what if?: Our World

This week in class we discussed the poem “The Angels” by John Updike. This poem goes in depth about composers, artists, and writers and how without them our world would be something so simple and boring. These angels are our guardians protecting us from a world of dullness. Mr. Allen referred to it as “cinder blocks and uncomfortable desks”; if it were up to him we would have a class room with couches, a full kitchen, awesome lighting and even a fire place. But that is only thinking in terms of a classroom, what if the world was made up of the most simplest, colorless and emotionless  things?

Now imagine no existence of: Mozart, Bach, Scarlatti, Handel and Brahms as mentioned in the poem.  Without these angels take a second and think of the world. The world would be the complete opposite as today. Our cities would be full of rectangle buildings; there would be no incredible unique architecture. Our environment would be nothing but grass, deserts and water. The fun in exploring would be taken away from hikers. The amusement of shapes and sizes would go back to its simplest form. Our world would become dull and harsh.

What if we then took all those things and made them colorless? An average person normally doesn’t pay much attention to how important color actually is. But if you took color away our eyes would turn on us because our eyes rely on color and change. We like to see a change in the way things appear to us; we like to see differences with in one object. Our life then turned into a sheet of paper, simple and colorless. Our world would contain a loss a perception.

Feel the emotion you would feel when living in a world so dull. There is not even an emotion you can grasp because living in a world of rectangles, same shapes and sizes and then no color leaves us with no room to express ourselves. The feelings of love, hate, fear, sadness, happiness would be gone. Our world would become a “Plane of silent compromise”.

Grasping a quick feel of how life would be without structure, color and emotion everything in life would be corrupt. Everybody should take a moment and welcome these guardians into their life to prevent dullness. Our world needs complexity, rainbows and expression to become a place like heaven where these angels are today.