TheaCSB

=Thea's Scrapbook=

Hey there, wanderer. Or maybe just traveler, if you have a purpose in life. Kinda doubt it, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Anyway, you seem to have stumbled onto my page, intentionally or not, so welcome. And because this assignment is because we're reading a book about the Buddha, have an obligatory image of the Buddha, which can be found below. Voila! While you look at it, please imagine me, on the other side of this computer page, wrestling with WikiSpace's formatting, and Albermarle High's wifi for your benefit. You're welcome.

The Assignment[[image:driddle10h/tee shirts.jpg align="right"]]
So, we were supposed to look at our lives and choose something that we could give up to help us understand a little of what Siddhartha, the main character of the book we're reading, is going through. At the point of the book we were at, Siddhartha had chosen to become an ascetic, forgoing such creature comforts as finding joy in interactions with other humans, personal hygiene, and apparently, food, seeing as the book tells us that he fasted for twenty five days" (Hesse, 7). Which, okay, may not exactly apply to my life right at this moment, but I have fasted for thirty hours, I'll have you know, and you really do stop noticing it. (I mean, until you stand up and everything spins.) After some thinking, I decided that I was going to give up wearing my usual comfortable t-shirts for a week. So the next day, I made sure to pull out a nice shirt and cami from my closet.

Beginning of the Week
The first couple of days were fine. I wasn't as comfortable, and I started to overheat more, since the fabric was less breathable than what I was used to wearing, but it wasn't really anything to complain about. I did have to resist the urge to change into a tee when I got home, though, so call that my temptation. I wasn't about to start wailing and telling my parents that "life was torment" (7), or that my life was "unacknowledged decay" (7). Life went on. (I'm not sure that wearing clothes is all that comparable to Siddhartha's experience of self-deprivation (the book says that he "gave away his robe to a poor Brahman on the road" anyway, so he didn't really even have any clothes. This makes me feel slightly awkward quoting from this book, in which he goes through much more than I, but these quotes are worth a grade, so in they go.)

Middle of the Week
By the middle of the week, I was still alright. My mother had noticed that I was wearing different tops than usual, and she began throwing out off-handed comments about it. "I like that shirt," she told me one afternoon when she came home from work. "It looks nice on you." I resisted the urge to remind her that she was the one who had bought it for me at Christmas a few years back. By the middle of my week of self-imposed exile from my norm of throwing on any old tee that I found on the shelves of my IKEA dresser, I was starting to run out of solid, nice shirts. (See, I don't actually have all that many clothes in the first place. I have tee shirts enough to get me through the week, but not that many nice dressy shirts, so I'd known that scrounging up clothes might be a problem when I started. Thankfully I had enough to make it my week, so I didn't have to quit on that account.) It actually reminded me of something. I might have been limited by the number of nice shirts I had to wear but Siddhartha suffered through freezing rain, sitting in briar that tore at his skin, and, the book tells us, he was "burning with pain, burning with thirst" (8). He bore all of these hardships and did not give up, as I was tempted to. So did he have limitations? One might say his willpower, but there is no mention of him even thinking about abandoning his life. "He took the path of liberation," page eight also reads, "through voluntary suffering and conquest of the pain, of hunger, thirst, fatigue". By what means could we ever rival a man possessing such willpower? Should we even try?

End of the Week
Not going to lie, I, like probably everyone else in my class, was ready for the week to end. I was done with suffocating shirts and sweating like crazy through classes. I slogged through it, but can't say I would want to do it another time. It was unpleasant. (Of course, in goes another quote that makes me look more spoiled and first world than I'm comfortable with, this time in the form of "Even though Siddhartha escaped...the return was inevitable...and once again [he] felt the torment of the cycle", which can be found in your copy of Herman Hesse's //Siddhartha// on page nine. No, this is not a proper way to insert quotes. For appropriate examples, I suggest looking higher up on the page. Thank you, and we're sorry for the inconvenience.) Here, I've uploaded a lovely image of fireworks for you to enjoy while commemorating my accomplishment with me. Aren't they lovely? I think so. Since the end of this assignment, I have returned back to my usual outfits, my usual lifestyle full of things I take for granted, and I hope never to have to forsake them again. Was it good to let them go, though? Absolutely.

The Assignment
So in the beginning of the "chapter" Awakening, Siddhartha becomes enlightened, and starts to see the world in blues and yellows, and in all sorts of glorious ways he'd never seen it before. The assignment was to draw a picture of what he saw, and color it.



**Analysis:**
So, please forgive the poor quality, and poor lighting of this picture. It probably doesn't help that I draw and color lightly, so it may be difficult to see in person anyway. I'll help you out.

There's a mountain range in the background, with a waterfall flowing down the side of the leftmost one into the foreground to the picture. The water is blue, with currents of pinks and yellows, next to a field of grasses, also with undertones of cool blue moss and sunlight glinting gold of the long blades of grass. The grass edges the forest on the right side of the page, with the brown trunks with golden and pink reflecting off the bark, topped with thick leafy foliage shining with the same blue and yellow for shadowy lowlights and bright highlights. The sky above is blue, pale and shot through with streaks of light. Clouds float slowly overhead, the fluffy undersides in purples and blues, and the lit tops in yellows. This fits with the setting Hesse describes, showing the "blue" and "yellow," how the "sky flowed, and river; forest jutted upward, and mountains, everything beautiful, everything puzzling and magical" (22).

