Gretel Ehrlich describes her move to Wyoming as awakening from a nap, satisfied in her new home she becomes absorbed in its tranquility and indifference. She is reborn, starts anew and creates a new life for herself. Ehrlich even cut her hair and buys new clothes to create a "new" and different person. To read and understand this essay means looking deeper into the author's story of rebirth, and how the big Wyoming skies were healing and put things into perspective for her. Thus, improving her quality of life without any fillers or distractions.
Ehrlich's purpose for being in Wyoming, is best described in the quote, "I suspect that my original motive for coming here was to "lose myself" in new and unpopulated territory. Instead of producing the numbness I thought I wanted, life on the sheep ranch woke me up...the arid country was a clean slate. Its absolute indifference steadied me."
This is the theme of the essay, the first step in the realization that Ehrlich didn't need "things" to be happy, she's found her calling in big sky country and is ultimately at peace with her inner self. The open space and sky of Wyoming according to Ehrlich, "Represents sanity, not a life purified, dull or "spaced out" but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation." The Author is telling us here that space gives her more room to reflect; and it can heal people and give them a better perspective of their own lives as well.
Later in the essay we find another imperative couple of paragraphs explaining the importance of communication between people in Wyoming. Ehrlich says, "The silence is profound. Instead of talking, we seem to share one eye. Keenly obs...
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...ich Ehrlich incorporates such beautiful messages and life lessons into her work.
The attention to detail that Gretel Ehrlich exhibits to her transformation in Wyoming is remarkable, she had a strong message that was well received. The details that she shows is in her writing make this essay amazing and the words and terms used in the essay are colorful and stick with the reader. I took a positive position when writing this paper, and I found myself agreeing with all of Ehrlich's opinions. However, moving to the middle of nowhere to begin again would not awaken everyone from the materialistic haze of their lives, many people enjoy the fillers they have. Perhaps one day people can start to break free of their dependence on material items and live life differently. Maybe our society can even start existing with the space we have, and stop building against it.
In N. Scott Momaday’s and D. Brown’s separate passages, they describe different views on the landscapes in Oklahoma. Momaday’s purpose is to reveal that in the midst of harsh surroundings, reverence can be found within.. Brown’s purpose is to explain how the relationship of nature is destroyed over time. Momaday creates not only a harsh tone, but also a spiritual one in order to reveal to the reader that the landscapes unforgivable qualities hide its sense of awe; while Brown adopts a mourningful tone in order to convey the landscape’s hopelessness and despair.
The speaker in “Five A.M.” looks to nature as a source of beauty during his early morning walk, and after clearing his mind and processing his thoughts along the journey, he begins his return home feeling as though he is ready to begin the “uphill curve” (ln. 14) in order to process his daily struggles. However, while the speaker in “Five Flights Up,” shares the same struggles as her fellow speaker, she does little to involve herself in nature other than to observe it from the safety of her place of residence. Although suffering as a result of her struggles, the speaker does little to want to help herself out of her situation, instead choosing to believe that she cannot hardly bare recovery or to lift the shroud of night that has fallen over her. Both speakers face a journey ahead of them whether it be “the uphill curve where a thicket spills with birds every spring” (ln. 14-15) or the five flights of stares ahead of them, yet it is in their attitude where these two individuals differ. Through the appreciation of his early morning surroundings, the speaker in “Five A.M.” finds solitude and self-fulfillment, whereas the speaker in “Five Flights Up” has still failed to realize her own role in that of her recovery from this dark time in her life and how nature can serve a beneficial role in relieving her of her
At other times, nature can be a source of solace for those who have suffered. Following the death of Gladys and Kate, Grainier looks to the horizon to seek comfort from his crushing loss. “All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dream-like business he’d ever witnessed waking – the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds...
