Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
- William Wordsworth
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind. - William Wordsworth
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It's amazing to think that Ray Bradbury wrote The Veldt 'way back in 1950, as its message is so timely today. In the Fifties, modern household conveniences included things like washing machines, refrigerators, and early T.V.s. From that Bradbury was able to extrapolate, imagining a time when all household tasks would be automated. He could hardly have envisioned today's world where it sometimes seems our lives are completely dependent on technology, though since he just died in 2012, he did live to see it. In 'The Veldt' - or 'The World the Children Made'- the two Hadley children are named Wendy and Peter. Bradbury was deliberately calling to mind the creations of J.M. Barrie: the girl reluctant to leave the nursery and boy who won't grow up. The Hadley kids aren't hard to understand... they've been raised to think that the world revolves around them, and they believe it. The entire purpose of the Happylife home is to provide everything for its inhabitants. It provides for the physical needs of the children, and the nursery provides their entertainment and happiness. So their world really does revolve around them. What the house doesn't provide, however, is a moral compass. It cannot give them empathy or impart values, and unfortunately, their actual parents have neglected to do so. George and Lydia Hadley are parents in name only. They acquired the Happylife house with the expectation that it would take the work out of family life. What they don't realize until too late is that they have gradually given all responsibility for raising their kids over to the house, and have become completely disconnected from them. As they have no active role in their children's lives, they have no place in their affections. They have been rendered superfluous, or worse, inconvenient when they try to interfere with what the kids want. When George and Lydia awaken to the realization of the emptiness of their "perfect" life, they belatedly attempt some course correction. Unfortunately, they have abdicated their responsibilities for so long that they don't even know how to go about it. Their half-hearted attempts to impose discipline and limits are met with hostility by Wendy and Peter, who resent the nonentities whom their parents have become, suddenly trying to interfere in their lives. Believing that their wants trump all else, with no guiding principles, and no emotional attachment to their parents, they don't hesitate to take a step which will rid them of the unwanted intrusion on their comfort. 'The Veldt' isn't a condemnation of all modern conveniences, but rather a warning about what can happen when we let these things displace our personal relationships. Frances Bacon said that money is a good servant but a bad master. The same could be said about technology; it has many advantages, but we don't have to look very far to find examples of people who have allowed themselves to be controlled by it. The Happylife house isn't evil in itself: the trouble is caused by use without wisdom,guidance, or limits. One of the excuses that Lydia gives for not caring for her children herself is that the house can do it much more efficiently... she can't compete. But what's efficient isn't always what's best, especially in a family. Kids are hard work: needy, messy, and exhausting, and most people aren't born with perfect parenting skills. The answer though, is not to avoid responsibility, but to deal with it- even imperfectly- strengthening the bonds of family rather than becoming detached from it. No amount of technology or convenience can replace it, or compensate for its lack... as George and Lydia discover just a little too late. Related Posts: 'The Veldt' is a short story written by Ray Bradbury in 1950, first appearing in The Saturday Evening Post, and then in a Ray Bradbury anthology called 'The Illustrated Man', and it was originally titled 'The World the Children Made'. 'The Veldt' is the story of the Hadley family: the parents, George and Lydia, and their children, Wendy and Peter. They live in a futuristic time in which technology has advanced to the point where people don't have to do any work if they don't want to. And the Hadleys don't want to. To this end, they live in "The Happylife Home," which is a completely automated house in which all every day tasks are done by machines. People no longer have to cook their meals, bathe or dress themselves, or even tie their own shoes. When buying their home, the Hadleys also opt for the bonus feature of the "Nursery," a kind of virtual reality playroom to which the children can connect telepathically and produce any place or scene they imagine. It's an expensive addition, but hey- nothing's too good for the kids, right? Liberated from the drudgery of household chores and child- rearing, everyone should be happy, but George and Lydia are becoming uneasily aware that something is wrong with their perfect little world. For one thing, Wendy and Peter basically do what they like, come and go when they like, and regard any interference