Contradictions

       Contradictions are difficult.  I ran into many of them a couple of days ago when I wrote my first formal paper for graduate school.  My assignment was to read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, and then to write five pages about what I found interesting. 

I hated Wuthering Heights.  I did not connect with a single character.  The characters' lives were perfect train wrecks, their children's lives became train wrecks shortly upon entering the world due to their parents' lives, and then the characters, most of them at least, die.  Most of the dialogue between characters is colored by hatred and a desire for revenge.  Characters abuse their children, the religious man in the novel is actually a manipulative tyrant, and emotions rage out of control.

I figured I could easily write a five page paper in a day, especially on such a straightforward book. 

But, my figure was wrong.

I flew through writing my introduction: Heathcliff and Hindley (two of the main characters) are products of their father's absence.  Simple.  However, when I began looking back in the text to prove this, I realized things were so much more confusing than I thought.  They were not entirely products of their father's mistakes; they had both made plenty of choices in their freedom that led to their demises.  They were COMPLEX.  Ahhhh!  (That "ahhh!" is not the feeling you get when you are sinking into a warm bath but rather the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap in the library and see that you have a missed call from your employer asking where you are...both have happened to me, and the former is definitely better).

This complexity thing freaked me out.  I emailed the professor and asked for an extension, citing contradictions as the problem.  He approved and also said "Hint about contradictions: they are your friends." 

Contradictions are scary because they cause me to re-consider something I had previously known as a fact. 

Isn't it funny that I, with a finite perspective, who live in a fallen world, would be afraid of contradictions.  They will inevitably happen to any thinking person who looks around them and tries to interpret the world.