Reflection Essay Profound Moment - 1637 Words

Carlos Benavides Professor Finn ENGW 1111 22 September 2016 Profound Moment It is dark. My eyes try to adjust to the sudden loss of light, my pupils dilating to their maximum size. I can’t see. Frantically I reach forward into the emptiness around me. I’m searching for something; what it is, is something I don’t even know. Is it familiarity? Is it light? Is it another just as lost as me? I ... am alone. In my panic I nearly miss it, something that was always there. Above me, a speck of light blinks into existence. It shines brightly against the sheet of black it is set upon. But its solitary life lasts for only a moment as the black sheet is poked with billions of holes. Before my eyes lies a magnificent show of light. I continue to stare as my once empty world is filled with pinpricks of brilliance. Suddenly a streak dances across the sky, a line cutting through night. As quickly as it appears, it vanishes, leaving only its faint impression. The sky is beautiful. It is a whisper†¦ falling effortles sly from my mouth. And of course that statement holds true. To explain my passion for space, you have to revert to childlike wonder. It isn’t just a love for the stars above, but also an endless awe for them. I am entranced by its many mysteries, by the lack of knowledge we have for it. I have never thought of a specific profound moment that I have had from my passion with astronomy and astrophysics because, frankly, it has always been profound. Past the ceiling of my room,Show MoreRelatedSpeech On Time Travel And Its Effect On The Places1542 Words   |  7 Pagesbecome one with our final experience. Due to prior knowledge, thoughts, and experiences in similar places, our primary focus is not on the current moment but on the many things related to it. Based on this, I theorize that being in a place allows humans to exist within multiple moments of time, giving us insight beyond our current positon. This essay will not consist of talk about time travel, but rather the explosi ve combination of our own wisdom and memories coupled with the natural mood of placesRead MoreThe Use of Literary Devices, Imagery, and Tone in Krapp’s Last Tape996 Words   |  4 PagesHe is essentially stuck in the past. The essay written below disputes the literary devices of imagery and tone in order to provide background and symbolism in the play. In Krapp’s Last Tape, the most important literary devices are imagery and tone because they provide human-like characteristics in the character. They also strive to portray one of the main themes of the play that is self-reflection and attraction towards past recollections. In this essay the use of these two literary conventionsRead MoreFreud and Jungs Father/Son Relationship835 Words   |  4 PagesFreud a signed copy of his published studies. Unknown to Jung, Freud had already purchased his own copy of the book after hearing how favorably his name figured into the writings. Six months later, Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zà ¼rich.(The Well-Documented Friendship of Carl Jung Sigmund Freud, 2014,p.1) When the two were finally able to meet in 1907 in Vienna, they sat and talked for thirteen hours straight.(Carr, J., 2012). From that day until 1909, theirRead MoreBlack Boy And The Grapes Of Wrath Analysis1728 Words   |  7 Pageshave a negative casting of religion, other writers feel the opposite. One writer is Kelly Crockett, who posits a positive reading of religion in The Grapes of Wrath. In her essay, she identifies a slew of biblical allusions, and argues that Steinbeck uses them to add depth to his narrative, which is visible through reflection and multiple readings. Moreover, two of her readings on biblical allusions, counter this paper’s readings: â€Å"Plainly, Steinbeck has made the Joads representative of the AmericanRead MoreCase Studies: Ethics in Journalism and Other Media1504 Words   |  6 Pagesï » ¿Part One Media Issue Essay When the editor of a large metropolitan newspaper finds out one of the papers journalists has been basically plagiarizing stories, making up facts that fit his thesis and fabricating sources, the editor must be quick to formulate a response and to notify the readers of the paper as to what happened and what the papers response was to the incident. What should be done in this instance, and why? First of all, a journalist is in a trusted position vis-à  -vis the communityRead More The Numerous Themes in Othello Essay1715 Words   |  7 PagesThe Numerous Themes in Othello  Ã‚        Ã‚   The Shakespearean tragedy Othello contains a number of themes; their relative importance and priority is debated by literary critics. In this essay let us examine the various themes and determine which are dominant and which subordinate.    