Influence of Yumi's constant book reviews. About a week ago, I decided to dig through my overflowing bookshelves (I do really need a new one--and in my dreams, it's that floor-to-ceiling kind with the built-in ladder whizzing by those glossy, colorful books). I was searching for my copy of The Giver. I mean, Maika's copy of The Giver. Heh. I wanted to read it again.

So I did. Finished it in one day (and what of my law school homeworks? Ha!), and, yeah it's a kid's book, but damn, it was just as beautiful as it had been when I'd first read it back in, oh, seventh-grade for a book report. It's great to read whenever you're feeling down, and you feel like everything's going wrong, and you wonder why there has to be bad things in this world. Times when you wish you could press the tip of some sort of magic wand to your temple and magically erase all the bad memories in your head. Then, you read the book.

How would you like to live in a "perfect" world? A world where there's no poverty, no hunger, no strife? Where everyone's perfectly equal, and everyone is secure in the fact that they would never do without. Where life is orderly, and you live in a community designed to make sure you protect and serve and each and every member of the community. In this world, there's no crime, no social classes, no malnourished children on the street.

How would you like that? You can have it...with a price. There's always a price after all. All you have to do is give up everything else that makes you the human being you are.

You have to give up of the freedom to choose. In this world, making decisions on your own is almost unthinkable. Oh no, what if you make the wrong decision? What will happen to the orderly world that generations before you had worked so hard to establish? That's why there are these bunch of people there to play God in your life. They choose the spouse for each person who applies for one. Then, if you want children (2 at the most), they'll provide you with a ready-made one, too, complete with a name they've specifically chosen to avoid having a lot of kids ending up with the same names. They decide what each member of the community will eat and how much they will eat every meal. They have the maintenance laborers to make sure everything around the community is uniform and organized. Once a person turns 12 (oh yeah, there's no birthday here...everyone turns a year older at the same time on the same day in December of every year), he/she is assigned a career. Nope...they've never heard of college degrees here. It's too dangerous to allow people to make their own choices.

*excerpt*
Jonas: We don't dare let people make choices of their own.
The Giver: Not safe?
Jonas: Definitely not safe. What if they were allowed to choose their own mate? And choose wrong? Or what if they choose their own jobs?
The Giver: Frightening, isn't it?"
Jonas: Very frightening. I can't even imagine it. We really have to protect people from wrong choices.

***

You have to give up all color (literally). Everything has to be uniform, the same. So give up all the color, and be content with black and white. This is Sameness, after all. Color would only distinguish one from the other too much.

You have to give up the traditional sense of family. As mentioned, your spouse and children are chosen for you. There's no real sense of parents because you all came from those who had been assigned as Birthmothers when they were 12. And once you become an adult capable of taking yourself, you leave your family behind--and not in the same way leave our families behind in this world once we're grown. In the world of sameness, once one is grown, his/her parents are no longer needed to form family units. Each family member go their separate ways, the parents each living with the Childless Adults, the children moving on to apply for their own family units. And there are no grandparents. Old people live in the House of the Old, just waiting to reach the age when they would celebrate their "release" from the community. What they don't know is that release means lethal injection in the not-so-perfect world. Nope, there's no crime here. But there is their own version of murder, made worse because they actually believe there is justice in this type of killing. They must have known the Spartans, who kill babies if they're somehow defective.

You have to give up feelings.

Jonas: Do you love me?
Father:Jonas! You of all people. Precision of language, please!
Jonas: What do you mean?
Mother: Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete. And of course our community can't function smoothly if people don't use a precise language. You could ask, 'Do you enjoy me?' The answer is 'Yes.'
Father: Or 'Do you take pride in my accomplishments?' And the answer is wholeheartedly 'Yes.'
Mother: Do you understand why it's inappropriate to use a word like 'love'?

How ironic that they require Sharing of Feelings inside their homes every night. They're so scared of feeling anything that they even require the taking of pills to get rid of "stirrings" (the opposite of Viagra, I guess). I wonder how the Birthmothers conceive children. Do they have shelves upon shelves of test tube babies there?

You have to give up the memories of "back and back and back". No history lessons here, definitely. No stories of when the world had color. Because those memories include tragedies, pain, heartbreak, loss, poverty. No, don't remember those. Let the one Receiver be the keeper of all memories so that those memories won't be unleashed on the rest of the members of the community.

But of course, when you give up the horrible memories, you also give up the happy ones. Memories of color, memories of sailing in the sea, skiing down hills, snow, Christmas with your family, music. Give up one, give up all.

A perfect world. An ordered world. A sterile world.

No, thank you. I'll take the bad memories and the rest of it if it means I don't have to live in that sterile, meaningless world where happiness is nothing more than routineness, where there's nothing to look forward to, nothing to hope for whenever you wake up in the morning.

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Damn. So much for a future as a literary critic. LOL.