Two forlorn leaves cling to the highest branch of a great oak as winter approaches. Nearly all of the others have fallen, and the second leaf wonders if “we know anything about ourselves when we're down there” (Salten 105). Both know that their time on the branch grows short. The first comforts its friend with recollections of warm summer breezes and the promise that many leaves will come after them, and then, still more. The first leaf is troubled itself now, and gently tells her friend to say no more for a while. After several hours of silence, a cold wind gusts, and the second leaf is torn from the branch, just as she began to speak, leaving the first alone in the cold and dark, with no one to comfort or be comforted by (Salten 105-110). This brief chapter in Salten’s novel Bambi foreshadows the many deaths to come and amplifies their meaning, while Disney’s animators realized they couldn’t render the haunting sub-story effectively and wisely hewed close to the broader strokes of the overall plot, which can be delivered successfully through both mediums. It’s not enough to tell a coherent story full of finely nuanced truths. The story has to travel through an effective medium, or no one will care, and if no one cares, no one will understand. The best mediums deliver structures of truth with maximum visceral impact, so that we not only grasp the revealed truth but fully internalize it. Subject to every whim of wind and weather, fragile leaves face their first and final fall after a single summer. Faceless, utterly inanimate and incapable of any sort of outward action yet clearly alive, the leaves themselves are a medium that embodies helplessness, aloneness, and individual insignificance. It’s also why their magic works on a p... ... middle of paper ... ...nched this October, but research in general and neuroscience in particular remains underfunded. Ed Catmull completed his graduate work in the twilight of grand research projects in the US. Since the mid-70s our scientists must spend much of their time worrying about their next grant and have little creative license, as projects tend to be short term, highly specific and don’t actually provide the human scientist with much to live on. The ARPA projects that began in 1958 aren’t just why we have Pixar, but also created both the first modern computer and ARPAnet, grandfather to the Internet. We do still have ARPA, now known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), but we are no longer creating a safe place for fragile creativity to take form. If we invested in putting smart people together again, they might create nothing less than a more interesting mind.
The big tree loomed bigger and closer, and as they bore down on it he thought: ‘It’s waiting for us, it seems to know.’ But suddenly his wife’s face, with its monstrous lineaments, thrust itself between him and his goal, and he made an instinctive movement to brush it aside. The sled swerved in response, but he righted it again and drove down on the black projecting mass. There was a last instant when the air shot past him like millions of fiery wires, and then elm…’Oh, Matt, I thought we’d fetched it,’ he moaned; and far off, up the hill, he heard the sorrel whinny and thought: ‘I ought to be getting him his feed… (Wharton,
In Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Frost’s Assonance “He gives his harness bells a shake,To ask if there is some mistake.The only other sound’s the sweep” describe the woods.
The sky is the color of cold stones as I cautiously make my way down the trunk of dying oak. The few remaining leaves of the tree rustle as a light autumn morning breeze passes through them. One of them is blown free, making a soft snapping sound as it breaks away from its anchored brothers and begins to fall to the ground below. It twists and turns as it goes and I watch it in momentary curiosity. I have seen this often before. It is still mostly green, only slightly browning at the edges. It makes a show of falling, as though it knows it has an audience. It spins and dances, carried across an unseen stage by the breeze. The breeze fades and dies and the leaf follows shooting down quickly towards the earth like a predatory birding diving down onto its prey. It makes no sound as it lands and lies atop its brethren who had performed the dance before it. Its faded green shows brightly against the decaying browns and violets. I twitch my nose as my interest passes then continue my sprint down the trunk of the tree. The life of a squirrel in autumn precious and dangerous.
The one good thing in my life that I felt would be my bridge and my long life companion whose branches would intertwine with mine. All the winter tree’s trust was put into this so called “willow tree”, all his heart and soul, building his roots into the soil next to me. Many, many times the winter tree had expressed stories of the harsh storms he had to endure and I listened and all I could think was “I am a willow and I will nurture you back to health and we will be one”. Until the day came that the winter tree had found out some hidden burdens of my past buried deep inside the soil I rested my roots in. Everything changed from that moment because, the winter tree who was transforming into a maple tree began to writher slowly and painfully with questions left unanswered. Further along into this journey, the winter tree had found some, if not many contradicting stories that the willow had told regarding those
The silhouettes of blossoms are menacing shadows against the luminous falls. I tiptoe further down the twisting vine of pale red blooms emerging, unfurling their rosy petals to the fluorescent streaks of lightening that extend their crooked arms through the sky and down into the swamp’s abyss. The brisk breeze carries scents of moss and mist. The magnificent falls tower above my head, breaking through the clouds, stretching up into space, like a daylily reaching up to swallow the sun. Water surges to the ground, crashing, the sodden earth crumbling away in its presence. An overwhelming sound of water rushing, as though it is a massive radio set malfunctioning, penetrates my ears. I slink through the canopy of vines, slithering, watching intensely,
Pushing aside the veil, a serene, dainty clearing holding a plaintive tree looms ahead. Encompassing the woodland surrounding it, crisp, sun-kissed air and numerous vivid, colorful trees brought the feeling of autumn. Its amber, leafy arms arch, extending upward, begging for help in a world cold to its desperation. The vermilion crown clasped varied carmine berries within its grasp, some decaying others fresh and fuzzy. Wind glides through the clearing, causing the berries to quiver; they stumble towards the ground, disheartened, and unwilling to continue any longer. The tree feels the same as the berries. Branches intermingle fabricating an unyielding shelter to the candid animals. The trunk, withered and wistful, arches with the pressure
While you may have stood reverently in the midst of towering redwood trees, gazed in awe at the magnificence of a statuesque mountain, or happened upon a crystal clear alpine lake, there is no experience quite so ethereal as a lotus field at dawn. Freshly killed rabbits cooking on ceramic hibachis send tendrils of smoke curling upward from the fire, as though the animals’ spirits are reaching for each other under the low haze that presses down across the darkness of the water. Whispers, and the gentle stirring of the water against the raised stone path, signal the arrival of those tending the ponds of tall leafy plants, as if they were ghosts moving toward the light- following in the footsteps of generations gone before.