A. C. Bradley, in his book of literary criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy, describes the theme of sexual jealousy in Othello:    But jealousy, and especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shameRead MoreSubject of Study and Importance of the Theory of Architecture.1428 Words   |  6 PagesDEFINITION, SCOPE OF STUDY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE. What is it thinking? Thinking is an activity we do naturally and spontaneously, each moment, every day, all human beings around the world during our stay ephemeral passing on this earth. The reality is something we can perceive with the senses, but the reality is something hidden that will not perceive the senses. To any reality we get a lot of questions: what, why, for whom is, by whom, etc.. We ask for things weRead More Symbolism in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Araby Essay1391 Words   |  6 PagesMisfit said, â€Å"if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,†(OConner 425). might be the way OConner felt about most of us alive, or how she felt that God must feel about us. The third, and final stage of the Grandmother is the moment of recovery. She finally sees The Misfit for who he really is, a person just like her. He is not someone who was made by his social class. He is a simple human being just like her. At this point she sees herself in relation to everyone else. She finallyRead MoreThe Iliad Or The Poem Of Force1472 Words   |  6 PagesIn her essay, The Iliad or The Poem of Force, Simone Weil argues, â€Å"The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad, is force,† (152). â€Å"Force† is defined as, â€Å"that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it/ into a thing,† (153). Weil perceives force as an active entity that is capable of profound, negative, influences on the lives it touches (153). For a hero, force replaces his rational sensibilities by an uncontrollable urge to slaughter his opponent in an animalistic fashion,Read MoreEssay about Down The Rabbit Hole1657 Words   |  7 PagesDown the Rabbit Hole Boys journey to becoming a man â€Å"One of the signs of passing youth, is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them† (Virginia Wolfe). In our culture, do we define the moment a boy becomes a man by his age? Is it by his size, stature or accomplishments? Does it happen the first time he makes love to a woman? Wikipedia defines coming of age as a young person’s transition from childhood to adulthood. I believe adulthood can be distinguished

An Analysis Of Esther And Plath s Life - 1947 Words

I. Genres A. Autobiographical novel and Autobiography Literary conventions common to autobiographical works are usually written in the first person, which is the way in which a person might tell their own story. In this case, Esther is telling her story, first in a series of flashbacks and then in the present tense. The awful way in which the protagonist, Esther, views the events around her and the gory descriptions she offers, seem to represent not only horrible events, but also the tortured mind of the writer. The fact that Esther is fixated on suicide and that suicide and death are constant topics in the novel are the most obvious reasons to see the work as autobiographical. There are specific events that happen to Esther in the novel that have been researched and have been determine to have happened to Plath in exactly the same manner or are very similar to events in Plath’s life. Esther and Plath both had fathers who died when they were young. Esther and Plath both won wri ting internships at a magazine in New York City. Esther and Plath both had Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Luke Ferretter, author of Sylvia Plath s Fiction: A Critical Study, argues that Esther’s description of her ECT is a way for Plath to tell her own story about the experience (21). Another validation of the autobiographical nature of The Bell Jar comes from an unexpected source in an unexpected way. Literary scholar Lois Ames offers a surprising insight into why many considerShow MoreRelatedThe Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath1211 Words   |  5 PagesSylvia Plath Research Paper Title The Bell Jar place[s] [the] turbulent months[of an adolescent’s life] in[to] mature perspective (Hall, 30). In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses parallelism, stream of consciousness, the motif of renewal and rebirth, symbolism of the boundary-driven entrapped mentally ill, and auto-biographical details to epitomize the mental downfall of protagonist, Esther Greenwood. 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Es ther experiences psychological distress whichRead More Weaknesses of Esther and Plath Exposed in Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar1174 Words   |  5 PagesWeaknesses of Esther and Plath Exposed in The Bell Jar   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The glass of which a bell jar is constructed is thick and suffocating, intending to preserve its ornamental contents but instead traps in it stale air.   