by their parents with resentment. Also, the Nursery seems to be permanently stuck on the setting of an African veldt (open grassland) where, unnervingly, lions in the distance roar and feed on carcasses. In addition, Lydia expresses dissatisfaction with their free- from-responsibility life. She would like to do some parent-like things: feed and bathe the children, maybe rock them to sleep or read to them. But, she says helplessly, the house does all these things more skillfully and efficiently than she could, and anyway, how can she compete with an African veldt? As for George, it has gradually been dawning on him just how spoiled and bratty their kids have become. He has been trying to impose some discipline by using the limitation of their Nursery time as a punishment, but this results in major temper tantrums from the children, and craven folding of their parents'resolve. By a weird coincidence, it is about this time that the veldt becomes the default nursery setting, and George and Lydia begin hearing distant screams coming from the room, and finding replicas of some of their belongings- scarf, wallet- in the veldt. Huh. Well, I'm sure there's no significance to that. The Hadleys have a friend, David McLean, who is a psychologist, and they ask him to come to the house and advise them on what to do. After listening to George and Lydia's description of the situation, and checking out the Nursery, David has a diagnosis. He tells them that they've let the house- especially the nursery- take over their role as parents. The kids, therefore, have transferred their affection to the house, and when threatened with having it taken away, react with hatred. He advises them to shut down the house, move to the country, and learn to care for themselves and their children. George and Lydia break the news to Peter and Wendy, which goes over about as well as you'd imagine. Traumatized by the very idea, the kids throw massive tantrums and their parents cave, telling them they can visit the nursery one last time before it is shut down. When George and Lydia enter the room to fetch the children, Wendy and Peter, who have been waiting for them, lock them in the nursery from the outside. Those quirky little tykes. As the lions advance on them across the veldt, George and Lydia belatedly realize a couple of things: one, the kids have imagined this scene so often and so strongly that it has become real, and two, the lions haven't been feeding on animal carcasses. When David arrives and can't find George and Lydia, he enters the nursery and finds the children playing happily while the lions in the distance feast on what is obviously the remains of their parents. Related Posts: The third installment of Hornblower- The Duchess and the Devil- is less action driven than the previous two, and more reliant on character development. For the majority of the film, Hornblower and his men are on land and incarcerated. The interest lies in what effect this has on Horatio and those with whom he interacts. One of the most interesting characters in 'The Duchess and the Devil' is in fact the "Duchess." She manages to keep Horatio off-balance; she doesn't fit his view of lady-like behaviour, though he is in equal parts drawn to and alarmed by her brash good humour. Then, when he finds out that she is actually not who she claimed to be, it causes him to doubt everything about her. After all, when someone is so adept at deceiving and manipulating men, it gives rise to the question of just how far her deception goes. And if she is willing to lie and cheat to accomplish her aim of returning to England, will she consider the dispatches to be open for negotiation? Interestingly, both Horatio and Kitty are quite skilled at concealing their thoughts and fears, though in completely different ways. Horatio does this by drawing into himself, internalizing his uncertainties and revealing little of himself to those around him. Kitty, on the other hand, obfuscates and distracts from her actual character by adopting a larger-than-life persona, using bold talk and bawdy humour to hide her true self just as successfully as Hornblower's quiet self-containment. Fortunately for Horatio, Kitty's flighty exterior conceals a staunch, loyal Briton, as capable of courage and sacrifice as any military man. For most of 'The Duchess and the Devil', the relationship between Hornblower and Hunter is an adversarial one. This is due to the fact that Hunter's strategy for fighting the war differs radically from Hornblower's. The difference being that Horatio actually has a strategy, whereas Hunter just wants to charge in and fight the French (or Spanish) wherever they find them. We see this in the very first scene, when Hunter tells Hornblower that they're supposed to fight the French, and Horatio tells him no, they're supposed to defeat them. Horatio sees the big picture, and his decisions of when and where they fight- or not- always have their end goals and objectives in view. Hunter's never do; he has courage, but lacks the ability to make long term plans. We see this again in the Spanish prison, where it has serious consequences. Hornblower wants to study the situation: discover the number of guards, the times of their shift