Narrative - Life with Escher
If you were to diagram my life, it would look very much like a drawing of Escher. Sometimes I feel like I'm the hand that's drawing a hand that's drawing itself. Other times I feel like I'm locked in one of those inescapable paradox cages. But most of all, I feel like I'm on the ever-ascending stairway that never goes anywhere.
Life's canvas was not designed to be painted by human hands. Constrained by the limitations of space and time, crippled by the human inability to see the entire painting at once, and gifted with an uncanny lack of judgement, I smear and smudge what I cannot go back and fix. At the same time, I worked hard to render my own image impeccably clear without the faintest idea of who I really was or the realization that I was constantly in flux, changing as often as a lonely flower bends before the force of the wind. Once I began to find outward stasis, my inward person grieved that I was not in the end what I wanted to be at the beginning. My attempts were futile.
I then looked to the Maker of the canvas and the Master Painter to draw something more perfect, more beautiful upon my heart and frame. But do I put down the brush and lay aside our pencils? No. I stupidly scribble all over the masterpiece of my Creator. Even if He asks me to stop (I only hear him if I haven't destroyed the ears He painted in) I stubbornly confound His every stroke. Worse, I think I made an improvement.
My life is also like Escher's paradox cage. This cage is of my own drawing. I thought I was building a palace for myself, but it restricted my movement. My own creation bound me, kept me from following the loving words of the Master Painter. He erased it for me once, but I was dumb enough to paint it back into existence. The funny thing, of course, is that it's just like the paradox cage. It doesn't really keep me inside. I just think it does. From my perspective, I have the illusion that it's an impregnable fortress when it's only a fake facade that need hold no one in, rendered so by the Master's nail-pierced hands. In the end, I choose to stay inside, though if I listened close, I'd hear the words of the Painter, guiding me through the illusion and onward in my life.
You are submerged in the tub of yourself—,” (Lines 11-12). The entire concept of the individual’s “tub” is now a construct of a person’s personality, and therefore each person is their own
From before the country’s conception to the war that divided it and the fallout that abolished it, slavery has been heavily engrained in the American society. From poor white yeoman farmers, to Northern abolitionist, to Southern gentry, and apathetic northerners slavery transformed the way people viewed both their life and liberty. To truly understand the impact that slavery has had on American society one has to look no further than those who have experienced them firsthand. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and advocate for the abolitionist, is on such person. Douglass was a living contradiction to American society during his time. He was an African-American man, self-taught, knowledgeable, well-spoken, and a robust writer. Douglass displayed a level of skill that few of his people at the time could acquire. With his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself, Douglass captivated the people of his time with his firsthand accounts into the horror and brutality that is the institution of slavery.
During the time of slavery, slaves were put to work on plantation, fields, and farms. They were considered property to their slave-owners and put under unfair living conditions. Growing up in this era, we can see the injustice between white and colored people. And one slave by the name of Fredrick Douglass witnessed this unjust tension. And because of this tension, dehumanizing practices became prominent among the slaves and in slave society. The most prominent of these injustices is the desire of slave owners to keep their slaves ignorant. This practice sought to deprive the slaves of their human characteristics and made them less valued. Fredrick Douglass was able to endure and confront this issue by asserting his own humanity. He achieved
Gender Trouble published in 1990 by Judith Butler, argues that feminism was and still relaying on the presumption that ‘women’ a...
It is impossible to understand the innermost and ever complex thoughts, feelings, hopes, and reflections of others. To understand is to grasp the strife and pleasure of each moment’s depth through a set lens. Confined by my own lens, I have been and will always be the main character of my own book. Though I can never know another human’s cognitive glances, I can at least be mindful of the infinite complexity and reasoning of each human. Even the most empathetic cannot understand exactly how Claude Monet felt for Camille, how Beethoven felt for “Elise”, or how
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave details the progression of a slave to a man, and thus, the formation of his identity. The narrative functions as a persuasive essay, written in the hopes that it would successfully lead to “hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of [his] brethren in bonds” (Douglass 331). As an institution, slavery endeavored to reduce the men, women, and children “in bonds” to a state less than human. The slave identity, according to the institution of slavery, was not to be that of a rational, self forming, equal human being, but rather, a human animal whose purpose is to work and obey the whims of their “master.” For these reasons, Douglass articulates a distinction between the terms ‘man’ and ‘slaves’ under the institution of slavery. In his narrative, Douglass describes the situations and conditions that portray the differences between the two terms. Douglass also depicts the progression he makes from internalizing the slaveholder viewpoints about what his identity should be to creating an identity of his own making. Thus, Douglass’ narrative depicts not simply a search for freedom, but also a search for himself through the abandonment of the slave/animal identity forced upon him by the institution of slavery.
In sum, all of these key arguments exist in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” because of the institution of slavery and its resulting lack of freedom that was used to defend it. This text’s arguments could all be gathered together under the common element of inequality and how it affected the practical, social, and even spiritual lives of the slaves.
Trudi Canavan once said, “Better to know the quick pain of truth than the ongoing pain of a long-held false hope.” Life would be much easier if the truth was told first before a lie is put in its place to cover up when in reality it creates a much bigger problem than saying the truth from the start. Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon, is a classic example of detective fiction and pulp magazine. Hammett demonstrates this example using: society, corruption, and criminality in San Francisco in the 1920s, explaining the role of the femme fatale in detective fiction, explaining the concept of fear and betrayal, explaining American men’s disillusionment after WWl, and explaining his, Dashiell Hammett’s, history of detective fiction and pulp magazines.
My life intersects with Into The Wild because I never had a good relationship with my mom or stepfather Dan who was 21 years older than my mother. So I “escaped” to Columbia much like Chris did from his own reality. Dan would drink every day; you would rarely see him without a drink in his hand. His drink of choice would be either whiskey or beer depending on what he could afford. You could always tell when he was smashed and when he was I was the person he wanted to tear down with his words the most. I remember one night after my grandma just had surgery and she was staying with us my mom asked me to cook. I told her I would. I then went outside to check what I was grilling and I knew Dan was out there intoxicated.
Showalter, Elaine. "Mob Scene." American Prospect 11 : 8 (Feb. 28, 2000) : 42-3 .
The consequence of this attitude is that he finds himself increasingly "stepping outside" his experiences in order to observe them from a distance. Instead of living his experiences more intensely, he finds himself o...
The boy from “Untitled” crumbles when faced with adversity; he is not resilient at all. Before he would draw; “and it wasn’t anything”, and he would stare into the sky; “It would be only him and the sky and the things inside him
You are a complex bundle of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, desires, images, fears, hopes, doubts, opinions and ambitions, each of them constantly changing, sometimes from second to second. Your entire life is the result of the intertwining and interconnecting of these factors.
Although ignorant of his own words, my grandfather has gotten it right: It is beautiful when it’s turning. We, as human beings, are not able to ossify what we perceive to be our “identity”; it will be forever changing—a kind of surreal, confounding, and complex reflection of our human experience. We possess innumerable facets, like little tubes of color that remain separate until some creative force removes all the caps and mixes them together. It is that mélange that initiates a masterpiece of identity—a masterpiece that is ever changing and never quite finished, but fulfilling in its progression. And it is precisely this understanding that makes the next stroke of the brush a little bit clearer, the portrait itself a bit more revealing.
As a teenager, you are always told that you are either “Too old for this” or “Too young for that.” It always seemed to me that my parents wanted me to grow up and be independent, but they also wanted me to be their baby forever. The problem is, sorry parents, you can’t be a kid and an adult at the same time. Shocker, I know, but it is the honest truth.