So it goes...?

What are the boundaries between love and sacrifice and the line in between?

You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

What a story. What a testament to the human condition. What a sad tale. What a happy tale. What a true tale. Such is life.

The idea of sacrifice was different in Slaughterhouse Five. It wasn't sacrifice for another. It wasn't even sacrifice for happiness. It was sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. Billy sacrifices himself, his humanity, and his involvemtn on this earth for no other reason than because he knows nothing else. He doesn't know fear. He doesn't know pain. He doesn't know love. He is desensatized...And yet he is reasonable, proven by his statement, "I was there."

It seems as though Vonnegut is examining what our culture has become and stating that both love and sacrifice have become "reasonable." If that's the case, what's the point?

Love Till it Hurts

Can there be anything greater than a mother's love? Obviously I don't know first-hand, but from watching my own mom take care of my sisters and I, I can only assume it's one of the greatest and most powerful emotions/feelings/obligations in the world. This lead me to think about the "fine line between love and hate"...how both are powerful emotions. We know hate (the absence of love) is destructive but can love (the absence of hate) also be destructive? The yin and yang of these two are so closely related, it seems completely plausible that each have an equal and opposite effect...ew. Sciencey much? Sorry.

I think about the heroes of the twentieth century...people like Gandhi, and Mother Teresa, and the Dahli Lama...People who we consider people of peace, people of change, people of LOVE. Mother Teresa said "if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love." I've always loved this quote, believing it to be competely and totally applicable to both my own life and the world around me. A world so full of hate.

But then I think about this quote within the context of Beloved. Beloved's love for Sethe was powerful, emotional, and, in a word, destructive. But her love was selfish...Sethe on the other hand was (on the surface) unselfish, completely and totally unselfish. Yet in her unselfishness, she was sacrificing everything and desiring love in return.

So when can sacrifice and love go hand in hand? Can pure love break the destructive cycle? I think of the ending scene of the novel, when the residents of the town come to rescue Sethe. There love wasn't self-searching or self-righteous...They were simply conming out of concern for their friend. Their love was thick too and in the end it destroyed the ghost...

Unfortunately, we don't see enough unselfish love in this world. When it comes to hating, you sacrfice love and when it comes to loving, you sacrifice yourself...where then lies the middle ground? And is it possible to find one?

A stranger in a strange land...

What would happen if life had no purpose? What would happen if life was predestined and there was nothing we could do about it? What if we had no free will? What if we were slaves to the fate of the universe?

Scary thought.

And yet most religions would argue in favor of this. Christianity for example, though it argues in favor of free will, focuses all its emphasis on the afterlife (heaven and hell) rather than the present. The purpose of life here on earth is to earn eternity with God.

The Buddhists have an interesting philosophy. There is no past and there is no future. The past is always leaving and the future is always coming. Hence, there is only the present. This is the kind of feeling I got from The Stranger

Camus confounds me. I can't wrap my head around his absurdist views...making purpose out of nothing? It's such a backwards, strange, odd idea. Partly because in America, we LIVE for purpose, noble or not. Mostly, we live to love. Whether it be money, people, or ideas, we live to love. And thus we live to make sacrifices for what we love.

In Mersault's case, he lives to live. No love. No sacrifice. No purpose. Only what he makes it. According to Buddhism, he's living life the way it should be lived. He wants and desires and loves nothing. Therefore, there is no sacrifice and there is no suffering.

But does this make life more or less enjoyable to live? Maybe love and sacrifice are a personal choice, but are they a choice critical to fully and completely living?

"Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks"

Be the change...

How many times have we wished we could change something about ourselves? Our hair, our eyes, our nose, our personality...? Sometimes change is forced upon you. Loosing your job, moving to a different state...becoming a bug. And sometimes change is voluntary. You chose whether to change your eating habits, your excercise habits, your way of dressing...sometimes you even change for other people.

Franz Kafka's The Metamophosis does not itially come across as a love story. The appearance of a giant bug kinda gives it that sort of nightmarish feel. However, I read it as one of the greatest pleas for love: a son begging for acceptance from his father.

Just like Gregor, Kafka felt belittled in his fathers eyes. No bigger than a bug. I can only imagine how he must have struggled for his father's affection, sacrificing bits and pieces of who he was, hoping to attain some kind of recognition from the most important figure in a young man's life.

Similarly Gregor hated his job. He hated the work. He hated the pay. He hated what it turned him into (a bug, an insignificant part of the universe), yet he was proud of his work. Proud that he could provide for his parents and sister. Proud that he could prove his love for them. Yet, once he couldn't, their love disappeared. He changed for them and it wasn't good enough.

The next question then becomes did he sacrifice himself for the right reasons? Does love and affirmation from someone or something qualify as a legitimate reason to sacrifice yourself--who you are, what you stand for...can sacrifice as a form of love go too far? Can love ever go wrong?

Is this be one of the boundaries between love and sacrifice?