“Lost Brother” by Stanley Moss is a poem dedicated to a fallen brethren, an ancient tree that had lived a long, noble life. As bizarre as it may seem to mourn a felled tree, the speaker wants the reader to share in his sorrow through extended metaphor and personification to prove that the tree was full of humanity undeserving of its untimely fate and whose life should serve as an example to others.
There is an old saying that goes: A picture is worth a thousand words. This statement could not be more correct; especially in the case of a book like Art Spiegalman’s, Maus. In his books Spiegalman shares his father’s experiences in surviving the holocaust. Rather than taking the conventional route, Spiegalman chooses the medium of “graphic novels” to tell his father’s story, and by doing so Spiegalman is able to share his father’s story in a way far superior to that of plain old text. He is able to do this by presenting dimensions of time and space in a way that cannot be reproduced through text. Not only this, he also gives the reader perspectives and landscapes that would take far too long to explain through text, but only a couple seconds to comprehend through a picture. The human mind is able to recognize the meaning of a visual much faster than through text because there is no ambiguity, and more room for symbolism both in the literal sense through the illustrations as well as through the dialogue of the characters. By using a comic to present his father’s story, Spiegalman can do far more justice to it, than text would ever be able to do.
“We pluck and marvel for sheer joy. And the ones still green, sighing, leave upon the boughs…” (14-16). This emphasis on nature reflects the respect and connection to the natural world the culture was trying to convey in their poetry. The colorful and illustrative descriptions of the physical world are indicative of the mindset and focus of these poems. Namely the fact that they were concerned with the world around us and the reality we experience as opposed to that of abstract concept of god or the supernatural as seen in other historical texts. This focus on nature is important because it sets the context in which the major theme of loss and separation originate from. In this poem the poet chooses to emphasize the passing of time in the choice of comparing the two seasons. Spring, in which life begins a new, and fall, in which the leaves begin to fall off and die. The poem reads “And the ones still green, sighing, leave upon the boughs- Those are the ones I hate to lose. For me, it is the autumn hills” (15-18). This juxtaposition of these two
autumn ‘oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour’ and then to
On a stifling summer night in Connecticut, I found myself attempting to bring life to wilted roses. Restoring grace with florid colors and fluttering brushstrokes, I crafted my own narrative from crumpled leaves and somber petals. Color soaked into the fibers of my canvas and gave it a heartbeat, pulsating in time with the movements of my right hand.
Frozen silence of a winter's dawn, matted brown pine needles peaking out of a powdery white carpet frosted trees sagging from the weight of last night's snowfall. Large flakes fell from heaven as if the angels were having a pillow fight and the goose down fell to our humble homes. Though beautiful the snow was cold and sharp as it bit at our fingers and the wind kissed the people's cheeks in the stunning forest. Like a wolf the snow bit at our fingers with its sharp icy teeth. How rare it is for the first time for such a still place to be when we ourselves are so busy in our minds that there is somewhere which can only listen. The whip slapped the huskies, pulling the sleds into motion. They stopped in the forest for rest by a homeless
The pliable, malleable quality of the birch tree captures the poet's attention and kicks off his meditation. Perhaps young boys don't bend birches down to stay, but swing them they do and thus bend them momentarily. Those "straighter, darker trees," like the trees of "Into My Own" that "scarcely show the breeze," stand ominously free from human manipulation, menacing in their irresponsiveness to acts of the will. The malleability of the birches is not total, however, and the poet is forced to admit this fact into the presence of his desire, like it or not. The ultimate shape of mature birch trees is the work of objective natural force, not human activity. Yet after conceding the boundaries of imagination's subjective world, the poet seems not to have constricted himself but to have been released.
A wind blew over the meadow, bending a lone sapling almost to the ground. But it sprang back. It sprang back. It reached towards the hiding sun even though a branch had been torn off, leaves had flown away, and the wind would come again. The brown grass had sunk into the mud of previous rains. But alas, one more storm would come. One more cloud crept up upon the land. One more time the ashen sky would break and fall and drown out all that was left - except the hope, the love, the sun in her eyes, except for her will to forgive and rise above the gale.