Andromeda Nebula

This is a paragraph I needed to write with some words of the vocabulary, I enjoyed writing this and I’m proud of it because I think it was a good story which I would like to read. The thing of people of other world and the meeting, came from the inspiration the movie “Thor” gave me. I think it is really interesting the idea that other worlds with living beings exist. Hope you enjoy it.

39

Andromeda

I started packing everything I needed for the conference, I already packed all my clothes and now I needed to find a way to pack all my papers without messing them up. On the last ONU meeting they asked me to do some specific research for the aliens explaining: what is exactly an omnivore, why most of humans are omnivorous, and how and why we differ between meat and vegetables since both come from living beings, how everything worked in the marsupial animals system, like if it caused some side effect when the marsupials kept the “baby” in a pouch after birth, and if it was possible for the aliens to mutate themselves in that way if they liked the marsupials, and what phloem is made of and if other living beings can use it as a tissue that conducts food to other parts of the body. I did this research till I reached the plateau of knowledge that humans have about it. I closed my bag and went out of the house. The rain had just stopped and the smell of ozone filled my nose. A taxi picked me up, I sat in the back seat and looked at the rearview mirror, with some polygonal figures hanging from it, to see if I could recognize the driver, but I’m not sure I’ve seeing him before. He was listening to some news about nocturnal animals and how they survive in daytime on the radio, but he was quite upset because someone kept talking with him like a parasite. The person who talked with him through a radio had many quandaries of the decisions he wanted to make, and he kept asking him about everything he should do as if it depended on the driver. When the driver finally decided he couldn’t stand this person anymore, he shot the radio and apologized for the nuisance of his friend. I finally got to the airport and I had only 10 minutes to get to the gates on time so I started walking fast and maneuvering through the crowd. When I had the tickets and did everything to get into the spaceship I had 40 minutes left. I started watching the news on a T.V. and the news was about a murder, the reporter showed some images of the mutilated body and I thought that the killer must had been inspired by Jack the Ripper, for the outrageous way he killed that young women. Suddenly a familiar face appeared, it was one of the company agents. He was nice but sometimes he annoyed me because he kept talking in metaphors, and he told me it was time to aboard the spaceship. I got in the spaceship and quickly fell asleep. I woke up and ate something before we reached the point of arrival: the future Andromeda Nebula, one of the greatest clouds of interstellar gas and dust in our universe. We walked in the bridge and I was able to see the meeting point, the buildings looked amazing. They were like palaces made of mosaic made of different colorful shining rocks, it was beautiful. I got to my assigned room and got ready for the conference, after that I was introduced to the new king of Althort. He didn’t talk any of our languages, so a translator from his nation helped us to communicate better, but it wasn’t a good translator because he just knew to talk using past participle which was confusing and annoying. Then the conference started, everyone presented what they had to show and the discussions about what was supposed to happen between the Worlds started. The real problem is that some kings or representatives of their nations thought they were the only protagonists of the story, but they weren’t, and they will never be again. I was getting tired of all this mess and decided it was time. I searched for my friends and the fair kings and representatives, and told them it was time and asked if they wanted to stay. Some said yes and others decided they preferred to come with me. We went to the spaceship and pulverized the bridge. When the bridge was destroyed the Andromeda Nebula was created, from the pieces of an old bridge and know there was no possibility to get in or out of the mosaic city. If they decide to live in peace they may find a way out, but they also may not find it because the way out may not exist.

Tan Imposible, Tan Irresistible

 Unhappily I don’t know what inspired me to write this poem since I was almost sleeping in the middle of a car trip, which lasted four and a half hours; I was looking to the  panorama and since spring flourished I noticed it because the flowers, the trees and any plants here in Venezuela get extremely beautiful and colorful, so what happen is that I was looking to the view thinking about nothing and suddenly the idea of the poem came in to my mind and started writing it and trying to imagine it to describe it, so I think it is not bad and I tried to translate to English since I wrote it in Spanish. And maybe Margarita is right, maybe I’m waiting for my first love xD (it doesn't have to be true). Hope you enjoy it :)

La piel dorada que cubre su cuerpo, caliente junto al mío,

sus brazos me rodean en un abrazo protector,

su altura, su ternura,

su sonrisa juguetona,

sus cabellos no mucho más claros que los míos,

sus ojos verdes como los árboles en primavera,

su aliento fresco que golpea delicadamente mi rostro,

su voz un poco ronca y acogedora declara palabras en mi oído

que harían mi cuerpo erizar si no estuviera en su abrazo caliente.

