I have said before that the reason
I like history is I like stories and how they connect. For some reason my brain works this way so I
connect various events and find some common thread among them. If you read this blog you can tell that each
post has a theme, but I give various examples and life experiences for
each. This isn’t a skill I naturally
knew; I actually was trained to do it. I
was tutored in English since middle school to be able to write and do this type
of critical thinking. I always thought
it was a bad thing to have tutoring even though for Indians it is pretty
normal. I guess people usual assume that
if somebody is good at something they are naturally good at it, so not meeting
that expectation felt bad.
When I was in middle school I could
barely write five sentences and make a paragraph. I felt what I had to say was obvious and that
is good enough. I had to put in the
effort to learn how to write proper papers and how to convey my message. This is especially true for English tests
like the SAT. The essay portion gives
you a prompt and you have to support or not support it using evidence from history,
literature, life experience, etc. It is
pretty much pick a side and support it with evidence from different
aspects. That is how I reason out things
in real life now; I pull from various sources and try to find the answer.
Something I do very specifically is
pull from literary sources. For the SAT
you obviously have to do that, but I don’t think everybody tries to apply it to
daily life. It is that age old question:
which is more true, fiction or reality? The answer seems obviously reality, but
fiction is just a way to distill the essence of real life and present it in
another form. Gus made sure I knew that fiction serves to guide us when the
reality around us can’t. We can find
truth in it that may give us better advice than reality. That is what authors try to convey through
their works.
A good example of this, is in the
Tale of Genji. One of the characters is
trapped by Genji who is using her in a game.
Let’s just say he is attracted to her but isn’t allowed to have her, so
he plays out his fantasies through teasing other men with her…yeah Japanese literature! Anyway, she has never experienced anything like
this before and doesn’t know how to handle the situation, but she finds people
who wrote fiction stories about a similar situation and reads them as people
who empathize and who know the way to escape.
In the story, fiction helps the main character more than reality as she
tries to break the fake reality that Genji creates around her for his own
pleasure.
In the end, is it so easy to bind
all these things together? Can something
in history so easily connect to something that I’ve experience to something
that I read in a book or is that just me forcing a connection where there isn’t
one? When I read Lenin in Japanese
History class, the teacher pointed out Lenin’s definition of Imperialism and
asked us what was wrong with it. When
nobody could answer he said, “It is a very nice list that is completely correct;
the only problem with it is that it is a list.”
Lists are step by step or distinct points, but they do not show the
interaction and the multiple causes and effects among things. To understand true interaction among items,
you have to be careful not to just compare and contrast, but show the dynamics
and logic among what are seemingly distinct events. I believe with that approach, the connections
can be formed and a common thread can be found.
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