Henry Mayhew's "Watercress Girl"

While reading Mayhew's profile on the watercress girl I became amazed with the amount of dialogue that he was able to pull from this young child. Writing my profile of Nancy Sand, a person I know, I found it hard to ask the right questions and get the responses I wanted. Mayhew somehow gets the little girl to say a long stream of statements that cover most everything you would want to know about her, while also pulling on the sympathy strings of the reader's heart.

I wonder whether Mayhew had more dialogue from the girl that he cut, or if some of this dialogue is recalled from memory, not taken directly from notes. It wasn't possible for him to record her, so there is very likely some discrepancy in the piece, and some exaggerations or untruths. Still, he does a wonderful job of keeping the child-like tone even if the girl is no longer child, and the accent is also very well done, whether he wrote this verbatim or had to improvise some of the speech.

I will say that I can now understand the comments on my profile asking for the driving question of my piece. I wonder why Mayhew wanted to write this profile of the girl, and if he tries to convey why it is lost on me. The profile is made up almost entirely of the watercress girl speaking, so I think the piece would have been made stronger by some of Mayhew's perspective, reflection, or more commentary. At the least, I need to know why Mayhew thinks we should care about this watercress girl.

Desensitized, Inspired by Lu Hsun's "Death"

                In the culture I have grown up in, death, real or fake, constantly around me could very well have desensitized me to the calamity of the event. I won’t start preaching about the negative effects of violent video games; though I do believe those effects can be very real depending on the person. I won’t muse on the fact that so many wars and movies depicting wars and stories by relatives about wars have made war seem like a normal thing, so that it isn't devastating like World War I was when it was first announced to the populations. I will tell a story.

                Kelly Banfill was a girl who lived down the street from me, six houses exactly. She let me borrow her Harry Potter books to read when I was in seventh grade. I finished the book series faster than she did, and hungered for the seventh book more than she appeared to. The series was the first set of books that truly caught my attentions and sympathies, or at least that is how I remember my experience with them. The books came out a long time ago, so I don’t feel guilty in revealing that many characters die, most of which were beloved to me. Now that I’m thinking, however, I did not cry reading that book as much as I did when the dogs died in Where the Red Fern Grows, but then again the death of animals did always affect me more than the death of humans. What does that say about our society, that the death of human beings just like me was less of a tear jerker than the death of animals that had much shorter life spans anyway? Or maybe it was the reactions to the death of the animals in the various fictions I consumed that got to me?

                Kelly’s dad Jeff Banfill was a second father to me, and I referred to him as such, though normally I’d just shorten it to the familiar “dad.” He died when Kelly and I were in tenth grade, very suddenly by a heart attack at work. They found him in his desk chair the next morning. I learned of this death in the middle of science class. Afterwards, I slammed the palm of my hand into a brick wall and became angrier than I can ever remember being. I have not been a person who cries often since I entered high school, maybe a reaction to my overly sensitive childhood. In the middle of lunch I was biting my lip, deep in thought, when another friend, Lindsay, told me to stop biting it. She was worried I would bite through. The moment my teeth left the pink skin I burst into tears, and was allowed to call my mom. Her, my sister and my nephew made the trip to school to pick me up. The episode frightened my friends, but no more than it frightened me.

                I did not cry much after that scene at school, and at the funeral I was in a constant back-and-forth between standing statue still and shaking like a leaf. I stood next to Kelly the entire viewing, right up front, even when her brother became annoyed and snapped at her that only family should be up there. Kelly lost a father and a foundation, a child like many whose parents had been divorced and not parted amicably. I lost a father figure and the innocent relationship I had with my best friend, and nobody told me when they buried Jeff Banfill that they were also burying my childhood and foreshadowing the death of my one true friendship.

                I would like to say that I am desensitized to death because then death would not bother me, but it did in the stories and it did in real life when Jeff left and it did a month ago when my grandfather passed away. Maybe I should play more video games. 

Once More to the Lake

E. B. White's essay "Once More to the Lake" was a shorter piece written in 1941 about White's trips to a specific lake in Maine as a child, and how those trips compared and encroached upon the trip he makes with his son to the same lake many years later. The essay focuses a lot on memory and experiences, and how time can stand still and yet move forward at the same time, as well as how a person's identity and place in the world can be hard to grasp onto.

