The arts, literature, and other forms of communication can be inherently liberating, as it connects human beings to each other in a way which allows us to share each other’s perceptions, emotions, and experiences. In Azar Nafisi’s, “Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran,” she clarifies that literature has the ability to reform the foundations of society itself, such as the government in Tehran which repressed the rights of women.
Freedom has the power to give salvation to those who suffer from totalitarian control or any type of appalling repression. On the other hand, the author of “The Mind’s Eye: What the Blind See,” Oliver Sacks, explains how blind individuals are repressed from the world, as they are not able to perceive the world around them. However, with the abilities of imagination, these certain individuals were able to create individual worlds in their minds. These individuals’ imagination was used to compensate for their lack of sight.
In order for us liberate ourselves, we must use our mind’s imagination from what we learn from literature, the arts, and the surrounding environments around us, so we can be the creators of our own individual worlds and think on a whole different level. People begin to perceive and think about things very differently, when they allow themselves to use the powers of imagination. When people are faced with hardship or repressed in some sort of way, they begin to use this “imagination” to find a way to escape oppression and their troubles.
The Research paper on Taking Middle School Kids Back to the Adventurous World of Literature
The problem is that middle school students in Texas do not practice leisure reading creating a deficit in their reading skills as measured by the National Center for Education Statistics. Texas students showed an upsetting lack of improvement in reading on the Nation’s Report Card. In 2011, the average score of eighth-grade students in Texas was 261. This was lower than the average score of 264 ...
Ideas from literature, especially that of books can become an escape for people; Nafisi reveals, “Against the tyranny of time and politics, imagine us the way we sometimes didn’t dare to imagine ourselves: in our most private and secret moments—falling in love, walking down the shady streets or reading Lolita in Tehran” (250).
With the literature group, ideas of freedom started to emerge in the minds of these women. Learning about how Lolita was able to make decisions based on her beliefs, such as who she would love, gave the women in the group hope and belief, that freedom was indeed attainable.
With the story of Lolita, the women were able to imagine themselves in Lolita’s shoes, where they were the ones making their own decisions in their life. Although creations of imagination are mostly fabricated, sometimes on an intense level, there are individuals who can replicate aspects of the real world into their minds with the use of imagination; Oliver Sacks states, “This imagery, moreover, enabled him to do things that might have seemed scarcely possible for a blind man.
“I replaced the entire roof guttering of my multi-gabled home single handed,” he wrote” (306).
With visual imagery and imagination, this sightless individual was able to accomplish a task so difficult, that even an individual who possessed sight would not dare do. Imagination became a way of life these individuals, as it helped them escape the world where they were seen as people who had a disability.
On the contrary, these individuals’ minds became far more intellectual as imagination gave them the ability to think profoundly about abstract ideas, “And it enabled him to think in way that had not been available to him before, to envisage solutions, designs, to project himself to the inside of machines and other systems” (Sacks 306-307).
This imagination, gave people the ability to look past their disability and to form a new type of thinking, a thinking which had a deep sense of thought and meaning.
The Review on The Cost of Stability in Brave New World – Freedom
... World – Freedom David Grayson once said that "Commandment Number One of any truly civilized society is this: Let people ... quest for knowledge and suppresses the freedom of thought and imagination. Homer Simpson once said, "God ... in the new world allow one embryo to separate into ninety-six individual embryos by means ... stability. Without the books to give the people ideas, and with the conditioning of the ...
These different varieties of imagination provide people ways to find the mean of themselves in times of great troubles. This “imagination,” provides people with a safe haven where they have the freedom to think of ideas and thoughts that are difficult to accomplish in the “real” world. Imagination doesn’t just give people the power to fantasize about ideas, but also gives them the ability to become creators of their own individual worlds. Imagination has the ability diffuse reality of our surroundings to create a new reality which is solely based what we want it to be.
This “new” reality provides a sense of freedom for us, as it is our definition of an ideal world; Nafisi states, “Our class was shaped within this context, in an attempt to escape the gaze of the blind censor for a few hours each week—no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimated and frightened we were, like Lolita, we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom” (264).
In our imaginative worlds, we try to think of way to achieve goals that we might believe are too farfetched to achieve in the real world.
In Nafisi’s case, reading books, gave her the hope that one day her and her students will have the same freedom that Lolita achieved in the book. However, as these imaginative ideas develop, these farfetched ideas begin to seem achievable, and we begin to search ways in which we can make these ideas a reality; as Nafisi reveals, “we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appearances, growing our nails, falling in love, and listening to forbidden music” (264).
The book club didn’t just create an imaginative environment where these individuals would escape to, but it helped spark ideas of revolution against the repression these individuals were facing from their regime. Even though the things these women were doing weren’t extremely radical, they at least started to build the road guide them and other like them to achieve their goal in the end, freedom. On a similar note, Oliver Sacks notes that blindness facilitates people by releasing their creativity and imagination.
The Essay on The Imagination Humans Human Idea
The human mind is considered by scientists to be the most complicated structure in the universe. Weighing a mere four pounds, the brain and how it functions is still not entirely understood. Indeed, very little progress has been made on the workings of the human brain. Aside from neurons and pathways, however, is the deeper mystery of consciousness. Scientists are still trying to unravel the ...
With this, we are to construct our ideal individual worlds, as said by Sacks, “Imagination dissolves and transforms, unifies and creates, while drawing upon the “lower” powers of memory and association. It is such imagination, such “vision,” that we create or construct our individual worlds” (317).
Imagination assists the blind by creating a visual world in their minds, which in effect, helps these individuals have a sense of freedom from their disability.
These sightless people were able to release their creativity and mental selves, by creating abstract concepts in their mind which helped them realize the richness and fullness of their own individual worlds. Supported by both Nafisi and Sacks, our imagination has to powers to create abstract ideas in our minds, which help us define ourselves, better yet develop our ideal world. With our individual worlds, we have the power to think liberally and develop different ideas, and in effect, these places provide us with freedom.
