A quotation from my summer assignment

My summer so far has been all work. I work at Zero Meridian as usual, I worked at a youth sailing camp at the yacht club. I worked as a camp counselor at camp winnarainbow. 

Also I have summer assignments. Mostly they are pretty boring. However, I have to write 10 quotations from the book “Black Boy” by Richard Wright. I really like it. Here is one quotation that has an issue that has effected me personally. I also included my response.

 

“I know that not race alone, not color alone, but the daily values that give meaning to life stood between me and those white girls with whom I worked. Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others’ hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.” (page 273 full version)

In the minds of some, there is not much more to life than the man made things that commercials and T.V.s sell. Their fixation of the media and consumer products drive their whole personality. Others do not forget that life brings them so much more. In this quotation, Richard describes the feeling of being in the presence of the former, while he, the latter finds himself lost to the conversation. When someone who is in touch with their heart, mind, and senses is in the presence of someone driven by urban life, it is if the two speak different languages, even as both speak with one vocabulary. 

Richard feels this with the white girls because they have lived with hopes and dreams in urban life, and none having to do with intimacy, personal morals, or environment. Richard speaks of how he is surrounded by those who speak the same way as him, but the meaning behind their words mean nothing to him.  

 

 

My point in this quotation is that I have experienced this firsthand, being in the company of those who can go no deeper than “the syllables of popular songs.” I can’t talk to them. We can communicate, but we are unable to truly talk to one and other.