0455006

Stephen lin tao

June 21, 2007

Timed-writing 3

Directions: In Dead Men’s Path the priest says “let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch.” Discuss what you think he means and what this saying reveals about him.

In “Dead Men’s Path”, the priest says “let the hawk perch and let the eagle perch”. Obviously, he means that the hero should esteem the customs of other country’s and allow the existence of the habits of different people. By reflecting on the contents of the story, we find the priest said the sentence when the hero insisted on abolish the path in his school, which the villagers still use to honor their predecessors. This custom appears to be absurd to the hero, especially considering the fact that in his opinion, the school’s job is just to help people to get rid of such kind of superstitious thoughts, such as people may get revenged if they stop honoring the ancestors. And thus, he persisted in his intention of the closure of the path in the school. But on the other hand, the path do appears to be quite important to the local villagers, who take after the custom from their foregoers and are in no intention of getting rid of it. And thus, the priest told the sentence to the hero, hoping that he would not close the path and that he should do his job and do not interfere too much in other’s affairs. And the “hawk” and “eagle” in the sentence just mean the different ways of living and thinking in general.

I think this sentence reveals two points about the priest. The first is his tolerance. Before the attempt to close the path, the hero in the story has already done much to change the local people’s way of living. It is impossible that the priest failed to notice all that. Local born and local bred, those changes and the new ways of thinking imposed on the villagers may also appear to be abrupt to the priest and hard to accept. But he did not reject them in the first place. Adversely, from the sentence we could see that he had allowed the hero’s way of doing things, which is fully implied from the term “let the hawk perch”. These facts undoubtedly reveals his tolerance over the problem we call “social conflicts”.

Besides the tolerance, the sentence also tells about the foresight of the priest. As the old saying goes: A cornered dog bites. The priest has foreseen the failure of the hero since the later has already done too much, resulting in the more and more serious problem of social conflicts. The sentence serves as a warning to the hero that if he does not “let the eagle perch” at the same time, he would receive a bad end. This level of meaning is confirmed in the later part of the story, in which the school campus was destroyed and the hero lost his job. But considering that the priest could foresee the end from a middle point, that is when the end has not come, I think that reveals the foresight about him.