After hearing of her diagnosis, the narrator travels from his residence in “California to New York” where his mother lives (3). Staring out of his airplane window, he noticed a change in the scenery. The “mountains giving away to flatlands” is used to not only describe the scenery, but how his life is changing (3). He will no longer be living a lavish life in California, but a depressing one that would “bring tears to his eyes” (22-23). He got a “sense of slippage” at the thought of losing his mother (3). When he finally arrived to his parent’s residence, the narrator was greeted with “brittleness and frost” (4). The author uses these two words with a cold denotation to describe more than just the weather on Long Island (4). Brittleness and frost are utilized to display the narrator’s feeling, as well as the theme of the book. The weather wasn’t the only thing the narrator noticed when he entered his parent’s town. His mother's actions caught his attention as well. When she held his hand, he again felt a sense of slippage (9). It mirrored the sensation he experienced on the airplane. His mom is slipping out of his hands, while life
The pioneers that traveled west from the east coast experienced so many hardships that today it has become hard to even imagine them. Willa Cather is an amazing author because through her stories readers can begin to imagine what it was truly like when pioneers had to go west and survive purely off of the labor of their own two lands. When she wrote A Wagner Matinee many Nebraskans felt that she was poorly portraying their way of life, and really what she was trying to do was highlight their strength and endurance. Today I think that her goal is successful for most readers. In this story she is using the point of view of a man who grew up in Nebraska with his aunt. His aunt is a lady that he is still in awe of because of how hard working she is. She kept everything running when he was growing up and even stayed up really late to teach him. One thing that she taught him about was music. She had been a music teacher in Boston when she met the love of her life and left music behind so she could move to Nebraska with him. In this story she is going to see her nephew and it will be the first time that she has left the farm in thirty years. This in itself would be hard because so much changes about the world in thirty years. When she gets there she is quite and doesn’t say much and doesn’t even want to leave his house but he convinces her to. They go and listen to an orchestra. She hasn’t heard so many of these songs in years and it is a beautiful thing for her. At the end she is crying because she doesn’t want to leave and go back to Nebraska. Throughout this story all her nephew does is describe the incredible strength that she has and this is why I think that Cather portrays Nebraskans so well. She is able to show how strong they hav...
The wilderness can be used to measure against the man made world, a “scientific yardstick.” Throughout the entire piece he is arguing that the importance is not what we can actually see or touch, but what we think of and how we think of the wild. This letter is being written to inform them of what would be missing without the wilderness. Those who think fondly of the Grand Canyon or the Everglades and have never been there are merely working from the idea, but those who have been there know what it has to offer and therefore receive the calming and sobering state of mind Stegner refers to.
Around Thoreau’s time there were a smaller number of people who lived in America. Free and untouched land was vast and easy to come by. He says, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life…” (Thoreau 1). He was able to basically walk into his backyard and build a cabin there. Today the population has grown so much that many people are lucky to have a backyard. In having tighter spaces people have learned to come together and be civil with one another. They learned to work with and around obstacles and one another. Friendly neighbors are made; rival ones forgotten. People have learned how to make others smile and cheer up the gloomier ones. If they were all to have built an isolated, self-sufficient cabin in the woods, this would not have been possible. They would have to rel...
To Thoreau, life’s progress has halted. It seems people have confused progression with captivity driven by materialism. To Krakaeur, people are indifferent to pursing the sublime in nature. To Christopher McCandles the world around him is forgetting the purpose of life. People are blind to nature. In the eyes of these men the world is victim to commercial imprisonment. People live to achieve statuses that only exist because man made them. Fame, money, and monotonous relationships do not exist in nature; they are the pursuits of soulless fundamentalism. The truth is that people pursue meaningless goals, and people don’t want to hear or know how they are foolish. When exposed, reality is so unsettling that it seems wrong. Yet, to be free of the falseness in life is in essence the point of singularity that people realize if there is no truth in love then it is false, if there is no truth in money then it is worthless, if there is no truth in fame then it is undeserving. Without truth everything is a worthless pursuit of a meaningless glass ceiling.
