For our next journal entry, we were given a quote and some questions:
“The past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
What does this quote mean to you?
Well at first I didn’t understand this at all. Now I understand it, it’s just that I don’t agree with it. This is the case with almost everything that I don’t understand. The point is, I think this quote means that the past is never dead because it is repeated and recalled. But can this mean that if a dead person is recalled, then they are not past or dead? I think not. I believe that the past is dead, no matter how far back or how recent in time.
How does this connect to The Wave?
The quote is the basis of the whole book! The entire storyline is based upon the past. The whole movement that Mr. Ross has brought upon the school was meant to be a history lesson. He was trying to recreate Nazi Germany with a history class, but the entire school got sucked into it, and it created a huge catastrophe. To back up my argument in the previous question, just because something is recreated, it doesn’t mean that it has been brought back to life. You can’t bring something back to life the exact same way it was. The past can’t be brought back just like a dead person can’t be revived.
How does this connect to American history?
I don’t know of any specific example, but we supposedly learn history so we are not condemned to repeat it. I’m not sure that I agree with this quote, because in The Wave Mr. Ross, a history teacher, repeats history. He obviously has learned history, but he has still repeated it. He knew the cause and effects of the whole Nazi movement, and yet he still went through with his experiment. I think that sometimes the human mind is too curious to not experiment with history. It’s like a small child who touches the stove once, and burns their finger. The next day they touch it again. And again. Eventually, they get the idea that the stove is hot and they shouldn’t touch it, but how many times will it take for us to repeat history before we understand what will happen?
