Things fall apart. Favorite part.

Just like all great books, "Things fall apart" has parts that resonant with your present day life. Undoubtedly, this book would have other scenes of resonance if read at different time because I believe this book has that potential, just like all important pieces of literature. The scene in which Okonkwo is exiled to his mother's homeland was it for me. In this passage, Okonkwo meets with his mother's family and is a basically told to stop being so melancholy and suck up his pride. He has taking shelter with his mother's family because children take shelter with their mothers. He is told to get some perspective, realize that it could be worst and it has been for others. "You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world? Do you know that men are sometime banished for life?...(Uchendu talks about losing his wives and children.) I did not hang myself, and I am still alive." This passage reminds me of a young man I taught this year that lost is salutatorian position, was unable to speak at graduation and could not suck up his pride, failing to show up for his own high school graduation. This passage really reminded me of you, Amman. Again, great books do this. I would like to read this one again in a few years and see what other parallels I will find. Good pick Nathan!

Things Fall Apart

The title of the new book comes from the following poem by Yeats. The first four lines are quoted before the novel begins. I thought it would be useful (maybe) to see the whole poem.


THE SECOND COMING

W. B. Yeats


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?