Gulliver's Travels, Chapter 2 -thoughts and commentaries

Within these next few chapters I found the story getting wholly amusing and rather conflicting for me. The second chapter started off with a topic that I find highly controversial in the current human society. The narrator is greatly pressed by “urgent matters” of nature and so he “relieves” himself in his home. Reading the passage felt exceedingly awkward, but you feel as though you are jerked back into the whole reality of life and human nature. The narrator blatantly tells us about his “needs” and how he satisfies them without “sugar coating” it as would normal text that would not stoop to such crass. The author shows us just how genuine life is and how while we would love to just blow it off and rather not dwell on the matter, the reality of it is still there. We would adore not having to think on all the bad of society and everything that is “wrong” but just stuff all the “unpleasantries” of everyday life into the back of our minds. It brings humans into light of the point that we would just love to fool ourselves with a perfect illusion of life so that we may feel better about the truth. We like to deny the fact that life is not perfect and as nice or as “clean” as we would like for it to be. Because even for me, as I’m writing this I would rather not think about it as well. I feel considerably awkward addressing the matter and I came very, very close to not even attending to this subject. But then I realized that if I didn’t include this then I would have done exactly as what I had described humanity of wanting to do. To just ignore it and that did definitely not bode too well with me. But even as I was writing down my views, a war was raging in my head. When I had first introduced the concept of how the society wants to view the world as a better place in my head, a side of me asked “What’s so wrong about wanting to see everything a little bit better? Isn’t that something we always do? Something we ought to do, looking on the brighter side of things?” And then suddenly I felt as though my previous views might have been too harsh. And then the cynical side of me kicked in. “Thinking that life will always get better is a hope. It might happen and it might not happen. Thinking that life is better than it truly is, is nothing short of lying to your self. You know how bad it really is and yet you run away from the truth indulging yourself into a fantasy of what everything should be like and not what it truly is. And that is nothing short of puerile. Yes, looking to the brighter side of everything is good but that does not mean for us to blind ourselves into seeing everything as being oh so happy and wonderful.” After that my “nicer” side (softer / not as scornful/ less skeptical?) retorted by saying that not the all think so imprudently and that it wasn’t to an extent of idealizing a world “full of rainbows and unicorns!!!” . It was exactly as if two miniature versions of me were on each side of my computer screaming at each other and calling the other idiots. (I have to admit though the thought is amusing). In the end I came upon a (happy?) medium and decided such:
“Perhaps the world does like to view everything bathe in light but we only go as far as masking the world in this veil only as much for us to be able to feel contented with what we currently see.”