The thickness of the bell jar glass prevents the prisoner from clearly seeing through distortion.   Sylvia Plath writes with extreme conviction, as The Bell Jar is essentially her autobiography.   The fitting title symbolizes not only her suffocation and mental illness, but also theRead MoreThe Bell Jar : Literary Analysis2261 Words   |  10 PagesThe Bell Jar: Literary Analysis With Author Biography Sylvia Plath is a renowned poet and author. She fantasied the world with her powerful writings. Beloved to the world, she truly changed women s status. She wrote distinctively from her own life experiences. This is cleared showed in her book, The Bell Jar. This book offers a theme of rebirth and a theme of feminism. The 27th of October in 1932, Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was a college professorRead MoreThe Bell Jar2368 Words   |  10 PagesResearch Paper: The Bell Jar, By: Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a work of fiction that spans a six month time period in the life of the protagonist and narrator, Esther Greenwood. The novel tells of Esther’s battle against her oppressive surroundings and her ever building madness, this is the central conflict throughout the narrative. After coming home from a month in New York as a guest editor for a magazine, Esther begins to have trouble with everyday activities such as reading,Read MoreThe Characters of Women in The Handmaids Tale and The Bell Jar1504 Words   |  7 Pagesmetaphors is ironical and inspiring, Plaths touching use of meaningful motifs and descriptive imagery suits its admiration as one of the best autobiographical fiction. nbsp; The Bell Jar penned by Sylvia Plath, is a tragic tale of Esther Greenwood, her depressing experiences of life and social relationship and her eventual mental breakdown resulting with her attempts of committing suicide. On the other hand, Margaret Atwoods award winning novel The Handmaids Tale depicts the hauntingRead MoreThe Nature of Reality Essay2142 Words   |  9 PagesJar by Sylvia Plath is an example of one of the many famous works that chronicle paradigm-shifting psychological journeys. Plath’s main character, Esther Greenwood, begins the book by facing her disenchantment with the cosmopolitan life that she once admired. After such disconcertion, Esther falls into a deep depression, eventually attempting suicide. She faces her physical and mental symptoms while being kept in a mental institution. Esther eventually comes to terms with her life, recovers fromRead MoreLiterary Criticism : The Free Encyclopedia 7351 Words   |  30 Pagesnovel is sometimes used inter changeably with Bildungsroman, but its use is usually wider and less technical. The birth of the Bildungsroman is normally dated to the publication of Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1795–96,[8] or, sometimes, to Christoph Martin Wieland s Geschichte des Agathon of 1767.[9] Although the Bildungsroman arose in Germany, it has had extensive influence first in Europe and later throughout the world. Thomas Carlyle translated Goethe’s novel

My First Trip to Disney World Free Essays

My first trip to Disney World My first trip to Disney World was really great. Disney World is in Orlando, Florida which is over 900 miles away from Columbia. We drove 15 hours to get there but we broke the trip up into two days. We will write a custom essay sample on My First Trip to Disney World or any similar topic only for you Order Now Although my grandfather and grandmother were tired when we got there, my sister Jazzy and my cousin Mychael were ready to go to Disneyworld. My grandfather took us straight to the resort and checked us in. Our suite was really nice. It was big with a big TV in the living room and a TV in each bedroom. My grandmother liked it because it had a washer and dryer by the kitchen. She washes clothes all the time. Then, my grandmother told us we would not be going to Disney World until tomorrow. They were tired from all of that driving but I was not tired at all. We went out to get groceries and some things my grandmother needed because we were staying for a week. While we were shopping, we ate dinner at a Perkins restaurant near our resort. My grandparents had been to Orlando and Disney World a lot so they knew just where to go shopping. The next morning, our cousin Virgil came over and we all went to Disney World. We call our cousin Virgil â€Å"Veasey†. Veasey works at Disney World so we did not have to pay to get in. Veasey took us to Epcot Center where I saw this huge silver ball. Veasey left us to go to work and we went into the ball. It was a ride that taught us about the history of technology. They had robots that looked like people and animals dressed up like people from the time each scene was talking about. We rode in cars like the kind on a roller coaster and a man told us about each scene when we got there. It was a great ride but it smelled like a cave and was smoky some of the time. After we left the ball, we went into a nice