The Wall

Pink Floyd is a very popular rock band in London, England in 1965 composed mainly by: Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright. Syd Barrett was the song writer of the band but a year after the launch of Pink Floyd, he left the band because of his mental health and the band stayed with only 4 members. After this tragic departure, Roger Waters became the main song writer of the band. In 1979, the album “The wall” got released containing 26 songs which most of them were written by Roger Waiters based on the tragic events of his life. According to the band, “the "wall" is the self-isolating barrier we build over the course of our lives, and the "bricks in the wall" are the people and events that turn us inward and away from others.”  A movie was made based on the story that the songs in the album are telling, and more specifically Roger Waiters Life with only one character named “Pink”. Instead of telling the story in a traditional format, the band used surreal images and the music in their album “The wall”. The movie is about isolation and alienation. Alienation is when you feel you have no connection with the people around you, and depressed people are usually the ones who feel this way.

To explain to you more the link between Pink and Roger Waters, here’s an example: In the movie, Pink is a boy who had lost his father during the war and at a very young age and kept searching for him through London which is very similar to Roger Waters story, who also at a very young age lost his father during the world war 2.

During the movie, we can witness how Pink builds an allegorical (and once in a while physical) wall to be shielded from the world and enthusiastic circumstances around him. This wall is made, as I said earlier, by all the people and events that happened during Pink’s life.  Each occurrence that causes Pink torment is yet another brick in his regularly developing wall: a fatherless childhood, an oppressive mother, a withdrawn instruction framework keen on creating agreeable pinions in the societal wheel, an administration that treats its residents like chess pieces, the triviality of fame, a repelled marriage, even the drugs he swings to in order to find relief. And these events are very similar to the ones in Roger’s life; he said it in multiple interviews like the one done by Tommy Vance, a radio one DJ. He admitted that he always felt lonely and isolated from the world. Now alienation and isolation are two very common feelings. Numerous sociologists have watched and remarked upon an expansion in this sentiment estrangement among youngsters since the 1960s. They credit this estrangement to an assortment of societal conditions: the fast changes in the public arena amid this period, the expansion in liquor and drug misuse, viciousness in the media, or the absence of collective qualities in the way of life on the loose. A few sociologists watch that people get to be distanced when they see government, business, or instructive foundations as cool and unoriginal, lethargic to the individuals who require their administrations.

We could really see the relationship between the explanation of the scientists about alienation and isolation, and the life of Pink in the movie “The wall” and also with the life that Roger Waters lived. 

The Guest

The guest is a story that describes the situation of a schoolmaster, called Daru, who has suddenly received an Arabic guest in his school. This school is the place where he lives. It is remote, empty, and situated in the desert What is special about this guest is that he didn’t come voluntarily. An old Corsican gendarme, who’s called Balducci, brought him. The gendarme asked Daru to take the Arab to the prison, which is some kilometres away from the school, and he told him that this Arab killed his cousin in a fight. That’s why he is expected at the police station. This what put the schoolmaster in a critical situation that needed a wisdom in order to take a critical decision. A sharp discussion took place between the gendarme and the schoolmaster that ended by the leaving the gendarme and the staying of the Arab.

The presence of the Arab in the school, made Drau feel uncomfortable. At the end the Arab was dropped in the middle of the route from where he could chose whether to go to jail or to the pasturelands and the nomads where he headed to the jail. As soon as Daru got back to his school, he found a sentence written on the board of his school, “you handed over our brother. You will pay for it”.

A lesson that we can learn from this text is, when reading and discovering how bad is the situation of the place, where the schoolmaster lives, and then, we find out that these conditions become a comfort zone for Daru.

What is surprising is that after having the idea and trying to imagine how rough it would be to live in such a cold, empty and remote place, we discovered that Daru transferred these conditions into advantages in his life and into conditions that he enjoyed them. For instance, he got used to loneliness, until the point that the presence of a guest made him feel unsafe and uncomfortable. He got used to silence until the point that the sound of the breathing of his guest was annoying. Daru was not an exceptional man who naturally loves to be alone in a remote places. It wasn’t either a psychological problem that makes him love to live in such situation. 

It is just because he was a wise and a brave man who resisted and accepted happily what live gives him. We can be sure by reading “It was the silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here, after the war”. Which means that things didn’t look the same at the beginning, so there was an effort right there, and there was a good management of what life gave to him because based on the writer, the conditions were not preferable for him.

What we can learn from this is that, we can always generate happiness in our life, whatever the conditions are; we can always make out of our life a special one, even by the things that we think, at the beginning, are atrocious. We can always make our life looks beautiful., but most importantly, Nonot in the sight of the people around, but in our sights. It is just that we have to be convinced and satisfied with the inputs that life give us and think only about how to make out of them a good out puts instead of wondering why we don’t have enough inputs.

Decision-making, strong personality and convenience. These are the three points that the text touches, which are important in every human life because in each move we make we need to take a decision. In order to take a good decision we need a certain level of strength in our personality. When we don’t have the choice, or in other words, we can’t make the decision that we are comfortable with, we need to be convenience.