Musings Essays

  • Musings on Caltech

    741 Words  | 2 Pages

    Musings on Caltech My parents convinced me to have a picture taken a couple of months after I graduated from high school, back when I still thought I was pretty smart. Now, I only take the trouble to dress up when I'm back at home, where I can be pampered by my parents. Here at Caltech, I'm usually slightly emaciated (they don't bother with feeding Techers over weekends here) with a wearier complexion (Sleep? What is this "sleep"?). Also, I tend to be a little more shaggy-looking, since haircuts

  • Orientalist Musings and their Applicability to Three Kings

    2379 Words  | 5 Pages

    Orientalist Musings and their Applicability to Three Kings The concept of Orientalism is one in which Edward Said, a renowned intellectual with a solid background in the field of Arab study, is particularly knowledgeable. If the concepts surrounding Orientalism are broken down into specific elemental degrees, then Said portrays the American conception of Arabic entities and their inhabitants with a plethora of stereotypes that generate a false depiction of the Arabic culture. This, of course

  • The Scope of Woolf’s Feminism in A Room of One’s Own

    1665 Words  | 4 Pages

    Woolf’s essay in interestingly different ways. Bennett states that Woolf’s essay is not a feminist work, rejects the idea that Woolf’s discussion of women and fiction may lean towards the political, and reduces the essay’s scope to a collection of musings on women and fiction. Daiches responds to A Room of One’s Own in the opposite way: he claims that Woolf’s work is feminist, and Woolf’s feminism emphasizes not only women and their relationship to fiction, but all people of genius who have not

  • Sonnets: The Power of Love

    1574 Words  | 4 Pages

    her at sight, and at night she invades his dreams. He cannot sleep without her coming, unbidden, into his mind: "Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind/ For thee, and for myself, no quiet find." Contrary to this thought, however, his constant musings of his lady are also a blessing to him. In Sonnet 29, Shakespeare, depressed and envious of others, thinks of his love: "Yet, in these thoughts myself almost despising,/ Haply I think on thee, a... ... middle of paper ... ...that time I do ensconce

  • Soliloquy Essay - Theatre and Language in the Soliloquies of Shakespeare's Hamlet

    1168 Words  | 3 Pages

    between earth and heaven". Shakespeare's audience would have had a physical picture of this before them, which added great weight to the imagery of his text, as of course would the scuffle over Ophelia's corpse. At the end of the play Hamlet stops musing and the language becomes very direct and simple, "there is a divinity.." "the readiness is all". In the final scene Hamlet "acts" in all senses of the word, and "theatre" takes over. The final speeches are terse and contain references to the theatricality

  • Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush

    825 Words  | 2 Pages

    Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy’s writings are often imbued with pessimism, and his poem “The Darkling Thrush” is not an exception. Through the bleakness of the landscape, the narrator’s musings on the century’s finale, and the narrator’s reaction to the songbird, “The Darkling Thrush” reveals Hardy’s preoccupation with time, change, and remorse. Written in four octaves, “A Darkling Thrush” opens with a view of a desolate winter landscape. With “spectre-grey”

  • Personal Narrative- Daydreaming in Class

    873 Words  | 2 Pages

    Personal Narrative- Daydreaming There I sat, trying desperately not to drool in the middle of my daydream. Dare I say class was less than interesting and all I could think of was my bed? Instead of daydreaming of a hunky man, or even a bright future paved with a golden road of success, I was dreaming of my bed. It was an ordinary college dorm room bed: you never know how many people actually slept in it, or did something else in it, yet I still find comfort in its lumps and bumps. In the brilliance

  • Hamlet: Contrast Plays A Major Role

    698 Words  | 2 Pages

    skulls in the air)  is a parallel to Hamlet's newfound attitude. After having committed himself to his cause in Act IV, he is no longer bothered by the paradox of good and evil, and (seemingly) is untroubled by his previous misgivings. Hamlet's musings on the equality of all men in death serve as a transition into the darker second half of the scene. His contemplations on death reflect Act IV, Scene 3, when Hamlet gives voice to a humorous notion concerning " how a king may progress through the

  • The Concept of Time in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night

    1733 Words  | 4 Pages

    explored the dark night of the human soul." (Austen 57) But even, and especially, in its timelessness, the play circumscribes and explains time in three major ways. First, either through dreams--the epitome of timelessness--or the bitter mystical musings of the drug-addicted Mary Tyrone. Second, its treatments of a past when things were better, or, paradoxically, infinitely worse. Finally, there is the vision of the future along with the denial of the present: the hope that things will change

  • Sporting crises

    1570 Words  | 4 Pages

    lay sponsors' most valuable assets, their brands, open to an associated fallout. How they can minimise its impact? Sport is never far from controversy. Whether it be alcohol-fuelled misbehaviour, allegations of drug abuse or inappropriate public musings on a thorny political issue, the national press is filled to the brim with sports stars dragging the image of their employers — and the sports they represent — through the proverbial mud. Such crises can have a major knock-on effect on existing sponsorship

