We perish'd, each alone (Castaway)...

When in doubt, press the right arrow key :)

Short Blurb:

In March of 2020 the English class I read Virginia Wolf's To the Lighthouse which features Cowper's "The Castaway" in my English class. It was also around this time, as high school seniors, that the MBS (the name given to a collection of my high school friends) talked about the pandemic's personal effects on their lives in a shared journal. I hope this Bitsy game blends those two experiences together in an enjoyable way. Created for EMS.

A Longer Explanation:

I found To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf to be quite lovely and engaging empathetically. The contemplative nature combined with the onset of the high school second semester senior blues and the realization that turning 18 meant adulthood in an existential and horrible way made me think about the nature of my own relationships. It was specifically between between my mother and me but also extended to any person I interacted with—I became acutely aware of the distance between minds and of how difficult satisfactory connection is. I’m not quite sure what initially drew me to the poem that Mr. Ramsay (a character I wasn’t too fond of myself) was so enamored by but I know I empathized with what I saw as degrees of self-pity. From apathy to slight bouts of depression, I felt that I could feel this poem’s tone (within the narrative of the novel especially) in a way I’d never experienced with other poetry. “We perished, each alone; / But I beneath a rougher sea, / and whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.” I was reminded of that internal place of desolation that I’m constantly trying to avoid with work, business, and distraction but where I’ll always end up in times of transitional upheaval and contemplation. This last stanza of Cowper’s poem on its own is quite Crywank-y in comparison to the whole poem which is about a sailor who dies rather unremarkably in the grand scheme of things but with great personal effort at sea.

The other part of my text comes from the Mysterious Bookaddict Society's [sic] (name inspired by Trenton Lee Stewart’s Mysterious Benedict Society) group journal. Currently, the MBS is the three member remains of the book club we started in 10th grade. We have a group journal that we pass amongst ourselves at three months per rotation. The text itself is sourced from March, April, and May from 2020 which was in the middle of schools first stopping in person classes. The decision to stop school was still being shunted to after spring break and lock down wasn’t a static state of being yet. I think a lot of our entries reflected the uncertainty of facing both the current reality and future and dips into existential reflection.

Citations:

Text: Group Journal (2020- ), MBS members: jc, ez, and sz

Poem: "The Castaway" by William Cowper (text link)

BGM: The Little Shepard - Performed by Gerluz on piano - From "Gerluz plays Claude Debussy" (music from musopen.org, attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 unported CC BY-NC 3.0)