Image Study 1

MRS. RUMFELT: My four images are split into four posts, please grade them all together as one. Thanks!

“He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower” (282).

I think an important theme of the book is that sometimes what we see is not always what actually is. By the end of the book, Cole is devastated at what he has found from the world. The disappointments, the simplicity, and the harsh reality of life was not what he expected- but he still has hope. He still sees the world as beautiful, despite how horrible it has been to him. In this quote, he is saying that beauty and pain are related, and that to see one is to see the other. All the violence and blood the world has, creates the image of a ‘single flower’, beautiful but with deeper meaning. This image of a flower symbolizes the one bit of hope the book leaves us with in the end: John Grady Cole might someday find beauty in the world, even though he has only been able to witness the pain so far.

http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Nature/Flowers/wallpaper-8372-2.htm