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Attitudes towards death
Attitudes towards death
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The old woman believed in dreams. She believed that a faithful heart made dreams come true. All one had to do was embrace a dream in their heart, to see it with the mind’s eye, and it would come to pass. She trusted that whatever you truly and faithfully believed would be what you experienced for eternity. Right now, however, the old woman’s dream was for a simple bit of strength.
The old woman might as well have been trying to break an oak log in half. Instead, she was simply, but unsuccessfully, trying to snap the long, thin, branch she held in her gnarled hands. She was trying to size the branch to fit into her small cook stove. After a few minutes of futile struggle, she simply set the unyielding piece of kindling down and resigned herself to defeat. She had learned to embrace defeat, rather than fight it, as if loss was an old friend. Long ago, or at least it seemed long ago, she stopped cursing her mounting inadequacies and inability to accomplish the simplest tasks, and accepted the inevitable: she was alone and alone she would stay. She shuffled her way to her old rocking chair and carefully sat down with a sigh.
She sat so still that if anyone were there to look upon her, they would think they were viewing a still-life painting. One would imagine her slight trembling to be nothing more than an illusion of breeze against canvas. Her shaking came with age. Age and a life of toil and hardship, but also a life filled with joy and ease. Either way, it had been a long life. She could not exactly remember how old she was. Not that it mattered, that information became useless and slipped away long ago. Lightheartedly, she would simply say that she was as old as dirt.
The old woman would be going hungry again. Fo...
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...side of her living room seemed far indeed. Still, the old woman gathered enough strength and fortitude to slowly but surely make her way to the bed and lie down.
There had been times when she reminisced about her youth and all the rashness that went with those invincible and immortal times. It had been an ephemeral time, yet seemingly without end. Now, as she rested quietly on her bed, she could see the enormity of the vanity of life and the futility of trying to deny the inevitable. For the inevitable had arrived.
The old woman believed that a faithful heart made dreams come true. She trusted that whatever you truly and faithfully believed would be what you experienced for eternity. So, as she lay upon her simple bed, in her simple home, taking her last breaths, she closed her eyes and held one thought, one truth, and one dream – the dream of being home.
Overall, dwell on this process of changing throughout the poem, it can be understood that the poet is demonstrating a particular attitude towards life. Everyone declines and dies eventually, but it would be better to embrace an optimistic, opened mind than a pessimistic, giving-up attitude; face the approach of death unflinchingly, calmly.
She gets to the point and proves that in our current world we tend to say more than we should, when just a couple of words can do the same. In her writing, it is evident that the little sentences and words are what make the poem overall that perfect dream she wishes she were part of.
Dreams are not just empty ideas, they give people ambition, and it is the pursuit of that ambition, which shapes a person. However, society instils an illusion about what can be achieved. Dreams can be tied to identity, but they can be good or bad. The Great Gatsby [F. Scott Fitzgerald] and Shattered Glass [Teresa Toten] share the similes in which both main characters dream of finding themselves and reach their end goals, through pressure and love. Both authors imply that dreams should be verified that they are possible before you start following them, otherwise they can ended up deadly.
...ome the dream of attainment slowly became a nightmare. His house has been abandoned, it is empty and dark, the entryway or doors are locked. The sign of age, rust comes off in his hands. His body is cold, and he has deteriorated physically & emotionally. He is weathered just like his house and life. He is damaged poor, homeless, and the abandoned one.
ThThe notion of getting older, one day has too frightened me. I wonder what could I have done in the past to change the future. I reminisce of all the things I have done with the people that I love. But, at the end the day, I look forward to getting older. I look forward to the memories that I will make, which one day will be stories told between two friends or family members about their crazy grandmother Gabriella. E.B. White 's essay represents the fears that adults, but mostly parents, face when seeing children grow up and experience life the same way they once did. These nostalgic moments turn to fear of losing their youth. I believe that White 's essay is a manifestation of a mid-life crisis that fails to show what life has to offer after
Previously, the narrator has intimated, “She had all her life long been accustomed to harbor thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves. They had never taken the form of struggles. They belonged to her and were her own.” Her thoughts and emotions engulf her, but she does not “struggle” with them. They “belonged to her and were her own.” She does not have to share them with anyone; conversely, she must share her life and her money with her husband and children and with the many social organizations and functions her role demands.
