A Life in Two Hours?

I have something of a history with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, largely because I have something of a habit of rereading everything I love multiple times, often with years between each read.

Life of Pi divides Pi's life into three segments: Part One (Pondicherry and Toronto), Part Two (The Pacific Ocean), and Part Three (Benito Juárez Infirmary, Tomatlán, Mexico). While during my second reading (more accurately Reading 1.5) I skipped the "boring" Part One (I was in elementary school and I refuse to be held accountable to literary shallowness), it now is as precious to me as the violent and peculiar animal life in the second part and Pi's cheerful enthusiasm contrasting with the other men's irritable disbelief in the third. 

Part One is the story of Piscine Molitor Patel, son of a zookeeper, who was named after a swimming pool in Paris and is mortified by the way his classmates and teachers slur his name in the Indian heat; who renames himself with the help of mathematics and a chalkboard (My name is Piscine Molitor Patel, known to all as Pi Patel. Π = 3.14); who finds not one religion, but three, and clings to each for different reasons; whose mentors are his priest, his pandit, his imam, and his atheistic biology teacher; who loves the certainty of science and the wonder of religion both; whose family must move to Canada to escape when “the New India split to pieces and collapsed in Father’s mind.” Pi is philosophical, intelligent, and still bursting with the innocence of youth. His thoughtful narration flows between young Pi’s immediate, childishly wise thoughts and the nostalgic reflections of his older self as he relates his story to the writer. He is at once young and old, naïve and experienced, but never foolish or cynical.

Part Two begins with the simplest of sentences: “The ship sank.” Those words mean the loss of his family: his brother, Ravi, who had teased him endlessly about his three religions; his mother, Gita, who defended herself from her son’s questions by suggesting books for him to read instead; and his father, Santosh, who called his wife “my bird,” and who showed his sons how dangerous animals could be by taking them to each cage and telling them how its occupants could maim or kill a person. They mean the escape of the animals, the cages somehow unlocked. They mean a tiger named Richard Parker, an orangutan called Orange Juice, a zebra with a broken leg, a hyena, and a boy called Pi, all together in a lifeboat “three and a half feet deep, eight feet wide and twenty-six feet long, exactly.” They mean the transformation of a boy who hated to snap the stem on a banana because it sounded too much like the snapping of a neck to one who will gladly drink fresh turtle blood. They mean an impossible island, an impossible encounter, and an impossible rescue.

Part Three is a tape recording. Two men from the Japanese Ministry of Transport have been tasked with discovering the reason the ship sank. Instead, they get two stories: one fantastic and one gruesome. They are lectured on philosophy and discovery and the wonder of the world, because even after his ordeals, Pi remains a staunch and cheerful dreamer. In the end, Mr. Okamoto and Mr. Chiba choose a story to believe, but the reader is free to make another decision.

The book, the author, and Pi himself ask us: Do you believe the first, unbelievable, impossible story? Do you take a leap of faith and trust that the fantastic can be real?

Or is that just a soft, placating lie? Is the second, darker, more brutal tale the true one?

Which do you believe?

Because this is such a powerful novel, and because at last we have the technology to create a reasonably realistic CGI tiger, of course someone was going to make it a movie.

The trailer, for your viewing pleasure:

To be clear, I have not seen the movie. It has earned some fantastic reviews, as well as some less fantastic ones, which I have not read because I want to judge it myself when I do see it. I am hoping for the best--hoping that my fears will be proven groundless.

And I do have fears.

My biggest fear is that they will take a story with cinematic and visual elements that complement and enhance the emotional, spiritual, and physical journey, and they will make a cinematic and visual movie with emotional and spiritual elements. This theory is only aided by the glowing CGI whale. 

My second biggest fear is that they will take a story with zero romantic interests—unless you count the wife we only meet once the couple has married—and throw in a romantic story arc. This theory is aided by the presence of a young woman with whom young Pi—not forty-something-year-old Pi—seems very friendly. I do not know who she is or her role in the story because she is not present in the original novel.