In the second paragraph White says that, "It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back" (White 533). As a child my family, myself included, would visit friends in a specific town in Michigan, the name of which now escapes me. We took these vacations when I was very young and stopped before I was even ten, so my memory of the trips are foggy. Yet what White says is true, in that if I allow my mind to sit on the subject of those trips to Michigan for long periods I am amazed by what I can remember. Just as White begins thinking of unique things like the lack of full floor-to-ceiling partitions, I can remember the piano Nikki would play to entertain us all and the exact way it sat situated against the wall. That sentence reminds me of what a fickle thing memory is, and how extraordinary it can be in storing away hidden bits of information, and then being able to recall those bits years and years later.

Another lines that was intriguing was when White said he, "began to sustain the illusion that (his son) was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father" (White 534). He goes on to talk in that paragraph about saying or doing things that suddenly makes him realize he is acting his father. He calls this "creepy," and I find it interesting because White is not the only person who feels this way about becoming his parental figure. I have often had friends say that if they become their mother, or father, that they will be very upset and want somebody to stop them. People never become somebody else like a clone, but it makes sense in my mind that every child would pick up on mannerisms and patterns of speech that resemble their parents'. I don't view this as a bad thing, or creepy, because we are what the tools we have shapes us into, and our parents are part of that tool set. Nor is necessarily bad, even if you appear to be developing a bad mannerism a parent had, because sometimes the things that parents did or said that were bad can be transformed in your life to bring immense good.

A recurring topic in the essay is time, and the lack of movement of time White felt once back in Maine. He states multiple times "There had been no years" (White 535). I think this theme was particularly intriguing to me because I generally have the opposite problem, in that I always experience things in a way that makes it blatantly obvious to me that time has passed. People are older, different experiences have shaped me, all reminders of the clock constantly ticking. White had the ability to go back to a place, a place prominent in his past but not a part of his every day life, that somehow did not change much with the test of time. I have never known a place like this, as most places of my childhood are places that I grew up in, in which case the change is always very evident. I wonder, though, whether I have just not experienced enough years and enough places to have this sense of timelessness, and in the future if I will be able to relate to White more on the subject.

The parts that I really began to relate with White were as he began to talk of the things that did change, such as the passage about the excitement of arriving being diminished by the popularity of cars, and efficiency that technology had brought to the lake in Maine. He says there is no "loud wonderful fuss about trunks" (White 536), a description not often heard. Wonderful and fuss are generally not two adjectives placed together, and yet I can understand what White means. Sometimes a fuss is more interesting than a quietness or meekness when it comes to things that can effect a community, like the arrival to the lake in Maine when White was a child. This would be an all encompassing event, a fabulous journey leading to a great reward that the entire community would celebrate as the wagon appeared. Lack of fuss also means lack of communication, and community bonding.

I was also highly interested in the talk of the new motors for boats, and how they disturb the peace that White was used to, like an annoying bug. It made me wonder what White would think today, going back to that lake in Maine. Is it possible things have still stayed mostly the same? How would he feel about children on water-skis out on the lake, and all the loud noises technology makes today? There would most likely not be the peace and quiet anymore, except in those very early mornings he was fond of back in his past. Or perhaps I am wrong, and that lake in Maine is an oasis really separate from time. Maybe the tar never reached the lake, the quiet never succumbed to the new toys of my generation.

Overall, I found the essay captivating, with many parts of it resonating with me. Reading that essay took me back in time just as the trip to the lake took White back, and as I read the essay it did for me what I hope reading can always do. It did truly make things come to a stand still. While reading there had been no years, or in this case, no minutes.

Paragraph Breaks in "Experiencing," "Breakfast with Canis Latrans," and "An Animals Looks At Me"

In Stephen Corey’s essay “Experiencing,” Reg Saner’s “Breakfast with Canis Latrans,” and Charles Bergman’s “An Animal Looks at Me,” the structural choice of paragraph breaks is utilized. It also becomes clear from reading all three essays that the paragraph breaks are used for similar purposes.

