The Swallow Man

“You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day,”91:5.

In the story a young boy decides to go hunting in the night and goes through a revelation as he witnesses an everyday act of the battle between light and darkness as the sun rises. Although set in a different place and time, both authors express a common universal theme: life is a constant battle between light and darkness in our everyday lives. This theme can be seen through a compare and contrast of powerful symbols, transforming settings and misguided characters.

Seeing an increase in light pollution and a decrease in natural darkness, Paul Bogard in his essay “Let there be Darkness” uses logic to persuade the reader to preserve darkness. Opening the essay with a personal experience from the past, he convinces the reader of the danger of light pollution. The author uses statistics, pathos, and science to support his thesis.

Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”

Often times we find ourselves thinking about the past only to try to force the memories away and return to our current delusion. We can never erase the past, but if the past is who we are, then should we just welcome pain back into our lives? Embarrassment, guilt, and pride betray us as we choose to bury our darkest memories in our head and look to a positive future without ever having to readdress them and acknowledge that they had ever happened in the first place. Thinking back now my weakest moment caught me by complete surprise.

In Holly Wren Spaulding’s essay, “In Defense of Darkness,” her main claim is that we have fallen away from darkness and immersed ourselves in a society of lightness. Furthermore, she claims this has lead humans to lose touch with basic human emotion as well as the sensual and spiritual experience true darkness has to offer. Spaulding makes this claim evident through exceptional use of personal testimony and copious appeals to value.

“And it hits me, not then, but today, thirty years later. Thirty years too late”(91). Those are the words of Jessamyn Hope when speaking about her experience with regret regarding her life’s decisions, the major theme for her essay. Her essay tells the story about how she failed to overcome two life challenges, one having a direct physical impact and the other having a delayed impact. The essay “The Reverse Dive” by Jessamyn Hope is a narrative essay looking to persuade its reader through the use of analogy, empirical evidence, and appeal to emotion that one should face their challenges while they can to avoid regrets.

In this quote, the narrator is showing that with the light comes knowledge of the world for the child. The light is bleak and not always encouraging. When the child exposes himself to the world he loses part of his innocence and childhood. Therefore, the child may wish to remain in the darkness. The darkness in this specific excerpt is personified as a slow and gentle relief. The narrator attempts to convey the concept that darkness, which is reality, means nothing without light to illuminate it because the light makes one aware of the dark, and therefore comprehend reality.

This quote shows the narrator’s struggle to be seen and his regret that he didn’t realize it sooner. He had lived all these years, repeating the same old mistakes. Being used and lied to, to help the people in power become even more powerful. They preyed on his innocence and longing for attention. Yet

The most confident people are those to have known failure and misfortune. It is evident that adversity elicits our talents that successful situations could not elicit. However, overcoming obstacles can also elicit our character flaws. Through my study of the memoirs Night and The Glass Castle as well as personal observation, I agree with Horace in that adversity elicits character talents but adversity can also extract our character faults.

For example, Don’t take what you have for granted. Additionally, you never know what you had until it’s gone. One last example is, don’t blame yourself, for things that you didn’t cause. The narrator was saying the following quote because, he found Doodle dead after he ran away from him. “I screamed above the pounding storm and threw my body to the earth above his.”

From books and TV shows to movies and plays, the contrast between light and dark is found everywhere. Typically, light indicates something good while the dark is something to be feared and is bad. For example, most people have this notion that Heaven, which is an unquestionably excellent place, is all light while Hell, which is atrocious, is completely dark. Even little kids assume something bad is going to happen in the dark, but is they have a night light then everything will be okay. This premise carries over into literature, especially Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Human beings make mistakes; sometimes they learn from their first mistake, sometimes they learn after

In the solitude of pitch-black infinite space, “men forgot their passions”-all values were lost, hopes and goals were put on hold, and only darkness existed. A world living in darkness was forced to displace its

Dark black surroundings around me. Blindness is a natural occurrence after the sun descends. Senses are heightened which sparks the imagination to soar. A moment of time when things of legend becomes a reality and self-doubt are unveiled. In the darkness the line between fact and fiction blur. Sounds, fears, and intuition are the elements that rule when light does not exist.