Directions: Annotate the text (print the text or write your annotations in response to this question) and handwrite a two paragraph analysis answering the Guiding Question. If you have typing accommodations, you can annotate and write your response below. The text can be downloaded or viewed here. This is an excerpt from the travel memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert, published in 2006. The whole idea of Bali is a matrix, a massive and invisible grid of spirits, guides, paths and customs. Every Balinese knows exactly where he or she belongs, oriented within this great, intangible map. Just look at the four names of almost every Balinese citizen — First, Second, Third, Fourth — reminding them all of when they were born in the family, and where they belong. You couldn’t have a clearer social mapping system if you called your kids North, South, East and West. Mario, my new Italian/Indonesian friend, told me that he is only happy when he can maintain himself — mentally and spiritually — at the intersection between a vertical line and horizontal one, in a state of perfect balance. For this, he needs to know exactly where he is located at every moment, both in his relationship to the divine and to his family here on earth. If he loses that balance, he loses his power. It’s not a ludicrous hypothesis, therefore, to say that the Balinese are the global masters of balance, the people for whom the maintenance of perfect equilibrium is an art, a science and a religion. For me, on a personal search for balance, I had hoped to learn much from the Balinese about holding steady in this chaotic world. But the more I read and see about this culture, the more I realize how far off the grid of balance I’ve fallen, at least from the Balinese perspective. My habit of wandering through this world oblivious to my physical orientation, in addition to my decision to have stepped outside the containing network of marriage and family, makes me — for Balinese purposes — something like a ghost. I enjoy living this way, but it’s a nightmare of a life by the standards of any self-respecting Balinese. If you don’t know where you are or whose clan you belong to, then how can you possibly find balance? Given all this, I’m not so sure how much of the Balinese worldview I’m going to be able to incorporate into my own worldview, since at the moment I seem to be taking a more modern and Western definition of the word equilibrium. (I’m currently translating it as meaning ‘equal freedom,’ or the equal possibility of falling in any direction at any given time, depending on . . . you know . . . how things go.) The Balinese don’t wait and see ‘how things go.’ That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart. Guiding Question: How does the author blend travel writing and personal memoir conventions to communicate what she’s learned to the reader?
Read Details