building where they had games and a really cool place that had sodas from all over the world. Some of the sodas were good but some were awful so I threw the awful ones away. It was hot outside so I did not want to leave the soda place but my grandparents wanted to walk around the â€Å"Showcase of Nations† which goes around a big lake. We walked around the lake and had lunch at the American building. It looks like Independence Hall in Philadelphia but it looked bigger to me. We ate hamburgers, fries and soda. At least this soda tasted better than the ones we sampled. After we ate lunch, we rode the monorail and a ferry to the Magic Kingdom. There we rode a lot of rides and walked around. I liked the â€Å"Small World† ride and ET. That evening, we saw fireworks at Cinderella’s castle. The fireworks show started with Tinkerbell flew across the sky on a rope. That was so great. After the fireworks, we went back to the resort. I was tired but excited for tomorrow. We were going to Universal Studios. But my fist time at Disney World was even better than I expected. How to cite My First Trip to Disney World, Papers

Influence of Gandhism on Mulk Raj Anands Untouchable free essay sample

Anand was arguably the greatest exponent of Indian writing in English, whose literary output was infused with a political commitment that conveyed the lives of India’s poor in a realistic and sympathetic manner. He had been involved in India’s freedom movement, been impressed by Marx’s letters on India and his general political framework and had been a co-founder of India’s greatest literary movement in the 1930s. Born into a family of metal workers with an army background in Peshawar, he witnessed the bloody reality of colonial rule with the Jaillinwalla massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Like most Indians of his generation he threw himself into Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. to avoid the petty bourgeois ambitions of his soldier father, that Anand came to study at University College London in the autumn of 1925. Unlike most Indian students at the time he had to work in Indian restaurants and later for a publishing firm to earn his keep as his family were not in a position to fully finance his studies or maintenance. But he also became part of the literary crowd known as the ‘Bloomsbury group’. Here he met writers such as T S Eliot, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E M Forster and John Strachey among many others. This literary elite both impressed him and left him feeling quite perplexed and uncomfortable. London at that time was the centre of the English-speaking intellectual world and Anand had hoped to meet with like-minded individuals who shared his anti-colonial liberal views. To his surprise he discovered that, according to Eliot, Gandhi was an ‘anarchist’ and that Indians should concentrate on cultural aspects of their society and leave the politics of governance to the British! Many of these writers had not visited India and so their impressions were formed by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which to Anand was typical of colonial fantasies of India. It was partly in response to these perceptions that he wanted to write. 2 As an Indian student in London, Anand found himself popular with the literary set and, fortunately for him, not all writers were as parochial as Eliot. He soon found himself drawn to the Woolfs and, more importantly, E M Forster. Anand held A Passage to India to be the best fictional writing on his homeland, as this went beyond the orientalist conceptions of the ‘natives’ and attempted to depict the complex, often contradictory and mostly confrontational impact of colonial rule in India. He had wanted to write about the ordinary, the mundane, everyday life experiences of Indians who were not kings and gods. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man impressed Anand greatly as it was a new literature infused with Irish nationalism. In 1927 Anand went to Ireland and enjoyed the writings of Yeats because his works represented the lives of ordinary people in villages and towns. This was to be his model as he set about writing his first novel, Untouchable, published in 1935. It is a story based on the life of the most downtrodden, despised and oppressed section of Indian society, the outcastes – those at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. This story is based on a single day in the life of Bakha, a latrine cleaner and sweeper boy. We follow him round on his daily chores cleaning up the shit of the rich and powerful, who despise him because of strict social rules governing ideas of purity and pollution. When he walks down the streets he has to signal an alarm with his voice as he approaches so that the ‘pure’ are forewarned to avoid even allowing his shadow to be cast upon them. On one occasion he does ‘pollute’ a caste Hindu and is chased, abused and attacked all day long for this defilement. Anand