The novel begins as Duluoz/Kerouac ascends Desolation Peak on Starvation Ridge in the High Cascades for a seventy-day job as a lookout for forest fires. He initially anticipates with relish the idea of a seclusion that will allow him to ponder "the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain" without the distractions of friends, drugs or alcohol Yet as the days dissolve into each other endlessly, he begins to tire of the monotony of Desolation. The stark emptiness greeting him from his outlook reflects the vacuity of life as he sees it. Entitled "Desolation in Solitude," this chapter records his mind patterns as he despairs over the "Void," an uncertain entity that symbolizes an eternal, vast, indifferent force of ...
As in most other novels that talk about new phases of life, Jaimaica Kincaid’s novel is about new phases of life, Kincaid’s novel is about the change in percption of her sense of self. In this novel, Kincaid is introduced to a much safer place yet desires to go back home- “I wanted to be back where I came from(line 55).” As this general feeling of homesickness continues, Kincaid uses nature and color to help portray how she feels at her new “home.” For example, “but a pale-yellow sun, as if the sun had grown weak from trying too hard to shine (line 20).” The sun, usually a symbol of hope throughout literature, in this case, has faded leaving behind only despair and homesickness.
In elementary school, I would escape to the library, face burrowing in picture books about space. Walking home with arms full of checked out books, I would pass by my parents consumed in another argument most likely about marital problems and sit in the corner of my room - door shut - to indulge my self in my own private get away. I did not check out my space books to read but instead to dream, dream about a world waiting to be explored. A world free of the petty arguments of my parents, the teachers with high expectations and the chores that awaited me at home
I was the first person to ski off of the chairlift that day; arriving at the summit of the Blackcomb Mountain, nestled in the heart of Whistler, Canada. It was the type of day when the clouds seemed to blanket the sky, leaving no clue that the sun, with its powerful light, even existed anymore. It was not snowing, but judging by the moist, musty, stale scent in the air, I realized it would be only a short time before the white flakes overtook the mountain. As I prepared myself to make the first run, I took a moment to appreciate my surroundings. Somehow things seemed much different up here. The wind, nonexistent at the bottom, began to gust. Its cold bite found my nose and froze my toes. Its quick and sudden swirling movement kicked loose snow into my face, forcing me to zip my jacket over my chin. It is strange how the gray clouds, which seemed so far above me at the bottom, really did not appear that high anymore. As I gazed out over the landscape, the city below seemed unrecognizable. The enormous buildings which I had driven past earlier looked like dollhouses a child migh...
French author, journalist and philosopher, Albert Camus writes, “but what is happiness except the simple harmony between man and the life he leads.” In his book, The Geography of Bliss, Eric Weiner sets out on a journey around the globe to “places that possess, in spades, one or more of the ingredients that we consider essential to the stew of happiness: money, pleasure, spirituality, family, and chocolate, among others”. (2) According to the World Happiness database, these are the keys to the happiness of several countries he visits. However, when he explores the nation of Bhutan, he encounters an entirely contradictive idea of happiness. The Bhutanese believe that less is more. From the beginning of his visit in Bhutan he finds that from their daily life activities, to their economics, to their ideas about self, the key to their happiness is simplicity. Simplicity is defined “as the state of being free from complexity, intricacy, and division; the absence of luxury or pretentiousness; of having plainness and sincerity; basic”
Into this deadening atmosphere of mental and social provincialism comes Lona Hessel, refreshing and invigorating as the wind of the plains. She has returned to her native town together with Johan.
Mrs. Mallard’s repressed married life is a secret that she keeps to herself. She is not open and honest with her sister Josephine who has shown nothing but concern. This is clearly evident in the great care that her sister and husband’s friend Richard show to break the news of her husband’s tragic death as gently as they can. They think that she is so much in love with him that hearing the news of his death would aggravate her poor heart condition and lead to death. Little do they know that she did not love him dearly at all and in fact took the news in a very positive way, opening her arms to welcome a new life without her husband. This can be seen in the fact that when she storms into her room and her focus shifts drastically from that of her husband’s death to nature that is symbolic of new life and possibilities awaiting her. Her senses came to life; they come alive to the beauty in the nature. Her eyes could reach the vastness of the sky; she could smell the delicious breath of rain in the air; and ears became attentive to a song f...