Interconnectivity of Versus (duality)

The Beginning of my essay...

Within “A Curtain of Green”, Eudora Welty examines Mississippi through its inhabitants, specifically Mrs. Larkin, a rich old white woman, and Jamey, a young black boy. In her short stories, Welty displays the reality of racial relations during the 1940’s. However, through the use of conceptual duality Welty looks past race and uses her novel to encompass the magical, unreal and odd beauty that Mississippi portrays. In fact, Welty utilizes the use of conceptual duality throughout the entirety of “A Curtain of Green.” Apparent, are the contraries of life and death, chaos and order, humanity and nature, illusion and reality.
The use of contraries appears in daily life. Female and Male, Mind and matter, good and evil, Black and White, and big and small are all dualities associated with the every day.

Both science and religion believe, strongly, in the fact that there are two opposing forces in many systems of society. For example. on a magnet there are two forces, the north pole and the south pole that cause a magnet to push or pull onto itself. Just as there is a connection in physics to particles and anti-particles so it is with dual subjects like life and death. It is with the use of duality that the church claims there is an afterlife in death thus accepting the dissimilarity between life and death.

According to Zhuang Tzu’s Taoism the the world is classified by the conceptual dualisms.

“With reference to positive and negative, to that what is so and what is not so, . .. if the positive is really positive, it must necessarily be different from its negative: there is no room for argument. And if that which is so really is so, it must necessarily be different from that which is not so: there is no room for argument.”
(The Identity of Contraries)

On the contrary, I do believe there is room for argument. I believe that there is a spectrum between the positive and negative and that the idea of there being only positive or negative is only a cliché idea instilled into our minds throughout our life time. I do still believe in the presence of the dualites though. Unlike Disney movies, there is no evil figure in our lives. Even if there is a person with whom we loathe, we still do not consider that person evil for there is without a doubt some positive characteristics in them.