Perhaps the visual scenes and potential romance will enhance the message of the original work since they cannot use every detail. Perhaps they add another dimension to Pi's tale. Perhaps. 

I am not strictly opposed to filmmakers adding scenes as long as they connect the missing pieces that the film cannot possibly include in a reasonable amount of time. I only worry that some of the most important elements in Pi's life--things that shape who he is and who he becomes--will be lost in favor of making something look nice or adding the romance that every move in the world absolutely must include. 

I will watch the movie with an open mind and an open heart, and I hope that it is as beautiful as the book I know and love.

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros's novel The House on Mango Street has little in the way of overarching plot or story arc, or even, seemingly, a point. At first glance, it appears as a simple collection of anecdotes and images that read like poetry. Indeed, rather than a novel, it could be likened to a book of prose poetry written on a common theme. In the introduction, Cisneros says that she wanted a reader to be able to open to any page and read without needing context. She wrote dialogue without quotation marks because she thought they were clunky and obtrusive. The effect is a relaxing, smooth style that makes each story feel more like a memory than immediate events, despite the present tense. When each story is pieced together, it tells the story of Esperanza's childhood in the first house her family owned. As she matures, she continues to dream of a house of her own, where she can live and write in peace, though she realizes that she will never be able to leave Mango Street behind her entirely.
At first I was thrown by the unconventional format, but the gorgeous language and detail more than made up for the initial uncertainty. "Four Skinny Trees," a section in which Esperanza compares herself to the trees she sees outside her window, is rich in poetic devices and symbolism, and is my favorite section both for its message of perseverance and the music in it. There are few recurring characters; most appear only in one section. No matter how briefly described, however, each character is given life in a way that sticks: life through a line of dialogue, the contents of a room, their appearance, or their house.
This is a novel I intend to revisit for inspiration, whether I need it to write, to calm myself, or to renew my own dreams. The strength found in Esperanza and her story is a strength I want for myself.

Questions

Deacon Bill told my theology class today to ask any religion-related questions we had. 

I have some, but I wasn't quite brave enough to ask...and it probably would have taken a while to just go through the ones I have. Any theologians out there who want to answer, go at it:

If one of the logical arguments in favor of God's existence is the idea that the universe had to come from somewhere, where did God come from? If the universe needs an origin, doesn't God? Doesn't that stipulation ("everything starts somewhere") cause an endless cycle of creators (the world, God, God's creator, God's creator's creator, and so on)?

If we discount the argument that "God has always existed" on the grounds that it does not answer the question of "where does God come from," just "how long has God been around," and the argument that "God exists outside of/before time" based on the fact that events occurring in relation to one another are the true parameters for the passage of time rather than the existence of a sun or a system of measurement, then why does God not require a logical origin in a theological discussion? Is "God" just an umbrella term for *all* of the creators who led to the creation of the world? How does that work logically?

If humans are created in the image and likeness of God, meaning they share God's free will and intellect (considering God has no corporeal form), why did they invent guns and bombs whose sole purpose is to murder other human beings? Does this not imply fallibility in humans' creator, whom they are said to represent?

If God is perfect, infallible, and all-powerful, why could he not create a race of beings who, when presented with a choice, will consistently chose the morally correct option through the use of free will and intellect? Why was an all-powerful God unable to balance individuality--the ability to choose and have different interests, languages, likes, and dislikes--with moral goodness, without taking away the choice between good or sinful actions?

If humans are said to tend toward moral good, why have trillions of lives been lost to war, prejudice, and hatred? Why was the USA, a country filled with and run by Christians of all denominations, the only country to obliterate entire cities filled with innocent people through the use of nuclear warfare?

If God has an ineffable, infallible plan for the universe, and God is infinitely good, why does his plan include so much suffering and death? Is his plan to take humanity from the innocent purity of the first humans to utter cynicism? Or is he allowing humans to die in order to enlighten the survivors in some way?

