|
JiaLeeSecondEssay 2 - 22 Apr 2024 - Main.JiaLee
|
|
>
> | Revision 2 is unreadable | |
<
< |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
|---|
Life Is Short, Art Is Long - Hippocrates
-- By JiaLee - 19 Apr 2024
The following is an analysis of what I think a legal career would entail, in part, if it were to comport with my background and views.
Personal Background
During his university days, my father hired my mother, a painting student keen on graphic design, to design a book cover. It was a guidebook for a program he co-developed with his university friends—the first chatting software in South Korea which drove the plot of the film The Contact. They dated, eventually got married, and after a number of years my mother and I relocated to Silicon Valley while he stayed behind in Korea for work.
I didn’t see him often growing up, but his jokes and conversations made his visits memorable. For example, when I mixed ramen with rice he yelled across the kitchen in Korean, “You can’t do that!” When I asked why, startled, he responded, “Because it’s too delicious.” He also shared stories from his life, seemingly to help me appreciate the life he had built for us in the States. Some of them were too dark for a child—his parents resorting to killing his dog for food when they didn’t have enough to eat, the copious beatings he endured at home, school, and the military, and various stories related to his relentless efforts to succeed in order to survive.
In photos, my father's face registers quiet turmoil from a lifetime of poverty and abuse normalized in South Korea one generation removed from occupation and war—a brutal period during which my grandparents’ family members were beaten to death or lived underground to avoid being forced into sexual slavery. For years, he toiled half a world away from us, consumed by work, alcohol, and serious mental health issues until he could no longer compartmentalize his destructive habits.
Suddenly without a source of income, my mother and I survived with the support of our church community, who housed us in their homes and then a warehouse where we lived for over four years. Around this time, a classmate of mine, another Asian girl—only 11 years old and likely a victim of generational trauma—tragically lost her life in a murder-suicide committed by her father. While my classmates and I mourned, I imagined taking her place.
Background on Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
I watched Life Is Beautiful in an undergraduate seminar on the depiction of Shoah in the arts. It portrays a father, Guido, sheltering his child’s innocence from an evil reality he cannot fight off forever. Although the writers probably were not trying to evoke this reaction, the final scene where the son reunites with his mother in a sunny, idyllic field after the liberation of the death camp left me feeling deeply uneasy for the boy’s future.
Lars von Trier got the idea to link prophecy and depression in Melancholia, the second of his Depression Trilogy, from a therapy session following a severe depressive episode. The therapist told him that depressives tend to be more level-headed than others in disastrous situations because they already anticipate bad outcomes. In the film, the protagonist Justine prophesizes the end of the world via a collision with another planet called Melancholia:
JUSTINE: All I know is, life on earth is evil.
CLAIRE: Then maybe life somewhere else.
JUSTINE: But there isn't.
CLAIRE: How do you know?
JUSTINE: Because I know things.
CLAIRE: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
JUSTINE: I know we're alone.
CLAIRE: I don't think you know that at all.
JUSTINE: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
CLAIRE: No, that's right.
JUSTINE: But I know. 678.
CLAIRE: Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
JUSTINE: That I know things. And when I say we're alone—we're alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.
Career and Background Brought Together Through the Two Films
In Part One of Melancholia, we see the evening of Justine’s lavish wedding. It shows her trying but failing to fit into a world for which she is profoundly ill-suited, where people view the world clinically, scientifically—and as a result, optimistically (not to mention, with patronizing intellect and confidence). As Justine sinks into a deep depression, her family perceives her melancholy through a modern psychological lens as a chemical brain disease that could be cured. But her melancholia is of an ancient definition originating from the Greek melaina chole, or “black bile,” a humor associated with Earth—and Earth, she says, is evil. Her depression is ontological, and its subject is the evil of our species.
The survivors of the ongoing war and their descendants will live with loss so horrifying and implacable it is the annihilation of their world. Their trauma will trap them inside, alienate them from others, and drive them to do evil in return. If the doctor sees all the weakness of humankind, and the lawyer all the wickedness, what is the technê or art-craft of a lawyer in this kind of world?
Both Guido and Justine indulge the optimism of a child as their final act. Guido beams and puts on theatrics for his son as he is marched off-screen and executed. As Melancholia approaches Earth and the people around her go to pieces, Justine, finally in her element, distracts her nephew with a game in a magic cave. Both characters have the frame of mind that enables them to take the actions necessary to improve a hopeless scenario: Guido’s son and wife make life unquestioningly beautiful in his eyes, despite everything, and Justine’s long-standing familiarity with impending catastrophe becomes her empowerment.
For those who find inner resolution in something beautiful despite their condemnation of the world, and for us Schopenhauerian pessimists who have a precognition of disaster yet to come, it is to use our careers to find some way to make loss in the world less than total.
Life Is Beautiful Scene
Melancholia Scene
| META FILEATTACHMENT | attachment="IMG_2972.JPG" attr="" comment="" date="1713497563" name="IMG_2972.JPG" path="IMG_2972.JPG" size="992903" stream="IMG_2972.JPG" user="Main.JiaLee" version="1" |
|---|
|
|
|
JiaLeeSecondEssay 1 - 19 Apr 2024 - Main.JiaLee
|
|
>
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="SecondEssay" |
|---|
Life Is Short, Art Is Long - Hippocrates
-- By JiaLee - 19 Apr 2024
The following is an analysis of what I think a legal career would entail, in part, if it were to comport with my background and views.
