Darkness falls.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
It was much the same, this memory, though the hill seemed to be a different one, steeper, and the snow was not falling as thickly as it was before. It was colder, also, Jonas perceived. He could see, as he sat waiting at the top of the hill, that the snow beneath the sled was not thick and soft as it had been before, but hard, and coated with bluish ice.
The sled moved forward, and Jonas grinned with delight, looking forward to the breathtaking slide down through the invigorating air.
But the runners, this time, couldn't slice through the frozen expanse as they had on the other, snow-cushioned hill. They skittered sideways and the sled gathered speed. Jonas pulled at the rope, trying to steer, but the steepness and speed took control from his hands and he was no longer enjoying the feeling of freedom but instead, terrified, was at the mercy of the wild acceleration over the ice.
Sideways, spinning, the sled hit a bump in the hill and Jonas was thrown violently into the air. He fell with his leg twisted under him, and could hear the crack of bone. His face scraped along jagged edges of ice and when he came, at last, to a stop, he lay shocked and still, feeling nothing at first but fear.
Then came the first wave of pain.
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In this excerpt, Jonas receives one of the first painful memories from the Giver. However, although he senses some similarities between the first pleasant memory of the sled such as the setting itself, he also realises that there are some different things about this memory. For instance, he can '[perceive]' that the hill was steeper and the snow had a different texture- that it was ice and that it was 'bluish'.
If we compare much of what Jonas sees and feels in this scene to our lives, we will be able to learn many things from it. For instance, take the fact that even when Jonas sees that the snow he sees is in fact ice, he does not feel any sense of warning. Of course, this may have been attributed to his (and the community's) rather underdeveloped sense of danger. However, in real life, we often want to continue with what we do, even when we know that it may have a bad effect on us or our lives.
Next, when Jonas began to go down the hill, he did not really know that there was anything wrong with his ride until he lost control of the sled and could only let a combination of inertia and gravity control his vehicle. Similarly, we often only sense the danger and want to stop when it is too late, and by the time we manage to stop, something, whether pleasant or not, would happen. This would cause us to feel physical pain like Jonas, or more often than not, emotional pain.\
Let me share an experience of mine which happened not too long ago and i feel relates to this excerpt.
It was another netball training, but this time, instead of the usual warm-ups around the track, our teacher instructed us to follow a track around school, which wound through the primary basketball court and the carpark.
On hearing this, I could not help but groan as the mentioned track would need us to go up several slopes, which would increase my tiredness. However, there was no room for complaints, and our group quickly made our way up the route.
All was going pretty well until we came to the carpark, where a security guard shouted after us, 'Girl, watch out for car ah!' But i was not aware that that was not the real peril. We made it safely across the first half of the carpark, and now we were near the canteen, running past the pick-up point behind it. Several squat barriers on the ground dimly alerted us of a division in the road. The people ahead of me seemed tireless, and were sprinting ahead effortlessly. In an effort to keep up with them, I gave a burst of speed.
At that moment, my heavy shoe caught on one of the black dividers on the road, tripping me over. In that split second, I found myself on the ground on my left side, and several people stopped to help me up, and they asked me if I was all right. In a haze, I got up and continued to run, feeling only a numb buzzing in my fingers, elbow and knee on the left side of my body.
Then came the first wave of pain.
Instinctively, I looked down at my fingers, which were numb with pain. Bright red blood about to flow out of the wound, which, by the amount of pain, I knew was quite deep. Looking at my elbow and knee, I also saw that same colour, fresh and wet, in patches on the wounds.
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Looking at these two stories, what are some of the similarities and differences you can find?
Labels: accident, blood, fall, pain, sled, snow
3 comments
thankyou.
