You Are the Creator of Your Destiny, but Also the Victim Sometimes - Essay Example

 You Are the Creator of Your Destiny, but Also the Victim Sometimes! Quote chosen 2. “Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as a place of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is forever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour. There – for with your leave, my sister, I will put some trust in preceding navigators – there snow and frost are banished; and, sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without example, as the phenomena of heavenly bodies undoubtedly are in those undiscovered solitudes. What may not be expected in a country of eternal light?” (Shelly 5-6). Title: You are the creator your destiny mostly, but also the victim sometimes! To see and understand the big picture of the Creator, you’ve got to meet him. That meeting in terms of spirituality is known as direct experiencing. The acts of love, both giving and receiving are the greatest pleasures of life. God has made all the beauties and pleasures of nature for his creations to enjoy. But the enjoyment springs from within; the outside surroundings are only witnesses to one’s moods. When one feels weary and burdened within life on any count, the safe choice is to hand over the load to God; he knows how to handle you in a given circumstance. It’s how you handle your vicissitudes that counts, not the vicissitudes themselves. The play of pair of opposites, negative or positive, can make you or break, depending upon your choice. Imagination is one of the important steps in the ascendancy of the spiritual ladder of realization of the self. Imagine first, experiment with it and then moves towards attaining the concrete; strive to do your duty to perfection and give providence an opportunity, without creating deliberate hurdles in its style of functioning and it will chisel something beautiful of your life. Frankenstein is the scientist-creator of the monster. Any creation of literature is influenced by the time to which it belongs and the societal traditions of the era. The age of the writer matters but does it really? Most of the intellectual giants in any field are born great. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was one of them. She was eighteen when she conceived the story and twenty when she finished it. Though appears like a ghost story, the real ghost seems to be residing in the heart of the creator of the monster. Broadly speaking, ghost resides within each and every human heart. Throughout the novel, one finds the desperate struggle, mental turmoil of the author to come to terms with the harsh realities of life. She reveals her grit on every tragic turn, to live life in its trials, tribulations, duty and beauty. Her mental poise is like that of a tough swimmer who has reached the turbulent sea-shore to take a bath. Having gone for a sea bath, that swimmer is not afraid of the oncoming waves. He knows the art of swimming (living.) If the waves are powerful, he will duck; if the waves are friendly he will swim with them and move to his desired goal. The word ‘inspirited’ in the quote is important in relation to the plot of the novel, and it hints at the agonies of Shelly both from secular and spiritual standpoints. Notwithstanding the twists and turns in the story that sustain the interest of the readers, her emphasis and sympathy is mostly to the day to day suffering of an individual on small and big counts. This is evident when Shelly writes, “Nature overcome by hunger, sunk under the exhaustion, a repast was prepared for me in the desert that restored and inspirited me.”(141)Shelley is a great lover of nature and its varying moods are her perennial source of inspiration. Just like the sun rises in the morning fresh and glows forgetting all the darkness of yesterday—similar is Shelly’s attitude to life. Challenging one such struggle of her life she writes, “Deprived of this respite, I should have sunk under my hardships. During the day I was sustained and inspirited by the hope of night for in sleep I saw my friends, my life, and my beloved country.”(142)Imagination is not just the role; it is the soul of the text. The flight of her imagination transcends the borders of reason, and it enters of portals of spirituality and bliss. The reason for cynicism perhaps lies in the events that overpowered her in childhood and the rigid social conditions prevailing in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Fed up of the boredoms of everyday life in England, the author with her lover and infant moved to Switzerland. There she had interaction with a small group of young English writers and intellectuals and her literary career in the real sense took concrete shape. Shelly’s flight of imagination is not dangerous; it is benevolent. Look at her expression: “Now dark…now glittering…now reflecting gloom….now lending splendor, where from secret springs.”(176) She enjoys and is amazed at the capacity of Nature to change her moods in so amazing terms and wonders about their source of origin. Individuals like Shelly never give their dreams and are willing to work for it. The issue is, at time such people suffer from bouts of despair, for they get stuck up at the mind level and no permanent solution can be found to any issue at the mind level. Mind is full of dualities. When the last hurdle of mind-level thinking is transcended, there lies the state of bliss. Pairs of opposites like pleasure and pain, power and fear, silence and speech, innovation and tradition, ambition and suppression, masculinity and femininity and most importantly birth and death, do not exist, and one is free from all sorts of confusion and worries. She makes a desperate attempt to find the meeting point of science and the truth related to elementary principles of human nature but the procedure attempted in the book is entirely different from the one that is revealed in the scriptures to reach the truth. But her inquisitiveness to get at the “secret springs,” is genuine and laudable. She has a good understanding about the dangers of acquiring knowledge, without understanding its end-use. Such knowledge can bring nothing but “gloom” to the humanity. Conclusion: Frankenstein symbolizes the struggle of human existence and the tough and frustrating experiences that fall to one’s lot. Wise people say an individual is the creator of destiny, not the victim. As one goes through the story, one feels that terror and beauty, disappointment and ambition, fear of knowledge and intellectual reaching, love and hated and all such dualities are the alternative beats of the same heart and one has to strike the proper balance to understand life in its correct perspective. Consider reason and imagination—the former has limitations; the flight of the latter is limitless. Imagination is not all dangerous, for it is the next step of reasoned calculation. To put a stop to imagination would mean to stop human progress. In fine, through the flight of imagination of Shelly, a beautiful book has seen the light of the day, and she has ably propounded that all struggles have a beautiful meaning in the ultimate analysis. How a serious intellectual topic can be molded into an entertaining and compelling story. What complications the lack of imagination can create? Shelly is prophetic and tells something tangible as applicable to the current age. Nuclear warheads, that have the capacity to destroy the world in a matter of minutes have been created and stockpiled. A great destructive force has been created without realizing its dangerous implications. Tribute to imagination or lack of imagination? -- No one seems to have the definite answer. Works Cited Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Author), Hunter, Hunter (Editor). Frankenstein (Norton Critical Editions) W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Read More