People have continuously been forming their opinions, thoughts, and ideas throughout history in order to better understand the world around us. While this has produced progress and growth in a general sense, there always tends to be those that stick to what they know and understand to be true rather than venturing off into what is unknown and uncertain. This has led to a debate of traditionalism versus neo forms of thinking. This debate has existed for as long as there have been opposing viewpoints on just about anything, and has divided generations of people from one another to create distinct “eras”. Even relating philosophers such as Camus with Dostoyevsky is a difficult, because they are separated by a period of about 40 or 50 years.…show more content… In the second chapter of the story, the grandmother is talking to Nastenka, the retorting granddaughter, when the grandmother talks about the new lodger for the two of them. When given a description of this man, the grandmother replies “Why a paltry lodger like this, and he must be pleasant looking too; it was very different in the old days!” To this, the granddaughter replies “Grandmother was always regretting the old days -- she was younger in old days -- it was always the old days!”. This makes a reader reminisce to times where one might talk about how wonderful and glorious the past used to be, following it up with a story about having to walk to school uphill both ways. This dichotomy between the good and bad builds up this conflict of if traditionalism is all that great at all, or if contemporary thought simply makes sense. In reality, the only people that are going to definitively know whether or not an era was good or not are the very people that lived through it. Yet this tends to cause an immense dilemma as people have either really good or bad experiences shrouding the objective facts that actually are pertinent to a decent study of
