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Romeo And Juliet Past And Future Essay

Decent Essays

Lady Juliet has placed one foot in the past and one in the present. As Lady Juliet reads out loud from her diaries, her voice is described by one of the archivists as a “song” and how “the voice then quavers - cracks and is reduced to a helpless whisper.” The total “effect” of Lady Juliet’s voice is described as, “both magical and devastating - for you know that what you hear is the voice of someone near death - and the wisdom remains a child’s.” (143). Just as the past and the present are contradictions of one another, similarly Lady Juliet contradicts herself. She is the past and the present combined; an old lady in the present, telling a story that was written by her past twelve-year-old self. By bridging the gap between the past and the present, it becomes impossible to decipher if the past should be taken into account when dealing with the present, and if the todays of time need to be addressed when looking back into history. …show more content…

The past and the present face their own challenges and boundaries, and so histories can fail the test of time. Nonetheless, the past survives because it is the past that shapes the present. Even though time and memory may distort it, history lives because the pivotal moments in an individual’s past makes their present. Those moments and memories an individual has is what shapes their entire lives, and creates a small page in the book of history. Lady Juliet’s and Marian Turner’s past and present is recorded by the archivists who are faced with the difficult process of putting it together in order to recreate

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