     

In the narrative “Experiencing,” Corey begins by describing four separate objects and or people, with each description separated by a line break. These objects are a plastic cap from a bottle, two ants scurrying on a sidewalk, his own foot jiggling while he crossed his leg, and four young dancers. These are the four things that his seventeen-month-old granddaughter observed within one single day in July, and he tries to explain to himself why she was interested in those things specifically. Corey analyzes what these things have in common—motion—and how his granddaughter’s ability to interact/possess these things affected her curiosity. He then relates (after another paragraph break) all of these things to beauty and art, and how beauty and art can be ingrained a human’s repertoire of feelings just as pain can.

Saner’s essay also utilizes paragraph breaks, though the topic of the essay is more about what specific event he experienced. The Canis Latrans, or the coyote, is being observed by Saner through binoculars as it hunts for various varmints on a snowy slope so white the shadows are blue. Detail is given about the way the coyote pounces, its kill rate, and some sympathy for the prey before the first paragraph break occurs. The story shifts to Saner’s own hunting trip, and the intricate and often long tracks that he finds of field mice as they dart from one area of cover to the next. He comes to appreciate just how brave it is for the mice that travel distances of twelve to an impressive sixty yards as they search for food, in danger of becoming prey to the owls of the night. Jumping back to the story of the coyote the kills are documented again, before the final topic of the feeling fear itself is broached, and the dangers of the wild.

Finally there is Bergman’s essay, which also centers around the topic of an animal, or animals in general. The essay begins with the topic of how animals and humans interact, and how inadequate the human philosophies are for dealing with them. People do not know what to think about animals, Bergman notes so most people do not think about them at all. The first paragraph break occurs, and Bergman pulls the reader into his trip to a marsh in Mexico, with descriptions of the marsh and the surrounding areas and endangered species that can be found in this specific marsh. A break occurs again, and then he is describing his encounter with an eared grebe in the marsh, which he wants to take a picture of. The grebe and Bergman make eye contact, and in that moment feels his sense of human superiority is disturbed. The old subject of philosophies is picked up again, and how humans are attempting recently to begin to return the gazes of animals, and what the true relationship between human and animal is.

In all three of these essays, though the topics vary from essay to essay and even within the essays themselves, they all share the structure of frequent paragraph breaks. The breaks are used to differentiate between various topics within the essays, usually topics that connect to one another, and are often touched back upon again later in the piece. These breaks allow for various topics to be discussed in one essay, giving the connection and flow needed so that the area of focus can be widened. Utilizing paragraph breaks that are effective and smooth allows a nonfiction author to widen his or her scope of topic in one essay, making more conclusions and drawing more connections that would be possible if only one topic was focused upon. It also gives the essay a structure that is less confusing, so that topics are not switched mid-paragraph, thereby losing the flow that the author would like to keep.

Samuel Johnson's 'The Solitude of the Country'

     I decided to read Samuel Johnson's 'The Solitude of the Country' because, as an introverted person, I believed that the essay would discuss what being in the country alone could do for a person in a positive sense. It has always been a personal sort of dream to retire to the country when I'm a little older, close enough to a town or city to be able to find things to do when I want to, but generally out in the quiet and peacefulness of a secluded nature home. Instead, when I read this essay, I was met with Johnson's reasoning for why certain people should not retire to the country, and these reasons resonated with me.

     Johnson utilizes his essay to describe the different types of people who seek out the solitude of the country, and while normally their reasons for doing so won't be fulfilled by retiring or would be a bad thing overall to do. He states that, "The greater part of the admirers of solitude, as of all other classes of mankind, have no higher or remoter view, than the present gratification of their passions" (Johnson 141). People of arrogance will seek out solitude to avoid avoid repaying others the regard which they receive themselves, but find that solitude means they are not praised and powerful as they are in company. People who avoid the failures of other and are sensitive to the grossness of the world will find they must succumb to personal reflection while in solitude, and they will scramble for other people to focus on. 