Sus labios rozan suavemente mi oreja y se sellan en un beso sobre mi mejilla,

cerca de mis labios, provocándome,

a él le gusta ver cuánto puedo aguantar, para no entregarme a sus labios, a sus ojos, a su amor,

miro sus ojos,

pongo mi cabeza sobre su pectoral y escucho lo que su corazón me dice,

el habla rápido y me cuenta cuanto me ama, cuanto me quiere,

pongo mis labios sobre su hombro y cierro los ojos, pensando en cómo sería hermoso

si pudiéramos estar juntos sin tener que esconder nuestro amor de los demás.

Levanto mi rostro y le pregunto "porque?", sus ojos se llenan de tristezas,

yo dejo que el mar se libere de mi cuerpo por mis ojos y pongo mi cabeza entre su cuello, 

el me abraza fuerte en un intento de consuelo.

Nos miramos a los ojos y decimos al mismo tiempo "te amo",

pero el sigue hablando de alguien más

y yo sigo arrastrándome dolorosamente a la muerte,

sin poder satisfacer las ganas que mi alma, mi corazón, mi cuerpo, mi amor, tienen de ti.

English version:

The golden skin that covers his body, warm next to mine,

His arms round me in a protective hug,

His height,

His tenderness,

His playful small,

His hair not much brighter than mine,

His green eyes like the trees during spring,

His fresh breath hitting my face gently,

His voice a little hoarse and cozy declares words in my ear

Which would make my body hedgehog if I weren’t in his warm hug.

His lips gently brush against my ear and sealed with a kiss in my cheek,

Near to my lips, provoking me,

He likes to see how much I can stand, to don’t give me up to his lips, his eyes, his love,

I look him in the eyes,

I put my head on his chest and listen what his heart is telling me,

He speaks fast and tells me how much he loves me, how much he wants me,

I rest my lips on his shoulder and close my eyes, thinking about how wonderful it would be

If we could be together without hiding our love from everyone else.

I rise my face and ask him “why?”, his eyes fill with sadness,

I set free the sea from my body through my eyes and put my face between his neck,

He hugs me strongly in an attempt to comfort me.

We look at each other eyes and say at once “I love you”,

But he continues talking, about someone else,

And I continue to painfully drag myself to death,

Unable to satisfy the desire that my soul, my heart, my body, my love, have of you.

"Black Swan" SPOILER ALERT: I COMMENT THE END OF THE MOVIE, SO IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED IT DON'T READ THIS POST.

Black Swan

“I had the craziest dream last night about a girl who has turned into a swan, but her prince falls for the wrong girl and she kills herself.”

The movie Black Swan directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Andres Heinz, is a about the story of a girl called Nina, which dances ballet in a company for many years and she finally has the opportunity to be the protagonist of the play “Swan Lake” but there is something that limit her to be perfect for that part, and perfect is what she always tried to be. In this play she needs to dance the White Swan, what she does perfectly, but she also needs to dance the Black Swan, which is very difficult to her, not because she doesn’t do the right dance moves but because she tries to do the moves perfectly and the Black Swan is not perfect. The teacher kept telling her “lose yourself”, so she could release the Black Swan that is trapped inside her but she can’t do it easily and painless.

