Night Falls, Nature Holds Nature is an essential part of life. From the start of Before Night Falls, nature is definitely essential to Reinaldo Arenas’ life. Nature centers around different parts of Arenas’ life and is intertwined in many facets of his life. From early childhood, with a cradle carved out of the earth’s dirt, to the end of his life, when Arenas hides from authorities amongst nature and finds solace in the moon. He even compares his love of Lazaro to nature. Nature supports Arenas through his life in a great variety of ways. It provides him solace through his life, is his means of sexual exploration and in the end prompts the title of his memoir. In Before Night Falls, Arenas shows his readers how essential nature is to his …show more content…
Through the memoir, Arenas often talks of his love for the beach and for the ocean. He first mentions it as, “like entering paradise,” (Arenas, page 92) mostly referring to the beaches quality of offering bountiful sexual activity, but all the same. Later, when he’s in jail at El Morro, he talks about the sea more. He can see the ocean when he’s outside on the roof, and he’s drawn to it. Arenas’ captivation by the sea gives readers the impression he is eager to get back to the ocean and the beach. When Arenas is transferred to the “open prison” in Flores, he finally gets his chance to get back to the ocean. He takes this chance, despite the risks. He writes, “Some Sundays we managed to swim in the ocean; it was a great joy to be able to jump into the sea and swim at least fifteen or twenty feet away from shore. This, of course, we did without the guards’ permission, and one of us had to watch in case a guard came,” (Arenas, page 223). This quote serves to show the readers how much Arenas values connecting to nature. Just to swim a couple yards is a really joyous experience for him and something he’ll definitely take a risk for. One last example of Arenas’ love for the ocean are his thoughts once he is out of jail, and rooming in Elia’s cat madhouse. He is thrilled to again have a lookout to the ocean, but Castro’s dictatorships have attempted to rob him …show more content…
Nature provides him comfort and solace through childhood. Nature provides him sexual exploration and availability in late childhood and adulthood. He makes his connections to nature in many ways, in the trees, at the beach, in the ocean. In the end, he makes his connections to nature through something very different: nightfall. As Arenas is a hiding fugitive, with access to trees and the sea a bigger risk than ever before, he finds another connection to nature. Arenas learns his only solace is in nightfall, when he can travel more freely and when he can meets his few confidants. Arenas’ connection to nature, not in the woods, or in the sea, but rather in nightfall is ultimately one of the most meaningful connections he makes to nature, and the connection he makes that titles the book. Nightfall comes to Arenas every night and always comforts him. It provides him access to his loved ones. This example, and its use as the title, serves to show the depth of Arenas’ connection with nature. Even when nature is no longer able to provide its ails, the trees, the water, it provides nightfall each night, and that comforts Arenas when nothing else does. Nature is essential to Arenas’ life and this is evident from the title, to the first page, to the last
A statement from the nonfiction novella Night –a personal account of Elie Wiesel’s experience during the Holocaust—reads as follows: “How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou. Almighty, Master of the universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces” (67). War is a concept that is greatly looked down upon in most major religions and cultures, yet it has become an inevitable adversity of human nature. Due to war’s inhumane circumstances and the mass destruction it creates, it has been a major cause for many followers of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions to turn from their faith. Followers of religion cannot comprehend how their loving god could allow them to suffer and many devout
Since the beginning of time, human beings were trying to find ways how to make their lives better. Technological improvements and inventions brought us a lot of benefits, but with benefits come consequences. Side effects are different types of pollution that we , as humans, are aware of. There are six kinds of pollution: land, water, noise, thermal, air, and light. The article "Our Vanishing Night," by Verlyn Klikenborg shows us the consequences of light pollution and completely neglects the positive aspects of artificial light. The author starts with a history lesson where he juxtaposes modern world to England in 1800. Back in the day, the most populated city in England, London, didn't suffer from light pollution since there
Throughout the Romanticism period, human’s connection with nature was explored as writers strove to find the benefits that humans receive through such interactions. Without such relationships, these authors found that certain aspects of life were missing or completely different. For example, certain authors found death a very frightening idea, but through the incorporation of man’s relationship with the natural world, readers find the immense utility that nature can potentially provide. Whether it’d be as solace, in the case of death, or as a place where one can find oneself in their own truest form, nature will nevertheless be a place where they themselves were derived from. Nature is where all humans originated,
This is a response to the video The Thousand and One Nights. The Thousand and One Nights is a book of stories. One of the main characters in the story was Scheherazade. Scheherazade is queen, storyteller, the wife of Shahryar, and the daughter of Vizier. The premise of the story is when faced with a challenge, for things to change sometimes someone has to step up and do something different.
Jonathon Levine’s The Night Before is a raunchy holiday comedy headed by Seth Rogen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Anthony Mackie. The film opens with the funeral of the parents of Gordon-Levitt’s Ethan, where he’s surrounded by his two best friends: Rogen’s Isaac and Mackie’s Chris. The grief over losing both his parents gives way to a new holiday tradition: for the next fourteen years, the three go out every Christmas Eve and party it up by performing karaoke, playing a Kanye song on a giant piano in the floor (a la Tom Hanks in Big) and search for an invite to the holy grail of holiday parties: the Nutcracker Ball. On what is supposed to be their last night out (considering that Chris is now a famous football player and Isaac is about to welcome a baby with his wife, hilariously portrayed by Jillian Bell), Ethan finds himself in possession of three tickets to the Ball. What ensues is hilarious, vulgar, and
William Stafford in my mind, a visionary seeking to enlighten us through words he wrote in the poem, he talks his travels down a dark road only to find a dead deer on the road. In the poem he talks about how he moved the deer out of the dark road and pushing it down a hill. The poem is great at making you visualize what is happen as you read it. In this essay I will dissect the poem’s deep and dark stanza’s and state what the poem means.