If the Bible is the Word of God, and God is perfect, why has the Bible been the direct cause of so many deaths and so much violence? Why is it still the cause of hatred and intolerance today?

If all humans are equally beloved in the eyes of God, why are women still seen (often subconsciously) as less than men? Why are other races abused and mistreated? Why are genderqueers and non-heterosexuals treated with horror, disgust, and hatred? Why is prejudice ever an option?

How can God be considered forgiving when all of humanity is still being punished, thousands of generations later, for the childlike curiosity of the first humans?

Why would God not give an update to moral law that does not include slavery, sexist marriage laws, dropping boulders on people, and an odd aversion to shellfish? Is God incapable? Does God believe that humanity would not have enough faith to accept an update? Does God expect humanity to have faith, without having faith in humanity? Does God not want to give an update because the entire Bible is meant to be taken literally, and people really shouldn't eat shellfish because it's sinful?

If the human body is perfect, why is it so susceptible to age, disease, and physical harm? Why could it not be more resilient, even if it isn’t necessarily stronger or faster? Why are humans so easy to kill?

If the source of all suffering in the world is original sin (the first denial of God’s will and the presumption that humanity might know better than its creator), how does that explain the suffering that comes from natural disasters, accidents, and disease? How could humans be expected to move away from sites of flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters in the past (when those events were nearly impossible to predict, and the humans lived there for the necessary proximity to food, shelter, and water sources) or in the present (when humanity’s population has expanded to cover nearly the entire globe and resources are limited, let alone land)? If humans struggle to treat and cure the millions of existing diseases currently known, how is the presence of disease a result of human error? Doesn’t that mean God put diseases in the world as a punishment for humanity? Or, if they are meant to challenge human ingenuity, what did the victims do to deserve such suffering? How is their pain and sacrifice justified? Did you know that there is a disease that creates bone matter whenever the victim so much as bruises, and that any attempts to surgically aid the victim result in more soft tissue converting to bone? How sadistic does God have to be to create such a disease?

Why does the existence of evil and pain afflicting good people necessitate the existence of divine recompense? Why do people still believe, after lifetimes of experience to the contrary, that the universe is fair? That it works on some level of order and justice? Is it simply because they cannot handle the alternative? Is it because the idea that their lives mean nothing to the world at large terrifies them so much that they have to have faith that there is more to life than what they know, and that they are acting according to some plan that has a meaning they cannot understand, orchestrated by a being that cannot be proved to exist or not exist?

But if humans don't have a purpose, what are they supposed to do?

Angel: Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters… then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long, for redemption, for a reward, and finally just to beat the other guy, but I never got it. 

Kate Lockley: And now you do? 

Angel: Not all of it. All I wanna do is help. I wanna help because I don't think people should suffer as they do. Because, if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world. 

—Angel, “Epiphany,” 2001 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gXaMnkmGq0

**EDIT**
Disclaimers:
One - I don't mean that humans should be perfect and love everything all the time. Just that there's a bit too much "you're different, hold still while I judge/insult/abuse/rape/kill you" going around for my taste. People could still make mistakes and have emotions and hate and love without being so inclined toward destroying what they don't understand. They can still be negative and flawed without being quite so violent about it.
Two - I know that God exists purely on the supernatural plane and the sources of sin are devil, flesh, and world. But God made the flesh and the world and the devil, so technically, God is the source of sin anyway. Since he's supposed to be the source of literally everything that ever existed and will ever exist.
Three - Yes, I am both a pessimist and an atheist.
Four - Yes, I know that the Bible is not meant to be taken literally and that its truths are moral and theological rather than factual.
Five - I think that if there is any sort of point to human existence, it's whatever we make of it. We should just have fun and make ourselves and others happy--and in order to do this, we need balance and responsibility. Just...be kind. Be yourself. Don't hurt people. Be happy, whatever that means to you.