Our Broken World

In our discussion of El Mundo this week, we talked about how Millás wanted to show the reader how the mentality of a person changes throughout the cycle of life, and how, in the moment that the person is living in, things don’t seem unequivocal to that person. I love this view of the world, and it makes me think of life as a perpetual free-fall with impervious safety nets catching you along the way. As the cycle of life plays out, each safety net is successfully cut open, and the free-fall begins until you hit the next safety next. Here’s what I mean: Millás shows us that at the time of birth, the world is completely broken, which represents the first safety net (being inside the mother’s womb) being broken and the first free-fall being undertaken. The fall represents all the chaos that has broken our world and how we are adapting to these things, learning more about them (i.e. communication), and eventually mastering them, which is when we hit the second safety net. Now we are living under our parents’ or teachers’ care, and while we know more and can do more things than at the first safety net, we still are confined by the limits of childhood, schooling, etc. And this is what life continues to be like until the end. Once we escape the world of childhood and schooling, our world is broken again, and we need to learn and master new things on top of those that we have already mastered in previous stages. Then we fall into another safety net until we take another step in the life cycle, where our world is broken again, and we adapt again. And so the cycle of life forces us to make ourselves better and more understanding, and we must abide or else when we do take that next step, we do not have all the tools we were supposed to acquire from the last free-fall; we would be set up to fail because we would be in an endless free-fall that never reaches the next safety net, simply because we don’t know the world as well as we should at that stage in the life cycle. That might have been really confusing, but it works in my mind, so I apologize if it was.