  • Effective Foreshadowing in King Lear

    1138 Words  | 3 Pages

    particularly sight, whether as a comment on the necessity of sensing consequences before acting (as Lear does not), or as yet another of Shakespeare's comments (most apparent in Hamlet) on "seeming." The destruction of Gloucester's eyes and his subsequent musings ("I stumbled when I saw" (IV.i.19) etc.) are a more graphical presentation of this basic theme which originally appears in Lear's first scene. Goneril declares Lear is "dearer than eyesight" (I.i.56) to her (though she is the one who later suggests

  • The Life of Charles Dickens Reflected in Great Expectations

    2656 Words  | 6 Pages

    past loves, and even Dickens himself are visible in the novel. However, Dickens' past influenced not only character and plot devices in Great Expectations, but also the very syntax he used to create his fiction. Parallels can be seen between his musings on his personal life and his portrayal of people and places in Great Expectations. Shades of Dickens' childhood are repeatedly manifested throughout Great Expectations. According to Doris Alexander, Dickens "knew that early circumstances

  • black cat

    2393 Words  | 5 Pages

    quickly comprehends that the Narrator's opinion of the story and what actually occurred may be two very different versions of some gruesome event. The fact that the Narrator is in jail and has been sentenced to death only adds to the irony of his musings. He looks back on the events with "awe," yet thinks that others, sometime in the future, will understand and sympathize with him, finding what he did not odd at all. In the end we know he will die because in the beginning he has still, only hours

  • From Playwright to Production: the Process of Recreating Shakespeare

    3337 Words  | 7 Pages

    result, he wrote not only for his own age but, in Ben Jonson's words, 'for all time.'; Shakespeare focuses not on what was popular and relevant in his contemporary world, but on the themes that would be enduring beyond his death. Shakespeare's musings on the function of the poet and playwright are included as themes of many of his plays. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus speaks for Shakespeare at the beginning of Act Five: the poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to

  • John Gardner's Grendel as Hero?

    2002 Words  | 5 Pages

    "hero" of Gardner's Grendel, and the mood is set for the coming pages. How is one to interpret this ambiguous, melodramatic narrator, whose phrases mix seemingly heartfelt emotional outbursts with witty (if cynical) observations, and ideological musings with ironic commentaries? Perhaps this is what makes Grendel such an extremely engaging narrator. A confounding juxtaposition is established in the first pages, in which the reader must somehow reconcile a hideous, murdering monster, with an apparently

  • Philosophy - Aristotle’s Concept of Virtue and the Comic Strip of Calvin and Hobbes

    2867 Words  | 6 Pages

    many questions with which Aristotle is concerned in the Nicomachean Ethics is: What is virtue and who is the virtuous man? However, this question of virtue is not considered in a vacuum. Aristotle’s discussion, far from amounting to mere ethereal musings, is firmly grounded in the everyday of life and consideration. So, in discussing the ideas of Aristotle, it is appropriate, and even necessary, that we ground our discussion in a like manner. That is, we should turn to a concrete example in order

  • W. B. Yeats, George Hyde-Lees, and the Automatic Script

    2766 Words  | 6 Pages

    poetry in a new direction, bringing together the separate remnants of his life and thoughts. Dilemmas over women and rejection, the frightening politics of his time, years of dabbling in the occult for answers, older ideas found in Blake, his own musings over Mask and Daimon, and the loose system of spiritual thought gathered in Per Amica: all these and other elements found their way into the cauldron of the AS, and with the help of Yeats, Georgie, and several "communicators," the medley was stirred

  • Hippocratic Medicine

    3277 Words  | 7 Pages

    in order to explain disease and offer help for a cure. Two themes characterizing Presocratic philosophical thought dramatically influenced humoral theory. The humoral theory approach of Hippocratic medicine was based upon Presocratic philosophical musings about the relationship of man to the world. By the time humoral theory was vogue, philosophers had concluded that both man and the world were governed by the same natural laws. Humoral theory also was based upon Presocratic theories about change and

  • Midnight Musings: A Commuter's Tale in Olympia

    1077 Words  | 3 Pages

    At midnight all the streets were quite in the city of Olympia in Washington. The sky was clear and the stars were shining bright. A full moon made the roads easier to see. Usually John Robinson could only see what the headlights of his 1965 mustang were pointing at, however on this night the moon let his eyes see much more of his surroundings. John Robinson drove down the same roads five times a week on his way home from work. The back roads appealed to him, he did not want to always drive

  • Comparing Rip Van Winkle And Subconscious Musings

    1299 Words  | 3 Pages

    Chrystal Coon English Rip Van Winkle and Subconscious Musings The story “Rip Van Winkle” is about a character named Rip Van Winkle, a man who wanted nothing more out of life then to be able to do as he pleased and drink without responsibilities. One day he takes a trip into the Katskill mountains, which causes him to miss twenty years of his life. Rip wakes up after his sleep in the mountains and realizes that everything is different. He is faced with the life changing realization that he can