The whole movie is about that, about her metamorphose from being a sweat and innocent White Swan to a free and audacious Black Swan. The metamorphose is really painful and scary for both spectators and character. That’s because she doesn’t want to become the Black Swan but at the same time she tries to act like one; it is like when you open the door for someone but you don’t let him out, and this person starts to push harder and harder to get out. That’s what she does. Nina starts to have hallucinations. And she believes that the person in does hallucinations is a girl who tries to be her friend but Nina didn’t let her because she was the perfect one to be the Black Swan after her. With that she starts seeing the girl in the hallucinations and to become paranoid about her, thinking she wants to still her part of the play. When the girl actually is supporting her and is amused about how Nina dances amazingly.

At the end before she dance the Black Swan part she has another hallucination in which she supposedly kill the other girl so she can dance the Black Swan, but Nina actually kill her White Swan, and release her Black Swan by doing that. She dances the Black Swan, everyone is amused, and then she goes back to the White Swan to dance the last part of the play: when the White Swan commits suicide because her true love doesn’t love her. She finishes the play perfectly and the White Swan dies.

Many people say she actually die, but I personally disagree. I am sure she survives because the whole movie is about Nina and her “conscience”. In the movie you can how she is control by the mother and how the mother doesn’t let her grow and live through her. So when she finally dies in the end, she doesn’t actually die; just the White Swan does, and with that she release herself from her mother and grows as the Black Swan. The movie, in my opinion is great, but I wouldn’t recommend it because it is extremely heavy, and I don’t get very emotional with movies and this time I was just in shock. It is worth watching it, but if you will need to be prepared, it’s not an easy movie and many people didn’t like it, especially because it is hard to understand exactly what is going on, if it is reality or her mind.

Tolkien Most famous stories

“The Silmarillion” (not my favorite), “The Hobbit” (which is a great book that I can reread for all my life), the trilogy “The Lord of Rings” (love it) and “the Unfinished Tales” (I have no comments because I haven’t read it) are the most famous book by Tolkien.

“The Silmarillion” is the bible of the Middle Earth; it tells how everything was created in the Tolkien’s world: the Middle Earth. I tells how everything raised, the elves, humans, dwarves, goblins and, of course, specify how the rings and all the legends begun.

“The Hobbit” is a great book about the first hobbit that found the One Ring, but not the first one to be involved in adventures. Everything started when Tolkien was grading his student’s tests and one of them didn’t wrote anything in one of the pages but “hobbits live in holes”, he was very curious about the hobbits, what are them? He started searching about hobbits, and that’s how “The Hobbit” started. The hobbits are like a miniature of humans, they live a calm life and any hobbit that like adventures or any living been that bring adventures aren’t seen by good eyes, that’s why the hobbit Bilbo Baggins is careful about thinking in adventures; one of his ancestors involved himself in great adventures, with that he stayed with a really bad fame in the Shire and because of that all the hobbits that lived there were always suspicious about his descendants. But in the end Bilbo appealed to his Tookish side, which was the side of his adventurer ancestor, and end up finding a ring that make invisible, which belonged to a nasty creature called Gollum that tried to kill him several times. Bilbo Baggins go through many spicy adventures that make you fly in Tolkien’s imagination, you get trapped inside the book, but, as most of the books, the beginning is really boring.

There are three “The Lord of the Rings”, the first one is “The Lord of the Rings: The Ring Fellowship”, then “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and a t last “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”. “The Ring Fellowship“ is when Bilbo miss the places of his adventures and wants to go back and live with the elves, after he do that his good friend the wizard Gandalf, which convinced him to live the ring with him, what he did, and with the ring he also left all his properties and goods to his nephew. And that’s how the adventure begins, Gandalf relive the truth about the ring to Frodo, Bilbo’s nephew, they need to run a way, the finally get to Rivendell, one of the elves small kingdoms. There the Ring Fellowship rose with courageous man, dwarves, elves, wizards and hobbits. The obstacles start to get worse in their mission especially when Gandalf falls and when Frodo decide to separate himself from the Fellowship and Sam, his loyal friend, follow his decision. Then in “The Two Towers” (the triple T) it’s about the Fellowship separate, Boromir dies and the hobbits Merrin and Pippin are kidnaped by the orcs, and Legolas, Aragorn and Glimly go to rescue them since they know that they will never find Frodo and Sam. In this book everything is really different they have different adventures, Frodo find Gollum that have big intentions to still the One Ring because it causes like an addiction to it, and if you stay too much time with it you don’t want anyone to stay with it. While the other are rescued and discover that Gandalf resuscitated, and start defeating the orcs and the followers of Sauron. “The Return of the King” is when they start winning, Aragorn return to his homeland as the king, as he deserve. They go to the last battle in the gates of Mordor and defeat everyone when Frodo finally through the One Ring to the volcano and killed Sauron with that. After everyone finally where safe back in their homes Gandalf, Bilbo and Frodo went with the elves to the most ancient land to never come back again. Great! Magnificent! I just love it! Yes it is long, yes it has boring parts but still, nothing can be great if you don’t have the bad part of it.

