The Way The Light Reflectss

“There is a question I am afraid to ask: to supply the world with what?”

~ Richard Siken, the Way the Light Reflects

There are many questions that we as human beings are afraid to ask. Many personal, existential, and purposeful. What do we supply the world with? What can we supply the world with? If I am being honest, this question keeps me awake most nights, because I am too afraid to answer it. But one night, while lying in bed in a sense of existential dread, I realised that it’s so hard to answer this question because people spend all their time looking back. Now, initially, when presented with the task of writing a reflective seminar, I found myself doing just that. But reflection, as I have found, is about one part looking back, and

But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table… The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what distinguishes the past from the future.”

Hawking then began to wonder what would happen if the expansion of the cosmos one day stopped, and then began to contract. Time, he theorised, as it moved backwards, would gather up the shattered teacups and put them back onto the table. The symbolic resonance of these claims, no matter how accurate or inaccurate they may be, make us realise that as we leave behind this chapter of our education and reflect on days gone by, fate and circumstance have allowed us to return to the moment when the teacups first shattered.

When we talk about teacups and time and the rules of disorder, more often than not we are talking about science fiction, not fact. This is simply because what we do know is vastly outweighed by what we don’t. So it’s not surprising that some people can mock these ideas and call them simple stories. Well, after seventeen years on this planet absorbing pretty much any movie, TV show, and book I could get a hold of, I like to think I know a little something about

In the isolated system of the room and the teacup, disorder can only increase. The teacup can never come together, and Catherine can never come back to life. But Heathcliff was so determined to put the teacup back together himself that he picked up every single piece and tried to glued it back together. He tried so hard to get Catherine back, that he, at one point, dug up her grave to have some more time with her. Rebirths can only be symbolic, and if I have learnt anything from senior English it is the power of symbolism. Emily Bronte had created a cycle for us. She was not interested in trying to rebuild the shattered teacup, but rather start over again. We watched as the new generation tried to improve upon the mistakes of their predecessors and create a better world. Edgars daughter Cathy was every bit as fiery and ferocious as her mother, but she had patience, and a kindness in her heart that Catherine never truly captured. Writing an internal monologue to better understand negatively portrayed characters like Heathcliff, Edgar, Catherine, and Isabella, is so important because we are aware that as we go out into the world, we will no doubt encounter people like this. This resistant way of reading has allowed us to become more critical thinkers, who will be able to navigate through life as thinking, feeling adults. We too, like the second generation of