Reading Log
The Necklace:
Since I have read the story, it doesn't attract me any longer. It just constructs a tragedy of fate with vanity of girls.
There is nothing wrong with vanity that everybody has. The essential point is how to face it and how to deal with it. As a woman, she can like gorgeous jewels and clothes and she can tries to get them even only for a little time. The only disaster is that she does lose it. At this point, there is no relation between the vanity and the tragedy. Then it is only a tragedy and has no further meaning in it. It may occur to one that if she didn't try to dress herself, this tragedy would not happen any more. It's meaningless. Nobody could predict the future. The assumption is based on the fact we have known what happened. There would be another thousands of assumption that are comedies or tragedies. Which would happen? No one knows.
The Americanization of Shadrach Cohen:
Perhaps the conflict comes from the environment and the diffenent culture. The father clings to his own thought and live his own life. Rather than generation gap, I would consider the reason as the variance of life values between the father and the sons.
We may have different values because we have dissimilar experience. The values may be changed some time just like the sons in the story. We modify our values as the age grows. Sometimes it's hard to change others' values unless some special event influnces one deeply. And it's no need to change others' values since we can just change the environment we live or the people we associate with.
The Grass-Eaters
When I read the first paragraph, I was puzzled by the adjectives describing the father and the son. However, I got the idea of content when I went on reading.
The leading character in the article suffered from a very terrible living environment, but he still enjoyed himself and kept happy all the time. How did he manage to do that? The key to his happiness is his optimistic attitude towards life, his passion of living and his values of the world, which helped him to succeed in finding enjoyment in such tough life and avoid being desperate.
What can we learn from this man's experience? If we were in his situation, what kind of attitude would we choose towards our life? Does bad situation mean life without hope? No, as I discussed before, the key factor is our internal attitude and will, not the surroundings. To be happy, we should learn from the man's worshipful spirit, relax ourselves, try to find the cheerful things in life and skip unpleasant things that add to trouble. Remember that we should live for happiness and enjoy life all the time.