"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

I had to get the book after he last time I watched the movie. It's one of our favorite movies and I've seen it several times. There are scenes that I don't understand though. It's like there is information missing, like maybe the director thought it would be understood and just skipped it. So I thought the book would shed some light on those scenes. It didn't. Maybe I'm just not understanding the culture that they are in.

It was still a great book though. I think I may have liked the book more because of the movie. How's that? Usually you read a book and then see the movie and think, "WHAT?!" but to me, the movie was just like book. I'm not sure if it's because I saw the movie first or what. There were no big scenes or themes left out of the movie. There were some omissions, but they didn't change the story. I liked the way the movie ended better than the book. The book goes on after they part ways in Crete and it made me sad.

I didn't understand the story teller's obsession with Buddha. I thought he was a Christian, but he writes a lot about getting through what Buddha wants from him. I loved Zorba's lust for life and wondered if he were entirely sane. The book gives reasons why he comes off that way at times.

There were little lines that I loved, like this one, "God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all his disguises." and "You understand! and that's why you'll never have any peace. If you didn't understand, you'd be happy! What d'you lack? You're young, you have money, health, you're a good fellow, you lack nothing. Nothing, by thunder! Except just one thing - folly! And when that's missing, boss, well..."

Finished "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley

I finished the book in about a week. It's an easy read, as in there aren't a lot of big words or difficult sentence structures to worry over. But the ideas in it aren't simple!

This is the first time I've read the book. A friend said she has read it several times in her life and each time it worries her that our society gets closer and closer to the world written in it. As I read it, I loved the story. I got sucked in. I could see some things that were similar to our current culture but I see what the big deal about the book was. I just didn't get it. Then this morning I watched something and it changed my perspective. It was like a curtain was lifted. Let me see if I can get this across here.

Conditioning. That is the word that has been going through my mind all morning. The society in the book has done away with the individual and family. Children are created in factories and raised in institutions until they are adults. When released into the world they are fully conditioned by the controllers to behave a certain way according to their class and the needs of the society. They are conditioned from conception to like certain things, wear certain colors, and thinks certain way. They are also fully aware that they have been conditioned. It isn't a secret. They believe (because of their conditioning) that they need this system to be ultimately happy and productive. That is what bugged me. If they know they are conditioned, why do they continue to condition others? Why do they perpetuate a system like this? Because they are conditioned to do so!

This morning I was watching one of the videos from my constitution class. It was about a public school in a national park getting a bill passed to fund it by the national parks system instead of the state like other public schools. The first part illustrated the problem the people had. The people that work in the park, live in the park while they work, so their children have a public school to attend. That school only has about ten students and state funding goes by number of students. It wasn't enough money to operate the school. The rest of the video explained the process of presenting a bill to congress and how that bill becomes a law. I'm already pretty familiar with that process, but what got me was something entirely different. Maybe because, for some reason, I was not conditioned properly?

I saw a small school with a problem that the people themselves could solve. There may be several solutions for those families that don't include making a federal law, but no one even went that way. They spent six years getting a bill passed to make the national park system pay for the schools that their workers wanted for their children. But why not do something different?

Conditioning. Those people are doing the same thing that the people in "Brave New World" were doing. It's like when I say to someone, "We homeschool.", the answer I get nine times out of ten is, "What about socialization?" What they mean is "Your kids aren't going to have the conditioning that all the other kids have. How will they be happy?"

We have been conditioned that the only way to be educated is to go through a grade system like the one our public/government schools are providing. If you look back through history, only up until about one hundred years ago, this was not the case. People educated their own children in the way they saw fit, be it books bought at home, apprenticeships, or private tutors. The government had nothing to do with it. Yes, as representative democracy we need an educated population, but is that what we have now after one hundred years of institutionalized learning? What we have are conditioning centers that teach our children the ways of a society that almost everyone can see is not healthy. But yet we continue to send our children there and we are expected to do so at a younger and younger age every generation.

I love that I can read, that I have given myself time to read and reflect. It's one thing wish more people would do. My ideas about this book may change through time due my personal experience and other things I've read or watched. But the ideas are mine. They are my links in my own life. I wish I could have started linking these things earlier. It's one of the big reasons I didn't send my kids to school. They were too busy learning and linking their own experiences to bogged down by that system.