The End Of Illusions Essay Research Paper free essay sample

The End Of Illusions Essay, Research Paper The terminal of illusionsMichael March: If you were a painter, how would you paint the twentieth century? What colors would you utilize? Arthur Miller: Red, truly, for the blood. I don # 8217 ; t believe there # 8217 ; s any other clip in history when so many were killed. Murdered by ground forcess, by province forces, and so on. Look at the 2nd universe war. Look at Vietnam, Korea, Rwanda, the Balkans # 8230 ; We # 8217 ; rhenium barbarians. Yet scientific discipline has achieved unbelievable efforts of imaginativeness within shouting distance of the violent death Fieldss. The head can # 8217 ; t absorb this ; we # 8217 ; ve managed to set it aside. The films get made and the stone music goes on, painters are painting images and I # 8217 ; m composing dramas and everybody # 8217 ; s traveling about as though it # 8217 ; s OK. I don # 8217 ; t believe it # 8217 ; s OK. I truly do believe that there are plentifulness of motives available to warrant the devastation of this c ivilisation. We will write a custom essay sample on The End Of Illusions Essay Research Paper or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page MM: What are your feelings for this new century? AM: I can # 8217 ; t acquire rid of the thought that it is within the scope of possibility for person in a little boat to convey an atomic bomb into New York seaport, calculating he # 8217 ; s traveling to travel directly to heaven. To me, this is possible. About 50 old ages ago this could non be thought, except by a moonstruck. Surely a lunatic like Saddam Hussein is absolutely capable of warranting this act. You know, they # 8217 ; re messing around with Israel, which has atomic bombs. And the Israelis are non traveling to be destroyed before they destroy person else. We # 8217 ; re standing on the border with India and Pakistan. In my dramas I search for light, but I # 8217 ; ve lost any semblance of safety. I # 8217 ; m non paranoid, it # 8217 ; s absolutely existent. You have a billionaire at the terminal of the Arabian desert pouring money into developing people to make this. The point is that they have an ideological and spiritual justification for the whole thing. So they # 8217 ; re every bit sensible as we are.MM: Yasunari Kawabata, the Nipponese author, said that # 8220 ; the grave is a work of art # 8221 ; .AM: I know a twosome in Connecticut who had bought a grave, a infinite, in a peculiar little graveyard up in the state, because they liked the position. And it was serious. They wanted the good position. My gramps asked to be buried in one of the graveyards in Brooklyn, jammed, really crowded, and he asked that he non be buried on the aisle, because he didn # 8217 ; t want people stepping over him to acquire to where they were traveling. He would instead be off in a corner someplace where cipher would be trouble oneselfing him. What eldritch things we are.MM: What decease would your salesman impact today? AM: First of all, Death of a Salesman is produced more now than it of all time was, and people say it # 8217 ; s more brooding of world now. In the old yearss the chief character merel y represented an extreme to which the bulk was remotely connected: now it # 8217 ; s the bulk. And, furthermore, there # 8217 ; s an interesting thing here. One of the proposals of Mr Bush is that money be removed, one million millions of dollars, from the pension financess, to be invested in the stock market at the behest of the proprietors of such financess. So Bush would do gamblers out of everyone who had non yet tuned into this # 8211 ; people who merely wanted to be reassured that they would non hunger in their ulterior old ages. They want to liberate up that money so that these people become investors, which is truly a nice word for chancing. Now, in the last twelvemonth the market has lost a significant sum of its value. So what would hold happened to all these people and their pensions if the authorities had already done this? Millimeter: We travel from immorality to power: forces that deprive adult male of his self-respect and work, impoverished through this dream, thro ugh the semblance of wealth, a signifier of immorality in the investing of power.AM: I agree with that. It # 8217 ; s what they # 8217 ; re making or seeking to make, it # 8217 ; s non yet been done, but it could really good go on pen. They’re trying to make unreal what at least had a certain amount of reality. This spreads unreality into the masses from the smaller class of people who are gambling on the stock market.MM: And social security?AM: The more detailed you get about this system, the more illusionary, and in many cases the more hallucinatory, it becomes. The big resistance to this new tax proposal – which would give even more benefits to the wealthiest 1% of the population – is coming from a small group of extremely rich people, like Bill Gates, probably the richest man in the world, who object to this proposal on the grounds that it would make them somewhat richer, but reduce the amount of charitable donations. That way it will create a class of heirs who, no doubt, will be idle and unworthy. MM: For the moment they feel secure in their wealth. AM: They feel that this will cause a degeneration of the system from which they benefited so greatly, and that it will create a class of people who simply stand with a big basket and all the money falls in – who are not necessarily moved to invent or work or do anything else. The question you have to ask yourself is: whence comes this idea? From a brand-new president. And I can only imagine that, since he is in the oil business, and the oil business is notoriously predatory – don’t go where the oil is, even if it’s in your bathroom – they figured that their man could extract more money from the tax department. And to hell with everybody else. MM: Travelling backwards, we could say that art mummifies life. Through mummification, we receive a sense of reality. It’s extremely ironic.AM: Basically, that is what its function is now. It’s just to stop time. You stop time. That massive flow of images that floods every country, with no meaning, no definition – art stops it. Long enough for you to say, â€Å"Oh, that’s what the hell it is!† It gives you a moment of recognition. But all you get is that moment. If I can generalise from my small experience with younger people, they know something is missing. They’re quite conscious of it. They think – in relation, let’s say, to my work or the work of my generation – that this something once existed. They long for an emergency. An emergency that will give them values; in other words, things you have to do. Ideas you have to understand in order to survive. They don’t have any such ideas. Every idea is something they choose to have or not have. Everything they do is arbitrary. There’s no necessity in anything. That’s a very common situation now, probably the most common situation, really forced upon us by an apparent culture which throws up an endless string of meaningless images. MM: We’ve reached a state where the communicable world is lost.AM: I don’t know what the reason is, but I do know what the effect is: that economic man is all there is. There isn’t a culture. And I’m wondering whether it was destroyed by the many wars of the last 100 years or so. A religion, for example, which offers itself as a means of dignifying humanity, and blesses, but does not condemn a Holocaust, finally evolves into vapour in the human mind. Religion in this country is like a football game. People get together in large institutions and cheer the minister. The idea of changing one’s life by turning towards some set of values is very remote. The only value is that we’re all together. That’s the value. We’re all together. We’re all singing together and we’re all praying together.MM: We’re all together on a sinking ship.AM: Yes. The one thing about this country which you can be sure of is that it’s gonna change. That’s the only certainty I know. Whatever is today will be somewhat different tomorrow.? Michael March, 2001 · Michael March runs the Prague Writers’ Festival.