These colors have a symbolic meaning, according to our archetype notes. For example, blue is peace and tranquility, green is life and relaxing, yellow is generally ideas, enlightenment, wisdom, and light. These all correspond to Siddhartha and the feeling of enlightenment he's experiencing. I added pink in myself, for the magical sparkly feeling, and gave some purple, majesty and wealth, for mystery.

[[image:KamalaDone.jpg width="483" height="365" align="left"]]Name:
Kamala

Location:
You can live me in the the grove outside of town, or at my house in the town (28).

Eyes:
My eyes are dark, clever and alert (28).

Hair:
I've got black hair (28).

About Me:
I've been told I have a fair, lovely soft face, with bright red lips, and tended eyebrows. I usually wear green and gold saris, with wide golden bracelets (28). I've been approached by many men for my beauty, but I am clever as well as lovely.

Hobbies/Profession:
I enjoy spending time outside the town, in my grove. I am accompanied by my procession, "a small train of male and female servants" (28). I am a courtesan by trade.

Looking For:
I'm looking for a man who has money, nice clothes and shoes, and who will lavish me with gifts (30).

My Daily Life
1. Wake up. 2. Shower, get dressed, etc. 3. Ride the bus to school. 4. Learn. 5. Lunch. 6. Learn more. 7. Ride the bus home. 8. Procrastinate on homework. 9. Eat dinner. 10. Start my homework. 11. Finish my homework. 12. Go to sleep.

Analysis
My life is average, I suppose. I wake up around 7:00 each day, shower and get ready for school. By 8:17 I leave with my brother for the bus stop, where we wait with the other kids for the bus to come, around 8:30-ish. I listen to music every day while on the bus so I don't have to listen to the rest of the kids on the bus. Once at school, I go directly to class and learn until class is out, the lunch bell rings, or school is over. I get back on the bus and go straight home. Then I eat a snack, and procrastinate on doing homework by going upstairs and ignoring my homework. My parents come after 5:00 usually, though that depends on my brother's soccer practice. We eat dinner after he gets home on the days he has practice, and on Tuesdays at 9:00 I watch Supernatural. Afterwards I clean the pots and pans. Then I start working on my homework in earnest, and once I'm finished I go to sleep. My day is pretty much the same, but it's always tiring, "every day a little denser, every month a little more opaque" (42). Even on days where I'm super lazy and hardly bother to get out of bed I feel exhausted. (I always feel guilty after those days, too, like I wasted the day. Mid-day crisis?) So I would say that my sedentary life is not so good for me, except for the fact that I would probably keel over if I had to interact with any more people than I already do. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I should be a hermit. Maybe.

The River
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Lyrics:
There is a river that washes you clean There is a tree that marks the places you'd been

Quote from the text:
"A tree leaned forward over the riverbank, a coconut palm...He looked down and discovered that he was totally imbued with the desire to let himself go and sink in that water" (47). "In this river Siddhartha had wanted to drown; in it the old, tired, despairing Siddhartha //had// drowned that day" (54).

Analysis:
In the song the lyrics match how Siddhartha goes to the river, weary and sick of his life, beside a tree, and thinks about his life. In that river he is tempted to drown, but in the end his just leaves the old Siddhartha behind in that river and emerges, so to speak, a man washed clean of his former life, freed from his life that dragged him down. In the end, he happened to "find the place where [he] belong[ed]" (Jars of Clay).

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Lyrics:
None (Piano)

Quote from the text:
"He looked tenderly into the flowing water, into the transparent green, into the crystalline depths of its mysterious design. He saw bright pearls rising from the depths, quiet air bubbles floating on the surface, with the blue of the sky depicted in them...How he loved that water, how it delighted him, how grateful he was to it!"

Analysis:
I discovered this song maybe a year ago, stumbling upon it thanks to my Pandora one day. Since then I've found it a beautiful, soothing song, and I believe it conveys the same emotions that Siddhartha was feeling as he looked into that river. There are lyrics to this song, but as it's a Korean composer, the lyrics are in Korean. I felt like the piano version would work as well as the version with words. However, I think they still fit the emotions Siddhartha may have been feeling, saying, "If there is a road made just for you, that road is right there in your heart. If you can, endure it through, then put all of your soul into trusting it" (Yiruma). The river marks a point in Siddhartha's life where he returns to trying to discover his way again, after having lost it to the mundane tedium of life, and I think those lyrics illustrate him trying to find his path again.

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Lyrics:
So take me down to the river down to the river and break me I'll be whatever you make me I've been of little use lately ... I barely remember who I was

Quote from the text:
"By that river he halted, lingering hesitantly on its bank. Fatigue and hunger had weakened him -- and then, what reason had he to continue on, and where tom toward what goal? No, there were no longer any goals, nothing was left but the deep-seated, sorrowful longing to shake off the entire chaotic dream, to spit out that flat wine, to make and and of that pathetic, shameful life" (47).

Analysis:
This song is similar to the previous one, but should perhaps come first, if organized chronologically. Siddhartha feels like his life as a successful merchant is meaningless and superficial and that he is weighed down by earthly, materialistic desires whereas before he was detached and even scornful of the prospect. I guess it's sort of his midlife crisis. He feels as if he has lost the purpose he was so secure in as a youth. From there he looks into the water, contemplating suicide, and hears the river. That leads into the earlier song.