A Very Warm Mountain

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A Very Warm Mountain

Have you ever thought of something having human like emotions such as trees or animals? In the essay “A Very Warm Mountain,” Ursula K. Le Guin offers a whole new angle to look at mountains. Through the use of examples and detailed description Le Guin creates a new perspective on mountains giving then human like qualities.

The author discusses the reactions that the person had to the eruption. She writes down journal entrees detailing the explosion day to day and uses some of the entrees in the essay. The author uses entrees as throughout the essay in an effort to give a more realistic view. The more real it seems the easier it is to convince you of her train of thought. She thinks that a mountain should be seen as a person with a personality. In giving examples of the how the mountain has characteristics of emotion. The author is trying to win you over by example after example of how the mountain could be looked at as having the qualities giving in the examples. “She [the volcano] put on hats of cloud and took them off again, and tried a different shape, and sent them all skimming off across the sky”(p.178). It is in this last statement the author puts the mountain in a view of being able to put on cloths. In doing that the mountain could be looked at in some kind of humanistic way.

The author’s thesis is the idea that a mountain can be looked at as having emotions and feelings of its surroundings. The author uses many ways of proving this theory. “She [the volcano] lay and watched her forests being cut and her elk being hunted… it was time to teach the White Man’s Children a lesson”(p.175). In the quote the author makes the volcano look to have some kind of way of dealing with the problem t...

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...ted her life and how she did things. Relating the mountain to a human was the most logical way to say it. The author was able to see many ways that the mountain could have be compared to a person. In saying that the mountain really did start reacting to something that might never be explained to us. The only reassurance we get from some expert is to say that it could happen again or never happen again we can not tell, till it is about to happen. The author is able to relax about what happened with the answer she has given to herself and the reader. She is merely trying to help you see that a mountain can be looked at as a person and has characteristics of a person.

Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. A Very Warm Mountain. In J. Ackerman, (Ed.), A Sense of Place: Physical, Natural, and Cultural Environment (pp.175-180) New York, NY: Forbes Custom Publishing.

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