The book “The Unfinished Tells” is a great book according to all who read it but unfortunately I haven’t read it; this book have all the stories that Tolkien wrote about the Middle Earth and he didn’t published and his son did so.

If you read these books enjoy it, if it is necessary be patient. These are great, and you can’t die before reading them.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

J. R. R. T.

I love magic, fantasy, and all the things that are considerate unreal, it just fascinates me! Well I will tell you about one of the “creators” of magic worlds (well, he is in my opinion), John Ronald Reuel Tolkien most known as J.R.R. Tolkien. For me he was a great man, he was creative, curious and obviously he inspire an entire generation and the followings, in all the stories he invented there is just one thing that don’t really like, “The Silmarillion” is kind of a slow book, but it explains a lot about Middle Earth religion, culture, etc., the other thing is that know it is hard to write an fantasy stories (books) without having similar stories or moments with “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Hobbit” because he used almost all kind of magic things, he created a hall new language, a hall new world.

John Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January third of 1892. On February 15 of 1896, when he was for, his father died, because of that his mother and younger brother, Hilary, needed to move to other country. They went to live in West Midland, England; when he went to England he was just 4 years old, so he remember just a little about Africa, and one of this memories were encounter with a huge spider, which, later, made part of his stories. Tolkien had a mixed and complex childhood between the England city and rural areas because of his school: King Edward’s School. After some years they moved to Kings Heat and there he developed his linguistic imagination.

After a time they moved again, this time to Edgbaston; there, in 1900, his mother were received in the Roman Catholic Church, for that Tolkien and his brother Hilary were raised by the father Pio Nono and started to have a completely catholic life. In 1940 diabetes were diagnosed in his mother, who died on February 14 of the same year. Since his mother death father Francisco took care of him and Hilary till one of his uncles could take care of them. Ronald started to show an incredible linguistic talent, he was one of the best students of Latin and Greek, because of that he learned several other languages. When he was 16 a girl called Edith, who was 19 year old, was living in his uncle house, he start liking her, for father Francisco forbidden him of seeing her for 3 year, what it hardly obeyed.

With 21 year old, on 1911, Tolkien went to Oxford University to study, he started having classes about classics, ancient English, German languages (specially Gothic), Gales and Finnish till 1913 when he meet Edith again. In the same year he started working as a tutor, he accompanies two Mexicans, but it didn’t end well because they had no charisma for France, French language or French people.

Edith moved in to a castle in Warwick and the relationship between both got stronger each day that passed, and equally the rage between countries, so in 1914 the war begun. Instead of the majority, he didn’t join immediately to the war, instead he went to back to Oxford in July of the same year. There he started working with poetry, practicing literature and creating his language, which later he called Qenya. He stayed several years in England working with that, till he finally went back to France and married Edith on March 22 of 1916 in Warwick.

Eventually he were sent to war in Western Front, where he didn’t had time to see Edith. He had an terrible fever that almost killed him for what he went to a hospital in November, and in Christmas he finally got back to Warwick with Edith. After a few months he started writing his stories, making one or another tale which created his book “The Unfinished Tales”, which wasn’t published in his life. From 1917 to 1918 his illness kept disturbing him for a long time preventing him for doing many activities, not long time after he was promoted to lieutenant and his first son, John Francis Reuel Tolkien, born on November 16 of 1917.

