Arcadia

Before I say anything else I just want to say that I loved Arcadia. Tom Stoppard managed to combine two seemingly contradictory genres: theater and science. Gardening, mathematics, carnal embrace, thermodynamics, grouse, fractals, history, Lord Byron, poetry, death, lust, and madness; Stoppard combines contradictory ideas and themes to create a dualistic play that is both intellectually intriguing and entertaining.

As I listed above there are many themes of this play that could easily be addressed in the context in this class. The first I want to talk about is heat.

Thomasina dies in a fire. In the context of this play this is the only fitting death for her. She discovers the third law of thermodynamics in the play and diagrams heat exchange. Literarily the theme of fire is underlying throughout the whole play, both in her studies of what will later be named thermodynamics and in the theme of sex.

 “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef. 

The play begins by talking about sex. When Thomasina, only 13 at this point in the play, asks the question above, Septimus joking lies to Thomasina claiming it is when someone hugs a slab of meat. The audience later discovers that Septimus had been participating in a "perpendicular poke" with a married woman in the gazebo. This establishes Septimus' reputation as a bit of a ladies man. The play is peppered with sexual innuendos about Septimus and several other characters Yet in the end of the play Septimus resists the heat and temptation to join Thomasina in her room which ultimately results in her untimely death by fire.

Better to struggle on knowing that failure is final.

We all die. Whether we like it or not, eventually we have to come to terms with this fact. In the end you fail. You and everything around you will one day turn back in to the star dust it once was. Thomasina understood this, realizing that you can not un-stir something. The jam, once stirred in to the rice pudding, will never be just jam again. This is the worlds movement toward entropy. In the end everything will be room temperature. 

I really struggle with this quote though. My own nature is to be a perfectionist; I don't like failure. It's something that I have been taught from a young age to avoid at all cost. It is painful and makes me feel guilty because I did not "try hard enough" if I failed. The TED talk the Booke posted talked about this but I think this is why our generation has trouble being happy. We view ourselves entirely by our successes and the moment we achieve something there is just another thing that must be done. This constant test to trying to prove one's self through our achievements is making us miserable. We keep thinking that if we could only do this (pick anything, get a good job, make more money, get all A's, graduate) then we will be happy; we are wrong. We don't find happiness if all we are doing is trying to postpone the failure.

But someday I will fail one time too many. Someday I'm going to walk in front of the wrong buss, or (more likely giving my family history) contract some disease that will ultimately end me. I know this rationally, I've seen someone who was dying and the end result of this process, but there is still a part of me that doesn't quite understand. I think this is one of the reasons I fear loosing those I love more than anything else in the world. My last blog was a video which talked about love and how ultimately humans know that nothing is permanent and that this makes us sad. I notice this sometimes in myself. I wake up from a dream that I remember only bits of but am left with this sense of melancholy and loss. I know that these dreams are the ones where I am alone after loosing those I love.

When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. 

Humans don't want to be alone; we are social creatures. This image, being alone on an empty shore, is one that strikes some deep cord in me. I think this is why most of the movie UP is so depressing to me. For those of you who haven't seen it this is a quick clip that gives their love story. 

I watched this movie for the first time with my boyfriend last weekend and spent (embarrassingly) at least a quarter of the film in tears. I just can't stand that he is left alone and seeing it makes me think that someday this happens to most of us.

"Can you bear it?....How can we sleep for grief?"

 Though my grief came from a disney/pixar film intended for children, Thomasina's came from the thought of the loss of knowledge that occurred during the burning of the Alexandrian library. Though she might have been a little melodramatic (what 13-16 year old girl isn'?), she does have a point. We have lost and forgotten nearly everything there is to know. If only we could remember. 

“It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.” 

This at least, is reassuring. I may have forgotten many many things (and as a population we have forgotten nearly everything) but as long as we continue wanting to know, this is the important part. 

It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. 

This quote is played out through the entire sections of the play that consist of the present day. Continually the characters are attempting to figure out what happened in the past, but nearly every time they fail. They believe many different things, but much of what they "know" turns out to be wrong. It also continues to be true in today society as we discover more and more about our world and ourselves that disproves what we thought previously.

So how does the past posses the present in Arcadia? The past is the present at the end of the play, they become so intertwined that they become indistinguishable.