In the world above, the people "with unnatural smiles" are those who spend their time trying to rectify their errors. Why wouldn't they be the most content instead?
As humans with full consciences, we find it quite hard to go about our days with the knowledge that we have done something wrong; we find it almost impossible to forget the fact that we said this horrible thing about a friend, or that we decided to rub our fortunes in others’ faces. (But, we hardly ever give up the chance to do either of those two). Like it or not, our past actions haunt us throughout the day, like pesky mosquitoes biting on every spare inch of our bodies on a hot summer afternoon. No matter how many mosquitoes at which you swat and kill, though, they continue to come back, more ravenous than before.
The people with the “unnatural smiles” attempt to rectify their moral status before they die. These people want to apologize to the ones that they have hurt and derided so that they can feel content before they die.
No matter whether you believe in a higher power or not, I do not think that it is possible to live life without regard to others’ feelings and to humanity itself. No sane person can go through their life flippantly disregarding people around them. We all have a conscience imbedded in us, and there is not side-stepping around that; we know what is right, we know what is wrong. The problem, though, is having the courage to deal with those problems. And, while Lightman says that these smiles are “unnatural,” for some reason, I don’t think that they are. I don’t think that these people only (if at all) apologize for eternal retribution or for the hopes that they can exist peacefully in the afterlife; these people apologize because it is the right thing to do, and they themselves know that deep down in their souls.
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3 comments:
Your mosquito metaphor works, but I'd hate to think that I've created such a swarm of misdeeds, myself. Still, I agree that no matter how many times we may swat at our past, it will always buzz back to the present.
But I'm not so sure those smiles aren't unnatural. Are their intentions really so genuine? How do you know from what is written in the text?
10/10
I know that their intentions may not seem genuine, and Lightman himself supports that in his text, but I do not believe - based on the fact that these people are humans themselves - that their apologies do not contain more than a hint of remorse and remiss. Lightman's does support his idea with things in the text, but I believe that the characters are human and they truly do care about their misdeeds.
See Amanda's post, and my reply to it, for a counterpoint.
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