Tolkien started teaching in Leeds University and kept writing more tales for his book “The Unfinished Tales”, and then he made a group with his friends that they called it The Vikings. On October of 1930 his second son, Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien and then Christopher Reuel Tolkien on 1924; on the next year the Anglo-Saxon teacher of Oxford University stopped working in there and Tolkien gratefully accepted to substitute him because Oxford was like his home. On 1929 his first and last daughter called Priscilla Tolkien; after her birth he started with the habit of writing letters for his kids as Santa Claus. They grew up, Francis decided to work in the church as a father, Michael and Christopher participated in the area war, Michael was an genius in the school and Christopher in college, and Priscilla were social worker.

While that Tolkien kept checking essays and tests, one day a student didn’t answer a whole page and the only thing he wrote on it was “the hobbits live in holes” and he started asking his self “what are hobbits?”, Tolkien started searching about hobbits everywhere and with that he started his novel, in 1973 he published the famous book “The Hobbit”. The editor Stanley Unwin was impressed with the popularity the book had in all ages and asked Tolkien if he had other books like “The Hobbit” and he gave here “The Silmarillion”, but the test readers didn’t approved it because it wasn’t in the same path as “The Hobbit”, still Unwin insisted asking him if he had more stories or if he could write more and Tolkien got interested about the challenge of writing “The new Hobbit”.

No much later he wrote the enormous trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”, which is divided in three parts: “Lord of the Rings: The Ring Fellowship”, “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”, that were published between the year 1954 and 1955, the publicity was so enormously huge that both, author and editor, sub estimated it and got tremendously impress with the results. By 1968 the trilogy had become the “alternative society” Bible.

Of course, with all that fame, an epidemic started; people, in USA, called him at pm what was 3 am in England, to ask him why Frodo did this or that. He needed to move to other house immediately because it was almost impossible to live in his house. After Tolkien move to the other house he didn’t get his address of telephone number to anyone that seems a crazy fanatic fan that would call him at 3 am. Thanks to that he finally published “The Silmarillion” because it explains everything about Middle Earth, the creatures, culture and how it was created.

The rest of his life he spent with Edith, writing tale (for the “Unfinished Tales” of course) and publishing small books for children. Edith died on 1959, Tolkien was really depress and decided to go back to Oxford again and work as a university tutor to distract himself till he had got over Edith death; he (unfortunally) died on September 2 of 1973, Edith and Tolkien were buried together.

Looking at everything he did, invented, created I just think about one thing: he created an whole new world, a whole new language, he is a creator, and with that he is consider almost a god because that is what gods do, they create, they give life, and Tolkien gave life to our imagination and this new/ancient world called Middle Earth.

How can a war affect people's emotions, actions and future?

This essay (which I wrote) is about how people can change in a war, especifically Loung Ung the author of a book called First They Killed My Father, A Daughter of Combodian Remembers. I hope you enjoy it :).

Imagine you’re happy with your family doing something, maybe playing, in a party, or eating the meal, promptly people outside start to scream, soldiers get in to your house and tell your family everyone should go outside; you discover that soldiers are taking over all the city, they take you to a camp, force you to put some black ugly clothes so everyone looks the same, cut your long hair that you like so much, force all the members of your family that are capable to work hard every day, give your family a small amount of food that barely one member of the family could eat alone in normal days, kill most of your family, send you to a camp that teaches you to fight, kill and that the soldiers that killed your family and the person that lead them are good people, the “good ones”. Now imagine you survive to that till the end of it and long time after it, how would you be after all? Would you be the same person as before? How you would be emotionally affected? Does the way it affected you will affect the way you’ll act in the future? Those are interesting questions to ask to people that have already had this experience and I will explain how Loung Ung, the author of First They Killed My Father, A Daughter of  Cambodian Remembers, was affected by the Khmer Rouge invasion and the camps of child soldiers. Loung has enormous changes through the war and the camps she goes; she starts acting in a more violent way and just thinks about revenge in difference with her sister Chou, who also survived but didn’t let rage and hatred take over her actions and way of thinking. In this camp the Khmer Rouge and Met Bong train children to be soldiers, there they tell Loung and the others that Pol Pot is great and that the Khmer Rouge soldiers are the strongest, what made Loung be confused about what is wrong and right.