Personal Background
During his university days, my father hired my mother, a painting student keen on graphic design, to design a book cover. It was a guidebook for a program he co-developed with his university friends—the first chatting software in South Korea which drove the plot of the film The Contact. They dated, eventually got married, and after a number of years my mother and I relocated to Silicon Valley while he stayed behind in Korea for work.
I didn’t see him often growing up, but his jokes and conversations made his visits memorable. For example, when I mixed ramen with rice he yelled across the kitchen in Korean, “You can’t do that!” When I asked why, startled, he responded, “Because it’s too delicious.” He also shared stories from his life, seemingly to help me appreciate the life he had built for us in the States. Some of them were too dark for a child—his parents resorting to killing his dog for food when they didn’t have enough to eat, the copious beatings he endured at home, school, and the military, and various stories related to his relentless efforts to succeed in order to survive.
In photos, my father's face registers quiet turmoil from a lifetime of poverty and abuse normalized in South Korea one generation removed from occupation and war—a brutal period during which my grandparents’ family members were beaten to death or lived underground to avoid being forced into sexual slavery. For years, he toiled half a world away from us, consumed by work, alcohol, and serious mental health issues until he could no longer compartmentalize his destructive habits.
Suddenly without a source of income, my mother and I survived with the support of our church community, who housed us in their homes and then a warehouse where we lived for over four years. Around this time, a classmate of mine, another Asian girl—only 11 years old and likely a victim of generational trauma—tragically lost her life in a murder-suicide committed by her father. While my classmates and I mourned, I imagined taking her place.
Background on Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
I watched Life Is Beautiful in an undergraduate seminar on the depiction of Shoah in the arts. It portrays a father, Guido, sheltering his child’s innocence from an evil reality he cannot fight off forever. Although the writers probably were not trying to evoke this reaction, the final scene where the son reunites with his mother in a sunny, idyllic field after the liberation of the death camp left me feeling deeply uneasy for the boy’s future.
Lars von Trier got the idea to link prophecy and depression in Melancholia, the second of his Depression Trilogy, from a therapy session following a severe depressive episode. The therapist told him that depressives tend to be more level-headed than others in disastrous situations because they already anticipate bad outcomes. In the film, the protagonist Justine prophesizes the end of the world via a collision with another planet called Melancholia:
JUSTINE: All I know is, life on earth is evil.
CLAIRE: Then maybe life somewhere else.
JUSTINE: But there isn't.
CLAIRE: How do you know?
JUSTINE: Because I know things.
CLAIRE: Oh yes, you always imagined you did.
JUSTINE: I know we're alone.
CLAIRE: I don't think you know that at all.
JUSTINE: 678. The bean lottery. Nobody guessed the amount of beans in the bottle.
CLAIRE: No, that's right.
JUSTINE: But I know. 678.
CLAIRE: Well, perhaps. But what does that prove?
JUSTINE: That I know things. And when I say we're alone—we're alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long.
Career and Background Brought Together Through the Two Films
In Part One of Melancholia, we see the evening of Justine’s lavish wedding. It shows her trying but failing to fit into a world for which she is profoundly ill-suited, where people view the world clinically, scientifically—and as a result, optimistically (not to mention, with patronizing intellect and confidence). As Justine sinks into a deep depression, her family perceives her melancholy through a modern psychological lens as a chemical brain disease that could be cured. But her melancholia is of an ancient definition originating from the Greek melaina chole, or “black bile,” a humor associated with Earth—and Earth, she says, is evil. Her depression is ontological, and its subject is the evil of our species.
The survivors of the ongoing war and their descendants will live with loss so horrifying and implacable it is the annihilation of their world. Their trauma will trap them inside, alienate them from others, and drive them to do evil in return. If the doctor sees all the weakness of humankind, and the lawyer all the wickedness, what is the technê or art-craft of a lawyer in this kind of world?
Both Guido and Justine indulge the optimism of a child as their final act. Guido beams and puts on theatrics for his son as he is marched off-screen and executed. As Melancholia approaches Earth and the people around her go to pieces, Justine, finally in her element, distracts her nephew with a game in a magic cave. Both characters have the frame of mind that enables them to take the actions necessary to improve a hopeless scenario: Guido’s son and wife make life unquestioningly beautiful in his eyes, despite everything, and Justine’s long-standing familiarity with impending catastrophe becomes her empowerment.
For those who find inner resolution in something beautiful despite their condemnation of the world, and for us Schopenhauerian pessimists who have a precognition of disaster yet to come, it is to use our careers to find some way to make loss in the world less than total.
Life Is Beautiful Scene
Melancholia Scene
| META FILEATTACHMENT | attachment="IMG_2972.JPG" attr="" comment="" date="1713497563" name="IMG_2972.JPG" path="IMG_2972.JPG" size="992903" stream="IMG_2972.JPG" user="Main.JiaLee" version="1" |
|---|
|
|
| Revision 3 | r3 - 23 Apr 2024 - 06:50:53 - JiaLee |
| Revision 2 | r2 - 22 Apr 2024 - 02:39:28 - JiaLee |
| Revision 1 | r1 - 19 Apr 2024 - 03:32:43 - JiaLee |
|