Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I had a much needed break which involved travelling back to Ontario, where I spent all my time with friends and family.

I am going to start the New Year off with talking about this amazing novel that I read for my ASTU class. The novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is about a boy named Oskar who suffers from the death of his father in 9/11. Oskar finds a key that he assumes to have belonged to his late father. Oskar travels all five boroughs of New York trying to uncover the lock that this key would open. To him this key represents a final way to connect with his father.  This is a novel that I cannot get off my mind.  I am reminded of the main character Oskar at least once a day, he seems to just pop into my mind whenever I find myself day dreaming.

While reading this novel I often find myself forgetting that Oskar is only nine years old. He manages to travel the city of New York almost seamlessly (he has a better sense of direction than me… and I’m almost twenty).

In class on Tuesday we talked about the memorial of 9/11 and how it was actually created to sit in the ground.

http://blog.archpaper.com/2011/08/911-memorial-plaza-how-it-works/

After seeing this picture I could not help but remember how at the beginning of the novel Oskar talks about how there one day will be no room left on this earth to bury the dead.   He says:

“So, what about skyscrapers for dead people that are built down? They could be underneath the skyscrapers for living people that are built up. You could bury people 100 floors down, and a whole dead world could be underneath the living one.” Pg3

This in a sense is the 9/11 memorial as they have designed it so that you feel you are looking down into the ground. I couldn’t help but imagine Oskar’s view that in the middle of the memorial where the tower was that there is an elevator that takes you down to world of dead underneath the living. It resembles his idea even more knowing that there were in fact skyscrapers there before and now it is considered ‘Ground Zero’.

It seems so realistic to me… maybe I’m just able to live in Oskar’s world for just a moment.

 

While reading this novel and discussing the events around 9/11 and how is classified as a ‘terrorist attack’, I cannot help but consider the events in Paris, France at the current moment. The attacks in Paris have had a similar reaction from its citizens as the events of 9/11. Once people come to terms with what has happened, they have come together as a country to stand together and support the police, first responders, and Special Forces as they have continually protected them as citizens. The citizens have not let the attacks or invasions change their love for their country and the people that belong to it.

 

More Information on the People of Paris Coming Together.