In earlier drafts of Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway opens with the words: “This is a novel about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring.” Though this exposition was later cut from the novel at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald—one of Hemingway’s contemporaries—nevertheless it still serves to reveal the objective center around which The Sun Also Rises revolves. As an enigmatic amalgamation of feminine charm, unapologetic androgyny, and sexual promiscuity, Brett captivates the attention of all the other characters of the novel—be it Jake Barnes or Mike Campbell or even Pedro Romero—as she attempts to find individual freedom in a society altered by the general disillusionment and psychological malaise after World War I. Though much critical attention has focused upon Brett’s licentiousness and the resulting Victorian ideals that she violates, surely Brett transcends both the sexual function her critics limit her to and the Victorian values they hold her up against. Indeed, Brett’s loose and meaningless romances play an important allegorical role in representing the broader shattered unity and inconsistencies of the modern world—the world of the Lost Generation.
In Il Deserto dei Tartari1 and Il Visconte Dimezzato2, written respectively by Dino Buzzati and Italo Calvino, the omnipresence of nature sets its role as much more than a passive setting. Kate Rigby in Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, defines the role of nature as being a background of images bearing symbolic meanings. Marie- Helene Caspar completes this statement by saying that: “Il paesaggio non e solo una cornice, qualcosa di esterno, senza importanza. Anzi, esso fa da complemento al personaggio, lo satura di connotazioni che concordano. E tavolta la metafora del personaggio”3. Nature in the two novels becomes the stage of the narrative through which the protagonist's psychology is forged.
Rachel Perkins hybrid musical drama One Night the Moon set in the 1930’s Australian outback and Malala Yousafzai’s ‘speech to the UN’ in 2013 were composed to raise awareness and reveal truths of multiple perspectives, representing the voice of the unheard and disempowered in juxtaposition to the dominant and powerful. Both Perkins and Yousafzai challenge societal expectations of their context, advocating for all voices to be heard and for the potential unity between cultures and races through education and shifts in paradigm.
The ground is frozen, parents sob over their children, stomachs growl, stiff bodies huddle together to stay slightly warm. This was a recurrent scene during World War II. Night is a literary memoir of Elie Wiesel’s tenure in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel created a character reminiscent of himself with Eliezer. Eliezer experienced cruelty, stress, fear, and inhumanity at a very young age, fifteen. Through this, he struggled to maintain his Jewish faith, survive with his father, and endure the hardships placed on his body and mind.
Jonas Lie had created “Dusk on the lower Broadway” in 1910 with short brushwork, and atmospheric rendering. Jonas Lie’s love for travel is what enlightened him to the works of Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse. In Dusk on the lower Broadway, just as the titles suggests, Lie captures the image of a busy New York afternoon on Broadway. Jonas Lie was rather famous in New York during this time, being most remembered for his paintings on the Panama Canal, which are now in the United States Military Academy at West Point. Looking more deeply into the painting, we can see that the painting shows a person (a child maybe) on the right-hand side trying to cross the busy street of Broadway.
Nature runs the world in cycles, it works as an essential element in the earth, its function is undoubted in the world and that is revealed in Touching Bottom, The Salt of the Jungle and A Field of Wheat, which are written by Kari Strutt, Nguyen Huy Thiep, and Sinclair Ross respectively. They all gave nature a special meaning to let them lead the development in each story. Initially, the role of nature is similar in placing obstacles for the main characters. Besides, nature has a similar effect on changing the main character’s attitude in these stories. On the other hand, the influence of nature’s existence on the main character differs in each story. Nevertheless, nature plays a significant role in all three stories which is helping to develop each story’s theme.
Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is not morbid, full of despair and hopelessness or unpleasant. James, Mary, Jamie, and Edmund Tyrone all had the opportunity to change their ways. The Tyrone family had opportunities of redemption to help each other and help themselves but they chose to not to take them, even though they all loved each other they couldn't help one another as much as they needed but the opportunity of hope was still present.
Speculative fiction is the genre of fiction that incorporates a setting other than the real world and can involve the supernatural, futuristic and other imagined elements. Primarily speculative fiction focuses on asking ‘what if’ questions and can include many sub-genres; such as fantasy, science fiction, horror and magical realism. The film If I Stay and the novel Before I Fall fit under the sub-genre of magical realism and explore the ideas of an individual experiencing magical or alternate realities limited to only themselves. The texts also embrace the conventions of alterity, nature of humanity and power. The film If I Stay was realised in 2014 and directed by R.J Cutler. The film adaption of the book by Gayle Forman is based around an
Nature and God are the main themes in “Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, William Wordsworth’s poems, “The World is Too Much With Us”, and “It is a Beauteous Evening”. The poets portray the themes of Nature and God both explicitly and implicitly, exposing the reader to a variety of ways in which nature and God is synonymous.