Modern Man And Naked Shingles

Dover Beach is an Unrealized Dream

                                                                          pexels

Matthew Arnold in his poem Dover Beach has expressed grief on the split personality of Modern Man. The dichotomy of    consciousness is eternal. The Fall of Adam is The Fall of Atom Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Satan is the Collective Consciousness of Scientist who invented, politicians who took the decision and Enola Gay who dropped the Bomb. Just look at the irony, a Gay would be the biggest source of misery in the history of humankind.

What could be heavier than the guilt a nation would carry on his conscience. Moreover, what could be more shameful than a refusal to accept of a crime towards humanity, irrespective of the boundaries of nations? What do we propose to coming generations? Where is the expiation of guilt? Who would propitiate our sins?

When they had a choice, nations, scientists, politicians and capitalists, they took wrong decisions. The Sea of Faith has dried. The romantics are disillusioned, searching for the shoulder to weep. They find no sympathizers and weep alone on the George Street amongst the crowd.

Weeping is catharsis. It is repentance. It is a confession of a finite before the infinite. It is a lament of an innocent child before his Father who is kind. If you could weep like a child, you still have some hope left in you. Imagine the day when you would want to weep, but no tears would come to your eyes. You would make a hollow sound that would scare everyone around you, because they too suffer from the same guilt and have stopped making efforts to weep. You would be wrapped in that silence which is born not by bliss, but by agony and frustration.

Tragedy of the Modern Man is that he is constantly chasing the solution of those mysteries that God has deliberately hidden from humane conception. This leads to unresolved pessimism. Though agape is a solution, but due to lack of faith we do not consider it as an option.

Matthew remembers Sophocles in his poem to show that he shares his pessimism. Crime is mostly punished, not only by society but also by consciousness and collective unconsciousness of that person. Eugene O' Neill has beautifully described in Emperor Jones, how the past haunts the present and destroys the future of a person. But how do we explain the suffering of guiltless persons? Harold Kushner has asked some very pertinent questions in his book "When bad things happen to good people."

Didacticism is not The Pure Art. Therefore, artists have spared themselves for being instruments of social change. Ideal politician has remained a misnomer, since the dawn of politics.

Is there any hope of redemption?

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©  Vipin Behari Goyal