In the speech “I Have a Dream,” presented in the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr talks about his American Dream. This speech is recognized as one of the best speeches ever given at the Lincoln Memorial. As King gives his speech the reader would notice how the second half of the speech is what the world would see as the American dream. The first half consists of the actual reality, nightmare, of the world the constant state that seems never to change. Throughout the speech a person can hear one of the primary themes, dream, repeated constantly eleven times to be exact. Although King acknowledges the metaphor of reality, he explores the archetypical metaphor of a dream.
Through the book, Night, the author conveys the idea that the desire to reach a dream can allow an individual to overcome all their adversity. Whereas, when there is a loss of hope, there is a loss of a goal. Keeping faith and holding on to their dreams are beneficial, for they provide individuals with the strength necessary to keep carrying on all the weight of their pain and sufferings. The desire to succeed is essential if an individual hopes to achieve any dream, whether that dream is as small as passing an exam or as large as surviving in a concentration camp. The power to overcome every adversity lies deep within every individual; one must simply reach inside and grasp it.
“It was a large, beautiful room, rich and picturesque in the soft, dim light which the maid had turned low. She went and stood at an open window and looked out upon the deep tangle of the garden below. All the mystery and witchery of the night seemed to have gathered there amid the perfumes and the dusky and tortuous outlines of flowers and foliage. She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet half-darkness which met her moods. But the voices were not soothing that came to her from the darkness and the sky above and the stars. They jeered and sounded mourning notes without promise, devoid even of hope. She turned back into the room and began to walk to and fro, down its whole length, without stopping, without resting. She carried in her hands a thin handkerchief, which she tore into ribbons, rolled into a ball, and flung from her. Once she stopped, and taking off her wedding ring, flung it upon the carpet. When she saw it lying there she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it. But her small boot heel did not make an indenture, not a mark upon the glittering circlet.
Lennie dreamed about tending the rabbits on the farm with George, but Lennie doesn’t have a chance to do that anymore. Curly’s wife wanted to be an actress in Hollywood for a show, but she never got the call that she’s in. Crooks never got to be a free slave. But this story at least talked about the characters trying to reach those dreams, which shows they have dignity and pride within themselves. But in reality, dreams are something we stride for, dreams will never be perfectly perfect nor perfectly
As a child, Sharon Olds childhood was described as a “hellfire.” Growing up, she was told that she was going to hell. In Olds’ poem, she tries to express how she felt about her early childhood with an abusive father and relationships with her family. Olds wrote many poems about her relationship with her helpless, alcoholic father and her path to help deal with these memories and forgiving her father to loving the dying man. Most of Olds poems are about her journey from an abusive household to healing her past memories from a man she disgusted with. Her poems are ways of her speaking in loud tone describing domestic violence, sexuality, and family relationships. Like any poem, “His Stillness” the theme of the poem was about Olds getting close to her father w...
I cannot feel myself gradually aging as the speaker when he states that, “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire / That ashes of his youth doth lie.” However, I see the lines of age begin to define themselves through those around me. Whether it be physical lines imprinted as maps of knowledge across the kind faces of my grandparents, or perhaps more mental lines as my friends begin to find courage and self-assurance within
I chose this book to explore whether our dreams do mean anything, and whether it does symbolise and influence our past and future. The points that I will be talking about The Interpretation of Dreams in my review is the theories of manifest and latent dream content, dreams as wish fulfilments, and the significance of childhood experiences.
...dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”
Women’s dreams” in Levinson 1798 sense ,are more complex and compounded than the traditionally work focused dreams of men’s-realistic and adaptive response to woman’s developmental needs, shifting societal expectations ,changing job opportunities and the reality of pregnancy and child.