was born into the kshatriya warrior caste, which is placed one below the top caste of the Brahmins priests. He had always befriended and played with the children of sweepers and as a child he had been shocked and disgusted by the suicide of a relative who had been disowned by his family for daring to share her food with a Muslim, for this too was regarded as pollution. Anand had always been disgusted with and opposed religious sectarianism, communalism and caste society. His soldier father had been involved with a Hindu reform movement, Arya Samaj. But Anand kept his distance, for despite its opposition to child marriage and the prohibition of widow remarriage, the movement was also quite evangelical in its attempts to ‘re-convert’ Muslims to the ‘true faith’. To Anand it harboured deep anti-Muslim sentiments with which he would have no truck. With the publication of Untouchable, Anand had firmly associated himself with that brand of writers who saw ‘political, social and human causes as genuine impulses for the novel and poetry’. 3 For Anand literature should be an interpretation of the truth of people’s lives. It should be written from felt experience and not books. It was for this reason that he returned to India briefly in 1929. Being influenced by Gandhi, he came to his ashram in Ahmedabad, where he showed Gandhi drafts of his novel. Gandhi was extremely critical because he claimed there was too much of the ‘Bloomsbury’ feel to it, on which he was probably right. While in Ahmedabad Anand lived like a disciple and did his share of cleaning the toilets – an act seen as defilement for a caste Hindu. In this period Anand revised his book considerably and when Forster read it his retort to those who complained about the ‘dirt’ in the novel, was that â€Å"the book seems to me indescribably clean†¦it has gone straight to the heart of its subject and purified it†. Though this is his best known and most widely read novel, it was no easy job getting it published in the 1930s. Some 19 publishers had rejected this story for ‘its dirt’. In despair Anand was on the brink of giving up when the twentieth publisher accepted the novel on the basis that E M Forster had agreed to write the preface. Anand praised Forster for his support as it was not only unusual for an India n writer to have his central character be a latrine cleaner; many European writers would not touch a subject like this either. Anand displays compassion for the plight of untouchables but never sentimentality. In many ways the novel represented his thinking beyond the limits of Gandhi’s idea of untouchables as harijans – children of god. For Anand this is far too patronising and it is for this reason that his fictionalised account depicts a debate between a Gandhi-type figure espousing the oneness of humanity and simple living on the land and a poet who poses a modern solution to the problems of untouchability flushing toilets! Anand’s second novel also illustrated his compassion and concerns for the poor of India. In Coolie he portrays the life of young Munoo, kshatriya by caste but a peasant boy who travels from his mountainous village through north India and eventually finds himself in Bombay. He is an orphan and so is forced to take whatever work he can in order to survive. He works as a servant, in a mine, a factory and as a coolie – black men who empty their bowels in the fields. In each of these situations Munoo is subjected to harassment, beatings and financial exploitation at the hands of employers, moneylenders, and his so called betters. But the story is also about the development of a young boy who begins to learn about the world around him and attempt to make some sense of it. This novel was written in 1936 and has a fictionalised account of a Bombay riot, which clearly represented Anand’s thoughts on those agents who fuelled communalism in their desperate attempts to keep the country divided, but also to keep the poor and workers in their place. So the riot as witnessed by Munoo is deliberately engineered to break a potential strike through the use of communalised tensions between Hindus and Muslims. In some ways the failure of progressive and left forces to counter rising communal tensions left Anand feeling that perhaps partition could not be avoided after the growth of the Muslim League and the inability of Nehru to counter the right wing elements within Congress. 6 While in London Anand was conscious not only of colonial racist stereotypes of Indians that were prevalent among some British intellectuals but also the contempt in which they held British workers. A year after he arrived in London the 1926 General Strike took place, and was to have a profound effect upon him. His natural sympathies were with the strikers and their supporters for he found himself comparing the position of the English worker with that of Indians under colonial rule and found ‘British democracy’ seriously lacking. He believed there to be ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’. 