folyosó

Áron Kaposvári

Dear Tom,

I’ve been thinking a lot about your story because your character touched me deeply. I’m a 20-year-old young man and had almost similar problems some years ago, so I want to share my thoughts with you.

First, about me. I lived in a one-parent family with my mum and younger brother, who is a wheelchair user. They wanted me to stay with them forever, but I wanted to follow my dreams, so I had to choose between career and family. I love them very much, and it was a difficult decision. Now I live in a city not far from my hometown and go to university.

As for you, your mum Amanda often worries about your responsibilities at home. She says: “What right have you got to jeopardize your job? Jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we’d manage if you were—-” I think it’s not fair, she expects a lot from you, you are not her “property.” Convince her that you will help her and your sister Laura, but you would like to live your own life.

Speaking of Laura, it’s obvious that you love her a lot. You deeply care for her, but you aspire to your own freedom. “The window is filled with pieces of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles, in delicate colors, like bits of shattered rainbow. Than all at once my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes… Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger- anything that can blow your candles out!” Since you miss her, and think about her, you should call her, visit her. You should help Laura to be open to the world and other people. You can help her without going back home.

Your stories and mine show that life often involves difficult decisions. Stop living in an imaginary world like your sister with her glass figures. Both the dreams and the glass figures are fragile. “Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are.”

Sometimes we must choose what’s best for our own growth and happiness. I want to encourage you to keep following your ambitions. It’s essential to find your own path and live your life.

Best wishes,

Áron

Eszter Forvith

“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” — T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

It is a quite thought-provoking statement, but after thinking about it we quickly realize that it holds a lot of truth.

The more people feel the toughness of life, the more they try to escape reality. Many people tend to escape reality by developing a “live in the moment mindset,” which often creates the illusion of a mostly problem-free life. However, this is just one way of escaping reality; there are many others, and some of them are nicely represented in Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie.

Amanda, a single mother of two children, often seems optimistic about her daughter’s future even though her daughter, Laura, sees things the opposite way. Amanda often wanders back to the past when she was Laura’s age and had a lot of gentleman callers, in Mississippi, where she was a young beauty; that time could easily be called the highest point in her life. “Amanda: Why, I remember on Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain. Tom: Again?” She sometimes seems to be stuck in that imagination which enables her to escape from the reality of rapidly changing things and growing tension between her and the kids, especially Tom.

Tom, the younger sibling, works at a warehouse, which we can say is not his dream job. Since their father left a long time ago, Tom has become the breadwinner and thus cannot afford to fulfill his dream of traveling and discovering the world, which frustrates him. Tom often goes to the movies, which causes his mother a headache, but this is Tom’s only freedom, his only chance to witness real adventures. Later we discover that Tom often goes to the bar to drink, which is an obvious way of escaping reality. Not long after a failed attempt of finding a husband for his sister, he gets fired and finally decides to leave and travel as he always wanted. He follows in his father’s footsteps and goes from place to place, discovering the world. We would think that Tom was satisfied, now that he could achieve his dream, but it appears that he cannot be truly satisfied, since his sister often appears in front of him, reminding him of the life he left behind; this also appears as a sort of pullback to reality, a sign that his life is still not and probably will never be the way he wanted it. “Oh Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind, but I am more faithful than I intended to be.”

Laura, the older sibling, had a chance to get a good education, but she dropped out of school, and now her only hope is to get married, but she doesn’t really have any faith in that either; rather, she spends her days taking care of her glass animals and living in her own isolated world, which is not really to her mother’s liking. In the play she appears rather insecure and shy, but at the end, with the help of a young man called Jim, she discovers that even though we fail sometimes it doesn’t matter, because we can try again and one failure will not determine our whole life. That gives Laura confidence and a gateway to jump back to reality, making her the only character with a rather big and positive character development. “Jim: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken? Laura: Now it’s just like all the other horses. Jim: It lost its— Laura: Horn! It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.”

Escaping from reality is something that all of us do. Some people practice it more often than others. Similarly, we unintentionally remember the good that happened to us but try to forget the bad in order to stay balanced. Our mind tends to tame the harshness of reality to protect us.

Márk Gál

“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets). Well, that’s a very interesting statement! Many times this is not a statement, but a fact. Yet, while not knowing the truth can create huge problems for us, sometimes not knowing it is better for us. I will give you some examples for both thoughts to explain why I think like that.

Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie as a whole is a great example of the above-mentioned quote. The play is about a mother and her two children (who are young adults), where the breadwinner is her son who wants to leave his family to live his own life. The only hope for Tom (the son) and for the family (Amanda the mother and Laura the daughter) is for Laura to get a husband who able to maintain them (or at least her). Amanda asks Tom to find a person who is optimal for this and he finds one: his friend from the warehouse (Jim). Before the end it seems that Laura has found her mate, but at the end it turns out that he has got a mate already.

The mother is extremely optimistic person who doesn’t want to accept that she and her children have deficiencies:

Amanda: Girls that aren’t cut out for business careers usually wind up married to some nice man. Sister, that’s what you’ll do!

