waiting for the storm

Waiting for Tropical Storm Fay to blow through any time now reminds me of the last hurricane I went through in 2004, during which I had to re-read Things Fall Apart by candlelight - No circumstance excuses English majors from completing their reading assignments.

I hated the book the first time I read it in the summer before ninth grade. At that point, I didn't realize that the protagonist in every story doesn't have to be one that I fell in love with. Before that, my books of choice had included Jack London novels, Greek myths like the Odyssey with the classical hero, and various other adolescent girl novels. Okonkwo did not fit into my mold of a hero. He was a misogynistic wife-beater who killed his adopted son, and I imposed every Western moral I had on him just like the Christians in the novel.
Re-reading it made me realize that morality is a construct - an illusion. It allows us to live together relatively peacefully until our morality clashes with another, like walking in on someone else's dream. This is the point of the novel - that human society is fragile and the barbarian waits beneath the surface to shatter our illusion of a world in anything other than chaos.