Blog for Week of February 3rd

    The book The Gaucho Juan Moreira was very amusing to read. Growing up, I loved reading fiction books more than anything else. Reading the book this week brought back a lot of the joy that I used to have for reading when I was a kid. Despite the story being nonfiction, the whole story felt like it was completely made up. If it was fiction, I probably would have labeled it as "unrealistic," which just goes to show how entertaining Juan Moreira was. 

    My favorite quote from the story comes from the part where Moreira begins his life as an outlaw by stabbing Sardetti over his debts: "'One,' said Moreira, and then, like lightening, he stabbed the storeowner nine more times counting aloud, once for each thousand pesos of the bad debt." I was left open-mouthed at that part. If you saw that scene on T.V., you would probably laugh at how ridiculous it was, so the fact that something similar happened, in reality, is farcical. 

    Another passage that caught my attention was just before Sardetti's death where Moreira said, "Patience just runs out, sometimes, like mine has. Who knows where it's run to . . . straight to the devil, I expect." Moreira had figured out that he was no longer going to put up with Sardetti's hesitancy to repay his debts. The metaphor of "straight to the devil" was astounding to read for the first time, but it still made a lot of sense to me. I related to those emotions because for me there are some days that have an inevitable feeling to them, whether good or bad. Even without having a clear plan for the day, there are some times when you know your patience has already run out. I'm sure everyone can connect with that feeling of unavoidable frustration every once and a while.

Comments

  1. Dylan NewberryFebruary 4, 2022 at 9:06 PM

    Hi Ben! I was very intrigued by your post, and specifically about the parts where you talk about the book in terms of being unrealistic or fictional. This get me thinking about the implications that these kind of thoughts could have had for people in Latin America that read this book as it was released in the newspaper back then. Could this story and fantastical feeing about gauchos have had the same kind of impact on Argentina that cowboys and the Wild West had on the US? In the US, cowboys and their ideals helped form an American identity of traditional family values such as strength, humility, and integrity, so could a similar thing have taken place in Argentina through the gauchos? Anyways, I really enjoyed your post and was glad to read something that had me thinking of the larger implications of all of the things that we learn in this class.

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  2. Professor StarkFebruary 16, 2022 at 12:45 PM

    Thank you, Ben, for the post. I am glad you enjoyed The Gaucho Juan Moreira and I like the discussion of how Moreira's patience simply ran out on him. To me this makes Moreira seem more human, as you said we all experience this feeling.

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