teaching a stone to talk

Annie Dillard’s “This is the Life”, an addition to the publication of “A Journal of Art and Religion”, Dillard persuades the readers to ponder the purpose of their lives. Dillard provokes self-contemplation through asking and repeating rhetorical questions and phrases, illusions that support her point, and an inspirational didactic tone.

Our identity is inimitable, yet ironically it is affected by society and enigmatic forces that define our external relationships. This inextricable link between identity and social environment not only shape our identity, but gives us a sense of purpose, however when we fail to establish our sense of congruity with society through metaphysical acceptance, as a result of social isolation we can feel an abyss within our lives often forcing us to look into our inner self, as exemplified in Gwen Harwood’s poetry, especially her poems “At Mornington” and “Mother Who Gave Me Life”. These also reflect and force us to explore the impact time has on people and how this can inevitably lead to a reassessment of one’s life.

All good things must come to an end. A common phrase we have become accustomed to hearing, and a phrase that parallels the meaning of Annie Dillard’s “The Chase”, an excerpt from her autobiography “An American Childhood.” In “The Chase” (1987), Annie Dillard recounts how childhood, no matter how enjoyable, will come to a close. Dillard conveys this by carefully detailing her childhood experience as a tomboy and that “nothing girls did could not compare” (1). Her experience during “the chase” symbolized an end of Dillard's childhood and wishing for “the glory to last forever” (19). The author recounts her story of “the chase” in order to express exuberance and love for childhood compared to the fact of mandatory growing old. The author addresses the audience in this narrative chapter of “An American Childhood” to express how short childhood is is this passing craze of life. The author uses expertly composed imagery, parallelism, diction and tone to create the impactful story in a chapter of her autobiography.

Sitting in the dark at night, we gaze up at the night sky, in awe and wonder. Through the sacrifice of our certainty, confidence, knowledge—civilization in a manner even—we are able to see the stars, planets, heavens, something beautiful we would never see without them. It is only by willing sacrifice, forfeiture, or things we hold dear that we are able to realize something truly beautiful, and "Transfiguration," by Annie Dillard argues thus. In "Transfiguration" Annie Dillard utilizes analogy to convince the reader to become writers, even though it involves a life of sacrifice.

Emily Dickinson was an exceptional writer through the mid-late 1800’s. She never published any of her writings and it wasn’t until after her death that they were even discovered. The complexity of understanding her poems is made prevalent because of the fact that she, the author, cannot expound on what her writing meant. This causes others to have to speculate and decide for themselves the meaning of any of her poems. There are several ways that people can interpret Emily Dickinson’s poems; readers often give their opinion on which of her poems present human understanding as something boundless and unlimited or something small and limited, and people always speculate Dickinson’s view of the individual self.

In the novel “Voices in Time”, the author Hugh Mclennan primarily focuses on the ways in which two characters, Timothy Wellfleet and Conrad Dehmel, deal with their loved ones and extremely perplexing situations. Furthermore Mclennan, explores how both characters contain a number of similar traits yet are abundantly different. This is demonstrated through Timothy and Conrad’s congruous childhoods as well as their contrasting ways of handling important relationships in times of apprehensiveness.

Memoirs, and writing in general, reveal a truth about the author. Oftentimes, said truth is revealed intentionally. Universal truths such as struggle, endurance, and agony help authors influence their audiences. These truths cause the readers to become cognizant of and appreciate the authors. It is a writer’s duty to write from the heart—to write about the good and bad sides of a story. Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood fails to use universal truths and instead presents a very superficial presentation of its author’s life. J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis display the unconventional upbringing of Vance in order to give the audience a better understanding of the writer. Pure honesty

It is significant that in Whitman's case moments of suspended reality do not open up a new dimension of space and time experience as in Emily Dickinson's poetry, but serve as stepping stones for the narrative-self or life force, ready to “troop forth, once more,” replenished and eager to resume the momentarily interrupted (Whitman, Leaves of Grass). In Emily Dickinson's poetry, the crucial transition point is found in the shifting of time periods such as the course of the sun at noon, the solstice in June, and even more generally, the conversion from being into non-being (or vice versa) as experienced in instances like spring.

“My great-uncle! I could tell them all how I had held those reins… But everyone laughed at the hunched old man… I did not tell them.” This quote by Lew Gardner, a New Jersey poet, expresses the importance of words and how they need to be spoken for others to see into different pasts and experiences. While delving into the stereotypical school day, discussion should include the ideas of “windows” and “mirrors” in order to peek into the reality of current events, historical topics and disagreements, and personal experiences.

After reading the current article “Where the confederacy is rising again” I have noted a very intentional flaw that I believe should be addressed. After reading the article, I believe it seems to be very one sided to lean towards the fact that Jim Toungate is invalid for believing in the same views as his ancestors. Although I do one hundred percent disagree with Toungate’s views regarding the central issue of the Civil War, I believe the article itself was merely based on interviewing people that opposed Toungate’s views, clearly making Toungate the underdog of the situation, which overall made his beliefs undermined.

The men go to work, and by mid day, their collars wilt. Then, they return home, eat dinner, and go to bed. The women bathe before noon, and by nightfall, are drifting away into the night. The days in this small, desolate town seem to drag on into eternity, yet the day is a meager 24 hours. If the kids wanted to play they would often reenact popular motion pictures, which they learned from Dill, because in such a small town, there were rarely picture shows.

At a future time, the woman contemplates whether to throw in “the ordinary instant,” yet scraps the idea, making a claim on how such associated words might be superfluous (Didion). The woman meditates upon the ways wherein feelings on what’s normal precede day-to-day-living-journey-altering tragic events. For instance, the woman cites reports on the calm existent leading up to Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attacks. The woman recalls

Annie Dillard opens Pilgrim at Tinker Creek mysteriously, hinting at an unnamed presence. She toys with the longstanding epic images of battlefields and oracles, injecting an air of holiness and awe into the otherwise ordinary. In language more poetic than prosaic, she sings the beautiful into the mundane. She deifies common and trivial findings. She extracts the most high language from all the possible permutations of words to elevate and exalt the normal. Under her pen, her literary devices and her metaphors, a backyard stream becomes a shrine. Writing a prayer, Dillard becomes an instrument through which a ubiquitous spirit reveals itself. Yet in other cases, she latches on to an image

Like when she asks, “when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it (152). Alternatively, here she explains loss; “Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it” (194). Her polished portrayal of these ideas is exemplified here as she describes Ruth’s feelings of invisibility. “I often seemed invisible… made no impact on the world… was privileged to watch it unawares” (106), Or how some people live their lives, not by the clock, the sun, or the calendar, but from event to event. “Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time”

Authors all write in different ways. They all have different minds and ideas. Even though authors think differently, they still are alike in a weird way. They also don’t think alike and they all have their different ways of writing their thoughts. While reading all 4 different essays, I’ve learned a lot about trying to understand how other people think. All four essays have something in common, and I believe that “ignorance” is one of the biggest common factors in all of the stories. They may all have a different way in showing ignorance because every essay has a different story line. It was easiest to spot out ignorance in Maya Angelou’s essay “Graduation,” rather than in Welty’s essay “Listening.”