Are we human, or are we dancers?

First the Forests




The article ‘First the Forests’ relates in many ways to Zamyantin’s novel We. It talks about the fact that civilization is ‘attacked’ by the forests, just like the One State is attacked by nature. He uses symbols of nature to illustrate his ideas, like the idea that the forest was hiding the sky. This idea ‘explains’ our urge to look at the sky, to go up to heaven once we die and the thought that God might be in the sky waiting for us with all his love. The forest was hiding the sky which immediately puts the forest in a bad position. I thought that this thought related to the fog in the novel We. Once the fog appears, D-503 is sad, destabilized and his world is crumbling down. Also the Integral might have been built because the numbers were curious about what hides in the sky, they could have been curious about the secrets the sky is hiding from them. It is repeatedly said that the forest was there first, that in the beginning there was only dense forest. That links to the ‘ancient’ times in We, where the world is described as being dirty, uncivilized – nature. A thought brought up in our class discussion was that the forest might be due to the big flood, when Noah and the animals were the only ones that survived. Of course this is what is said in the bible, and therefore we cannot rely on that fact scientifically.


The main question that we discussed in our class discussion was: What does it mean to be human? Where is the difference between animals and machines? Some very interesting ideas came up, about the ideas that ‘First the Forests’ contains. The numbers living in the One State are like machines, they don’t have a free will, they do whatever they are told to do by the Benefactor, they don’t rebel themselves and they don’t have free time to do what they want. In ‘First the Forests’ humans are described as animalist creatures, that live in the forest just like every animal would do. They are covered with hair; they even look like animals before they come out of the forest. Also the ‘other humans’ that live outside the One State wall are hairy. In our discussion we thought that the idea of always coming back to where we started is very important in both We and ‘First the Forests’. Life is a cycle. When we’re not born yet, we’re all covered in hair which is like a funny fact because when we grow older and we approach our sixties or seventies, we get hairier. I did not know that and I find it amusing how this thought in ‘First the Forests’ is actually something that can be scientifically proven. Going back to the question “What is human?” we noticed that there is a fine line between being human and being a machine. This comes back to the two articles we previously read in class, about Individuality. It is important for us to keep some kind of individuality in our large society. I thought that the giants mentioned in the article could be like a mix of animal and human, just like I-330 in We. Talking about I-330, she is someone that seems to fit into her society but that really doesn’t. She understands what’s going on, she sees how everyone is turned into machines from the very beginning of their existence and she tries to save the people in the One State. She is also the one that opens D-503’s eyes, just like the Vulcan in ‘First the Forests’ is the one that opens everyone’s eyes and a Vulcan is something very natural.


In conclusion I would agree with the article in some points. I also believe that during our lives we sort of come back to who we used to be, before we were shaped by our environment. Not only physically we shrink after years of growing but we’re also brought back to the same questions we had as we were a child. A quote from a song that I know says ‘and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all’. That seems like a harsh statement but I think that it is true in many ways. We can learn all about physics, geography or mathematics but do we really know anything at all?