     Two major points Johnson had stuck out to me, and they pertained to those who seek solitude for learning and those who seek solitude for religious reasons. Johnson says that, "He has learned to no purpose, that is not able to teach; and he will always teach unsuccessfully, who cannot recommend his sentiments by his diction or address" (Johnson 143). I have found myself thinking in the past that if I was removed from society, I would have time to do all the thins I don't have time for now such as reading more books, writing more, teaching myself more things. Johnson argues that this learning is for no purpose if you are in complete solitude and cannot discuss with others what you have sought out to learn, and I would agree with this. He also wonders whether those students who ache for solitude wouldn't find themselves sleeping instead of learning, and in my personal case this would definitely happen.

     As for religion, Johnson believes that some who lack the ability to avoid temptation should seclude themselves to save themselves from ruin. However, he believes that of those where, "the world passes before them without influence or regard" (Johnson 144), they possess a rare gift where they are able to lead a moral example of a life without being corrupted by others. In this case, those people should surround themselves with others and not the nature, so as to be a guardian of mankind, a light, and if they withdraw to solitude then they, "desert the station which Providence assigned them" (Johnson 144). I agree heavily with his ideas on those hidden away for religious reasons, and personally having known priests and sisters who refuse to hide away to avoid all of the evils of the world but instead go out in the world to fight the evil with their good, I see them as great beacons of light in a vast darkness.

     As for the actual writing of the essay, I enjoy Johnson's style. His diction is nothing more difficult than Austen or Shakespeare, which is refreshing given he was only alive during the 1700s. His writing does employ too many commas, and I wonder if this is a reflection of the writing style of the time or just a personal choice. In either case it can make the writing very choppy, forcing the reader to pause when a pause is actual unnatural. He argues with precision and just the right amount of detail to make his points, and my one complaint about the essay is that I would like to see more on the subject. Johnson ends his essay with the talk of the religious people. However within the second paragraph he talks of people who believe, "that the assistance which we may derive from one another, is not equivalent to the evils which we may fear" (Johnson 141), but doesn't argue that point any further. I would have enjoyed reading what he had to say on such a matter, and while he does touch upon that topic in all of his arguments, I would like to see that focused on.

Overall, I recommend everyone to read this essay by Johnson. My lackadaisical summary and flimsy appraisals don't do the piece justice, and I look forward to reading more Johnson in the future. 

Men at Night and Emily Free's Slipping Into Reality

The pacing of both "Men at Night" and "Slipping into Reality" seem very similar to me. In Huddle's essay, the story starts with an event that ends in slight confusion, and during the run back the story starts to become chaotic and a little scary, before there is a sudden peace that settles at the end. In Emily's essay, there is also an event that has slightly confusing results, and then her essay becomes disjointed and confusing before coming back to calm reality. One thing that Emily could learn from Huddle's essay, is that Huddle's seemed to allow some personal thoughts but mainly stated facts, especially during the chaos and then calm. Emily could work on her essay so that perhaps there was a little less personal thought when things become chaotic, or at least to state those thoughts as fact. It appears to keep the essay fast paced and chaotic without being unintelligible.

Solnit on the Self

In the chapter Flight, Rebecca Solnit weaves different stories into her own as she does throughout most of the book. She discusses the Tang artist Wu Daozi, the Road Runner and Coyote cartoon, the people of the past Easter Island, and then the origin story of her own path to writing. This evolves back into a story of her mother, as the book started, and then takes a sharp turn to involve Iceland and the crazy coincidences that led her to being invited there.

All of these stories are twined together expertly by Solnit, so that details that may not make sense at first come back later to solidify a point. The unrelated Wu Daozi becomes a means to talk about doors and escaping into the lives of others. The term dei ex machina is introduced here, which is mentioned in the passage of page 248, and Solnit talks of how events of the gods do occur which can send life spinning into any direction. These events of the gods, these coincidences, culminate to create doors of opportunity that build one's life.

This is true for Rebecca, whose trip to Iceland was due to the dei ex machina that often occurs in real life. Her book was passed between multiple people, one of whom met her in person, which led to her invitation to the new country which is also explained in the chapter Flight. Rebecca also talks of how a person is not just that person, but the combination of every person they've met and experience they've had, and those people's experiences, and so on.