In the beginning of the novel Loung was a nice girl, but as the book says she didn’t act as most girls use to, “-You are the most troublesome child-…It must be hard for her [Loung’s mother] to have a daughter who does not act like a girl, to be so beautiful and have a daughter like me”(Ung 2). Loung was always playing and running, she was a happy girl. Close to the end of the novel Loung was no more a happy girl, she become a girl full of rage and desire of revenge as the book shows, “Die! I hate you! I am going to kill you!” (Ung 126). She almost killed a girl but Met Bong stopped her from doing that. She changed so much because the soldiers treated her and her family really badly and almost all her family died by the hands of the Khmer Rouge soldiers. That made the rage grow inside her slowly; she, as any other angry child, exaggerates the rage she feels by saying “Pa, I am going to kill them. I am going to make them suffer”(Ung 119), with that she shows all her rage that is as big as she says, but she exaggerates when she says that she will kill them all, make them suffer because she isn’t capable to do it.

Loung thought that to be strong was to fight back, to react in a violent way to the insults of other people and to always want revenge for what the soldiers did. Instead of Loung, Chou, her sister, was calmer than her; when people insult her Chou stays in her place quiet trying not to get in trouble; although Chou’s thoughts were never mentioned, in the novel she never says something about revenge or acts in a violent way. Because of that Loung thought Chou was weak as she shows in the novel, “Chou, you’re older than me, stop being so weak,” (Ung 130). Loung feeds her strength with her rage making herself want to be alive so she can revenge for her family, something Chou doesn’t understand because, instead of Loung, she dreams of a day when war will be over and everyone will find peace again; that shows Chou is more mature than Loung, she is mature enough to forgive people for the mistakes they have done, which doesn’t mean she never feels rage but she knows how to control it and not let herself be influenced about the simple thought of “an eye for an eye”, she thinks “they took an eye, I forgive them for that” and shows how mature she is. Loung thought she was strong, that she could stand with anything, that she could survive without her family, but at last she notice it wasn’t true, she couldn’t survive alone; and she notice that when she goes to the infirmary and see her family “I cannot believe my eyes. I look into their beaming faces” (Ung 154), here she notice how happy she is with her family, and doesn’t want be apart from them again, in this moment everyone can notice that she is not as strong as she says and all this violent actions and thoughts was like a wall protecting her, don’t letting other people see how vulnerable she was.

  In Ro Leap was the camp where the Ung family lived for a long time. After a time when only Ma, Kim, Loung, Chou and Geak lasted in the hut, whole families started being killed and Ma forced Kim, Loung and Chou to go to different camps because there the soldiers wouldn’t kill them and maybe they could have more food than in Ro Leap.  They obeyed her and Kim went to a different camp from Loung and Chou, but the girls couldn’t be apart of each other, they weren’t strong enough for that as Loung describes in the book “Without words of goodbye or good luck, he turns and walks away from us…Chou and I cannot separate ourselves so we head off in the same direction” (Ung 123). They went to a camp where the strongest girls would be trained to become soldiers; in all the girls' camps there was a person they called Met Bong who ruled the camp. The children in that camp were trained all day long and everyday ; first they just planted and harvested rice and other seeds; then, when they were older, Met Bong started teaching them how to use weapons; every night in the dinner Met Bong told them many things about The Angkar and The Youns as “Angkar is all-powerful! Angkar is the savior and liberator of the Khmer people!” or “Though there are many more Youns than Khmer soldiers, our soldiers are stronger fighters and will defeat the Youns! Thanks to the Angkar!” (Ung 125). Sometimes it changes from Angkar to Pol Pot and the children should repeat three times Angkar or Pol Pot, depending on what Met Bong says, after each sentence she says. After so much time hearing that and pretending she agrees with all Met Bong says, Loung starts getting confused about what she really believes; she knows that she hates Khmer soldiers for killing her family, but she doesn’t know anymore which side she must trust, which side is really trying to protect her instead of sending her to right death.