7 His outrage at the way the state treated the strikers was only outstripped by his astonishment at the attitudes of the majority of his fellow students who were happy to scab and volunteer to help run trains, trams and tubes. Anand saw this as treachery and he quickly associated himself with a small group of students who ‘refused to be bullied by the others’. For his pains he was attacked in Gower Street by fellow students. 8 He had no regrets, stating that ‘in life there are some things worth getting beaten up for’. 9 London was home to many students from India throughout the 1930s and 1940s and Anand soon found himself gravitating towards the group of writers who would meet in people’s living rooms to recite poems and short stories, and above all to discuss the struggle in India and the international crisis with the forward march of fascism in Europe. Anand was invited to represent India on the platform at the World Congress of Writers against Fascism in Madrid in 1935. Anand was acutely aware of the threat fascism represented for writers in Europe and the mortal danger it held for humanity. After seeing the way writers and intellectuals in Europe were organising, on his return to London, along with the writer Sajjad Zaheer, an Indian Communist, he set up the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) in 1935. He penned the first draft of their manifesto which with minor adjustments was adopted at the first conference of the association in Lucknow in April 1936. This was a pan-Indian organisation that represented all the major linguistic regions of India and was staunchly secular in outlook and politically committed to the project of an independent united India with social justice and equality. At its height it probably had over 30,000 members writing literature in all the Indian vernaculars. That this literary association was also a social and political movement closely aligned to the Communist Party of India and influenced by Nehruvian nationalism is in no small way to be credited to Anand. Though he never joined the Communist Party, claiming the party would never have been able to tolerate him, he was very much a ‘fellow traveller’, aligning himself with the best elements of the left tradition in India. Anand’s anti-fascist commitment led him to travel to Spain in 1937 to fight with the Republicans in the civil war. He felt it was his duty to show physical support because he was in Europe. He returned to India briefly in 1938 to address the second AIPWA in Calcutta, where he spoke about his experiences in Spain and insisted that writers use their craft as a means of exposing injustice and exploitation. While in Spain he drafted another novel, Across the Blackwaters. This is the middle novel of a trilogy published in 1939. It is based on the experiences of Indian sepoys who are transported to Europe to fight in the First World War. The central character is Lalu, a young Hindu boy who has already broken with strict practices of Hindus by eating at Muslim shops while at home. In Europe we see how the soldiers are treated by their English masters within the army, but Anand also depicts the strict hierarchies among the Indians themselves in terms of caste, class and rank. Lalu not only flouts Indian conventions but in having an on-off flirtation with a French girl he challenges colonial morality under the very noses of the English officers. The novel is full of compassion and humanity as well as humour for the thousands of mostly peasants from the Punjab who died in the trenches of France and Flanders. 10 The roots of this story are in Anand’s childhood. As a boy he had seen hundreds of men go off to Europe from his town and surrounding villages but only a handful returned. This novel achieved such critical acclaim that in 1998 the British Council adapted it as a play to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the end of the First World War. Anand was pivotal to internationalising the experience of Indian writers to the outside world and he helped to bring an international dimension to the progressive writers’ movement in India. He is brilliant at satirising the bigotries and orthodoxies of his times, but his novels also celebrate the spirit of human rebellion which embodies all his central characters. Today Salman Rushdie is credited with popularising Indian writing in English. But 50 years earlier Anand had pioneered the writing of Indian literature which was accessible to the English-speaking world. And unlike Rushdie his works were inspired and informed by the lives of real people in unglamorous situations, warts and all. In addition his writings demonstrate a keen desire for political change and social transformation that remained with him throughout his life. The best tribute that readers of this journal could pay Mulk Raj Anand would be to read his novels and be inspired by the dedication and commitment he had.