"Better is one's own duty imperfectly carried out than following perfectly the law of another. Better is death in the fulfillment of one's own law, for to follow another's law is perilous." - The Bhagavad Gita
For me, the first part of this quote means that it is better for someone to do what they want, even if there is mistakes, instead of conforming and doing what other people want you do to perfectly. An example of this would be like in college. It would be better to be yourself and do what you want than join a fraternity/sorority and do what ever they want you to do perfectly.
The second part of this quote, to me, means that it is better to die sticking to what you believe because following what someone else does is a slippery slope that could lead you to places you don't want. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it because you know exactly where you are headed if you do what you want, and you won't put yourself into harms way. Also, following what someone else wants you to do may make you do illegal things and/or things you don't believe in. Before you know it, you will become a different person, maybe not even a person anymore but a pawn in someone else's chess game of life.
I think this relates to Holden because he is a person who does what he wants. Even though he makes mistakes like hiring a prostitute, drinking, and smoking, he does these because he himself wants to do them. He isn't a pawn of someone else's game and I don't think he has ever done what someone else has wanted him to do, except write the composition for Stradlater, which he apparently failed at. Other than that one example, I can't think of any other time where he follows what someone else wants him to do. What Holden does is pretty much what the quote says to do, carrying out one's own duty imperfectly rather than following what someone else wants.
The quote I decided to do was another quote from the Bhagavad Gita, "A man's own self is his friend. A man's own self is his foe." This reminded me of Holden because in many ways Holden is not only a friend to himself, but also a foe. In fact, he might be more of a foe to himself than friend. He is a foe to himself because he has never gotten over the death of his brother. This caused him to do crazy things, and now he has permanent damage to his body because of it. But he is also a friend to himself because at the end of the day, he does things that he knows will be okay for him. He hired a prostitute because he was depressed, but he realized what he was about to do, and told himself not to do it, something only a friend could do.
I would say that this quote connects to me because I do things as a friend and as a foe all the time. Take this blog post for instance. I just got back from a long day of defending the cyber space from a team of hackers who wanted to get in. Further more, I got about 3 hours of sleep last night and have only had about a 1 hour nap, so I'm running on 4 hours of sleep in the last 24 hours. There is no way I would be able to wake up in time to meet the deadline of these blogs tomorrow, so I'm making myself stay up and finish the blog posts before I go to bed. Even though I don't want to do it and want nothing more than to get up, walk to my room and fall asleep on my bed, I know I can't because I know that I won't get up tomorrow until at least 12:30 in the afternoon. I'm just not a morning person.
Although I just portrayed myself as such a noble person in the last paragraph, that may be a slight exaggeration. I actually got to my house at around 9:45 and spent the first 20 minutes of my time eating ice cream and figuring out how to setup some tablet thing I won in a raffle at the same competition. That's 20 minutes that I could have saved and 20 extra minutes of sleep I could have gotten, but I chose not to for some reason I have no idea why. I even knew that it was a bad idea but I acted as a foe and disregarded all of the reason I was trying to tell myself.
As you can see, I just found an example of being a friend and foe to myself in that last hour. If you can find 1 per hour, just think about how many times there are each week, or month. It seems to me that life is a tug of war between being a friend to yourself and being a foe to yourself. Oh, and maybe a little time in between for ice cream!
I really liked the quote you chose to relate to Holden and yourself. It was pretty awesome the way you found an example in yourself in the past hour. I think you're right when you say that we're all a friend and a foe of ourselves. We all do things to disadvantage ourselves without particular reason, but of course, we look out for ourselves at the same time. I think finding and accepting that we're all a friend me foe to ourselves can help us realize who we really are, and perhaps once that it done, we can start working together to create a better world.
ReplyDeleteRom 5:3-5 "not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, character and hope." If people makes mistakes they learn from It so that it will never happen again.
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