changes, and take the time to formulate a plan that will actually be successful. On the other hand, Hunter wants to take the first opportunity to attempt a jailbreak rather than wait for the best one, and he misreads Horatio's slower, deliberate approach to escape as a lack of will to actually do so. He convinces some of the other men to follow him in a futile attempt which ends disastrously. Speaking of the not-so-great escape, part of the blame for this really does lie with Horatio I think, as it reflects a failure in his leadership. At the beginning of T.D.A.T.D., we see Hornblower at the top of his game, cleverly outsmarting his opponents and obtaining the first British victory in some time. As a result of this, his men are admiring and happy to follow him, convinced that he's smart and lucky. Then, when things go wrong, and Horatio is unable to keep them from being captured despite his best efforts, that confidence in his abilities is shaken. Hunter is able to sway the men despite his cockamamie plan because their incarceration is wearing on them and they desperately want to escape. This is where Horatio's habit of playing things close to the vest is less than helpful. In this case, a little clarity would go a long way to reassuring the men that he was still willing and able to get them out of there. What Hunter is saying might be dumb, but at least he's talking to them. Under ideal circumstances- on the Indy- Hornblower could rely on command structure and regulations in place to assure the obedience of the men to orders without the "whys and wherefores" being explained to them. In the Spanish jail, however, with all of them imprisoned together, command structure gets a bit fuzzy, and the men need reassurance and purpose. For the most part, Horatio fails to provide this- even when he points out the holes in Hunter's plan, he doesn't give the men any alternative to it. It is only in the aftermath of Hunter's debacle that Horatio once again begins to show real leadership and wins back the confidence of the men. One of the points of contention between Hornblower and Hunter is the presence of Archie Kennedy and Horatio's insistence that they will not leave until he is well enough to accompany them. To do Hunter justice, Archie himself shows no inclination to return with them to the Indy- in fact, he seems to dread it. This might seem strange, except that it's clear from his nightmares and the return of the seizures that Kennedy is still haunted by his abuse at the hands of Simpson, and the presence of his former shipmates has brought his memories of it flooding back. Also,as punishment for his escape attempts, Kennedy was subjected to the torture of being put in a small hole in the ground and left there for a long period of time. This experience left him physically broken and mentally fragile. Archie's seeming resentment of Horatio might seem a little puzzling at first- Hornblower is his best friend, after all- but is perfectly understandable. One of the possible, or even probable, effects that prolonged incarceration and torture can have on a person is feeling a bit resentful of those who have been going about their lives, free of the suffering to which he or she has been subjected. Some years ago, I read "In Love and War,"the harrowing autobiography written by James Stockdale and his wife Sybil about the years he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Not long after his return to America, there is an incident where John suddenly becomes upset, angrily lashing out at Sybil over the unfairness of her experiencing all the joys of everyday life, while he spent over seven years in a hellhole in Vietnam. Rationally, he knows it isn't her fault, but still, he feels resentment- not so much for anything that she had done, but rather for what he had missed out on. I think that this is more or less the cause of Archie's seeming bitterness towards Horatio. In any case, it's clear that Horatio's friendship is still very important to Archie, and is in fact what pulls him back from the edge. He is unmoved by Hornblower's urging him to get well in order to return to the Indefatigable; in the end, he responds only when Horatio essentially tells him," I need you... I won't survive without your help." Tellingly, Archie later echoes these words to the injured and guilt-ridden Hunter, telling him to eat and get strong for Hornblower's sake: "He'll need you." In the end, Archie's and Horatio's friendship is only strengthened by this experience. What is also strengthened is Hornblower's ability to command, as he has learned a valuable lesson. A true leader of men isn't only someone who can be clever and courageous in successful campaigns: he must also be able to inspire and encourage his men in times of defeat and despair. As Captain Pellew remarks, what his men think of him is "the true test of a gentleman." "Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering." - A.A. Milne -I've been away for a little over a week, happily "Doing Nothing" at the lake, in the woods, and by the ocean. As you may have guessed, I've also been reading a bit of 'Winnie the Pooh' to some nephews and nieces... time well spent. |
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