Weekly Blog: Week 3

"Lot's Wife" by Anna Akhmatova was this week's poem, and was interpreted in many different ways; I thought of it as a story of a common housewife, who went much deeper than people gave her credit for. While her decision to look back at the town may have cost her her life, she chooses to do so anyway. This is done often, I think, in life; the "unhappy wife" knowingly decides to gain one last look at the town in which her and her family made so many memories and perished in return. To her, the closure she receives from that last glance outweighs the consequences (which because of Macroeconomics, I concluded in a cost-benefit analysis). We sometimes do things despite the consequences, even if it may seem to others as if the benefit is too small compared to the cost. But what others can't see in times of decision making are one's feelings; this is why we must not ignore our own thoughts when making decisions simply because we are listening to others. Lot's wife sacrifices her life to cherish that last moment of it, and while the narrator implies that she is not of significant loss to the others and even that her choice was out of stupidity, her passion is apparent in her final choice to look back once more.