A war, it doesn’t matter of which kind, will always affect people in some way; some will be more affected than others, some will change from a happy person to a forever depressed person, or maybe a person doesn’t apparently change, maybe the only thing that changes in that person is the perspective of things and the appreciation for small and simple objects and moments. It doesn’t matter how much someone changes and how they do it, what matters is that in any situation a war changes everyone and everything, perspective, actions, decisions, appreciation, government and even a whole country.

How we are controled by magical forces in "House Taken Over" & "The Night Face Up"

House Taken Over and The Night Face Up are originally in Spanish. This stories have fantasy and realism, I made a comparsion essay about them, O hope you like it :D

“The Night Face Up” and “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar have strange events that couldn’t happen in real life.  In “The Night Face Up” most of the story is a dream, whereas in “House Taken Over” invisible people go inside the house and take it over.  However, in both stories the characters are controlled by a magical force that doesn’t give them different choices to solve the problem in the story.  This magical force is what decides what they should do and forces them to do it.  What Cortázar means to say in both stories is that humans don’t have free will; they think that they can do what they decide to do, but really some magical force controls their lives.

  

  In both stories Cortázar doesn’t give names to any characters. For example in the story “The Night Face Up” he simply uses the pronoun “he” when he describes the accident with “He braked hard with foot and hand, wrenching him­self to the left; he heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went.”   By doing that Cortázar transmits the idea that the main character can be any person, which it can happen to anyone.  Similarly in “House Taken Over” he just says the name of the main character’s sister when he writes “I missed my briar pipe, and Irene, I think, regretted the loss of an ancient bottle of Hesperidin’s…”. By not giving a name to the main character also in this story Cortázar creates suspense in the story because in the house are invisible forces and he also transmit that the main character can be anyone.  

 In addition both stories have strange events which are connected to a magical force; the main problem is that this magical force causes difficulties in the lives of the main characters and don’t let them have a “happy end”.  In “The Night Face Up” this magical force controls what will happen to the main character during his dream as Cortázar describes, “It was unusual as a dream because it was full of smells, and he never dreamt smells… there to the left of the trail the swamps began already, the quaking bogs from which no one ever returned.” While the character is in the dream, he is struggling to escape from the place in his dream. In “House Taken Over” the magical force controls the characters’ lives in a different way. It controls them through noises caused by invisible people as the story describes, “The sound came through muted and indistinct, a chair being knocked over onto the carpet or the muffled buzzing of a conversation.” Even though they try to do everything well and keep their house, this magical force is so powerful that they need to abandon their house.

 Although the stories are very similar, they differ in that “The Night Face Up” is mostly dreams and “House Taken Over” is built around normal events. “The Night Face Up” starts with normal events as the author describes the main character, “Halfway down the long hotel vestibule, he thought that probably he was going to be late, and hurried on into the street to get out his motorcycle… he heard the woman scream, and at the collision his vision went.”  After the accident he ends up in the hospital and begins his dream where he is trying to escape from the Aztecs.  In this story the main character is confuse about what is real and what is the dream which further confuses the reader.  In contrast, in the story “House Taken Over” both the characters and the reader are sure about what is real and what is not real.  Most of the story has normal events focusing on what happen inside the house, as the author wrote, “We rose at seven in the morning and got the cleaning done, and about eleven I left Irene to finish off whatever rooms and went to the kitchen.” The author describes a normal day in the life of a brother and a sister that doesn’t give any foreshadowing of the invisible people inside the house. This makes “The Night Face Up” different to “House Taken Over”.

      Both stories share the aspect that the characters can’t make their own decision and maybe someone or something that we can call magical force already “wrote” the path of their lives and they follow it without noticing that  or realizing that it was impossible to change what happened.  After everything we can imagine or believe that we as humans are controlled by a magical force instead of having the satisfactory free will that gives us the right to do whatever we want whenever we want and however we want.

By Luiza Leal

                 Teixeira de Melo