Laura: But, Mother—

Amanda: Yes?

Laura: I’m—crippled!

Amanda: Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word.

Amanda doesn’t want to realize the truth. At some point, if she realized it, she would break. On the other hand she is calculating poorly, because she thinks Laura could charm gentleman callers and thinks this is the solution.

Laura is the opposite of her mother. She always playing the same records; she plays and tidies her glass animals. A terribly shy girl, she is very pessimistic about herself and doesn’t trust in anyone except her family, because she is afraid of people and she says “I’m—crippled” and thinks this is the truth, too. This is why she drops out of business school and sabotages her life: she is unable to face the truth. Later she meets Jim again (she knew him distantly in high school), and he encourages her not to be shy, because everyone makes mistakes and it is hard not to make them. So her not knowing the truth has turned out to be the problem.

Tom is a writer and a factory worker who wants to separate from his family because he is tired of maintaining them and wants to live his own life.

Amanda: What right have you got to jeopardize you job? Jeopardize the security of us all? How do you think we’d manage if you were—

Tom: Listen! You think I’m crazy about the warehouse? […] But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all that I dream of doing and being ever!

He hates his actual job and, as I mentioned, wants to live his own life far away from the family. At the end he leaves his family, betrays them, and starts his own life. Later he realises how important the family is that he left behind and how much he loves his sister, whom he really misses now. Until this point, he has recognised part of reality but ignored another part.

All in all, I think not knowing the truth is sometimes better than knowing it, but in most cases, not recognising it, or recognising only part of it, will cause us to make mistakes which might prove irreversible.

Zsombor Górán

Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie was written about the idea that everything will be good someday. I expected that they would reach this, but in the end they are still in the same situation .

Most of the characters don’t like the way their life is going, so they have something to distract them from reality. Tom goes to the movies every night because he is not satisfied with his job. He has no choice but to work to provide food for the family. When his mother doesn’t believe that he is going to the movies, he makes up a ridiculous lie because he really has nothing better do. He says, ”I’m going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals’ hangouts, Mother. I’ve joined the Hogan Gang, I’m a hired assassin, I carry a tommy gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I’m leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night a dynamic czar of the underworld, Mother.”

Amanda loves to tell stories about the past and fantasize about the days of her youth. She has no hope of living a life like the past but she still thinks about it a lot. A good example is when she is telling her favourite story about the gentleman callers : “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain, your mother received seventeen! gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them all.”

Laura just wants to exist in her own world and play with her glass collection and listen to music. She tries to have a future and fails  because she is shy. In addition, she thinks she is crippled, but her mother tries to dispel these thoughts: “Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word. Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect – hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it – develop charm – and vivacity and – charm! That’s all you have to do!”

In conclusion, we can see the characters of The Glass Menagerie trying to forget about their life, some successfully, like Laura, some not so much, like Tom. They try not to think of their depressing life because, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Jázmin Juhász

“Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

This quote applies to all three main characters of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie as they all try to avoid reality in one way or another.

Firstly, let’s look at Amanda, who used to be a rich southern girl living in a nice house, where young men would line up in hopes of getting her hand in marriage. Even though now she is a single mother with two adult children and an absent husband, she still clings to her old life. We can see that she keeps bringing up stories like this: “One Sunday afternoon in Blue Mountain, your mother received seventeen! gentlemen callers! Why, sometimes there weren’t chairs enough to accommodate them all.” Not only does she live in the past, not only does she refuse to acknowledge that the world is changing, but she also sweeps her problems under the carpet. A good example is when she is not able to admit that Laura is in fact disabled: “Nonsense! Laura, I’ve told you never, never to use that word. Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect – hardly noticeable, even!”

While Amanda sees life through rose-coloured glasses everything is worse in Laura’s eyes and this quote demonstrates it perfectly. “And everybody was seated before I came in. I had to walk in front of all those people. My seat was in the back row. I had to go clumping all the way up the aisle with everyone watching I” She felt insecure about the way she walked, even though nobody ever made fun of her (as far as we know). Her career was also restrained by her mental issues: “Her hands shook so that she couldn’t hit the right keys! The first time we gave a speed-test, she broke down completely – was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash-room!” Everything new and slightly challenging frightens her, hence she escapes reality by doing the same old things every single day. Playing with glass animals and listening to the same records are the only things she finds comfort in.

Lastly let’s talk about Tom, who is an explorer, a poet at heart but is stuck in a tedious and low-paying job. Excitement is what he yearns for. The only way he can experience any kind of adventure is through movies. He goes to the cinema so often that even his mother doesn’t believe him: “I don’t believe that you go every night to the movies. Nobody goes to the movies night after night. Nobody in their right mind goes to the movies as often as you pretend to. People don’t go to the movies at nearly midnight, and movies don’t let out at two a.m.”

All three of the main characters are trying to ignore reality but in very variable ways. Many people today are becoming increasingly like them by using escapism to endure the real world.