In Dillard’s essay “Living Like Weasels” she takes her desire of wanting a more simpler life, like that of a weasel, when she references “I could very calmly go wild” (Dillard 121). When you look at a weasel you will soon discover that a weasel is not a household pet; it resides in the wilderness typically away from suburbia. A weasel hunts for its food, and is a fearsome hunter, sometimes killing more than it actually needs at that moment, but stores the rest to have for later. Weasels have a high metabolism, so the weasel actually won’t have to store it to long before he will be hungry again. While a weasel may be small and cute, they are very dangerous. If they latch hold to you, they are not going to let go, like the example Dillard …show more content…
provided in her essay when an eagle was shot out of the sky and the shooter examined his kill only to find that of a “dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat” (Dillard 118) and still attached to the eagle. Dillard viewed the weasel’s strong sense for survival and basic necessity for food as a form of freedom, a freedom that a human does not experience. In Dillard’s essay she illustrates through her thoughts of how she would like to live a life of freedom, like she believes a weasel has, and minimize her world of choice. Choices, what human doesn’t love choices?
Choices are wonderful, they allow you to choose what you want to wear every day, what super market to buy your food at, you can choose what your daily meals will be instead of what is available, you choose where you want to live, etc.. By living a human life, you live in a life with an enormous amount of choices available to you. While these choices are available to you, it is also up to you and you alone on what choices you make. The choice or choices you make could impact your life more affluent or it could force your life into a very gloomy and dismal place. If our choices were limited and focused more on necessity, like that of a weasel who only “lives in necessity” (Dillard 121) what would our new life look like each day? What would we wear? Would we have to hunt for our own food? Would we have to live where food was in abundance for us to hunt? Could you imagine living in the desert where the food opportunities are grim and making that decision to either stay, potentially dying of starvation, or move, in hopes of surviving the move, to a place where the land is lavish and the food is bountiful. You would be living in the now, no past to reminisce on, no future to dream of, the absolute right now with all of your focus on your food source in order to …show more content…
survive. Why do we think living in a way where “yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity” (Dillard 121) is a better way to live our human life?
Possibly by making life a little simpler, in turn would impact our world positively where it would be absent of the mental tribulations that some experience today in our human life. Mental tribulations are contributed by stress of our current life of choices where we choose to work long hours to get ahead, we choose to go to school while working and raising a family, we choose to help our elderly parents, we choose to keep adding on more and more financial or non-financial responsibilities that cause this additional stress. If we could get rid of all that stress, remove the choices that give us that stress, wouldn’t we all feel better? When we look at the weasels life of freedom the weasel is “noticing everything, remembering nothing” (Dillard 121), this infers that the weasel is not living in the past like us humans do, he is living in the present time. If humans were able to do this, we wouldn’t dwell on our mistakes, we wouldn’t have the mental scars from a bad childhood or from a tragic time in our life, we wouldn’t worry about what tomorrow would bring, we wouldn’t need our past or memories, we would move forward just like any other day using our natural instincts, like that of a weasel, to fulfill a basic necessity, such as food. If humans took a few steps back and made their life a little more primitive
then maybe the world would be a happier, stress free, care free, violence free place to live. In conclusion, how can humans realistically take their lives to absolute freedom, the place of living “in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive” (Dillard 121). While it is not realistic for humans to live exactly like a weasel does, there are lifestyle changes that we can make in our daily lives so we can have some freedom from our choices. We can succeed in doing this by reducing unnecessary daily obligations that were made from our previous choices, strive to live a more modest life. For example, you can live a more modest lifestyle by not driving the most expensive car or living in the most expensive house. Make more modest choices and choose to drive a more reasonably priced car, live in a reasonably sized and cost conscious home. By making these or similar modest lifestyle choices you will no longer be living each day full of stress and financial obligation of having to find the means to pay for luxurious items that you truly do not need. Ask yourself next time your shopping and something shiny catches your eye, do you really need that? If the answer is no, and therefore, it is not a necessity in order for you to survive, put it back and don’t make the purchase. All of us can put forth significant effort to make our lives a little simpler; a little more care free and live “every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity” (Dillard 121)
Even if the events in the people’s lives don’t change, if they change their outlook on life. Forget the bad times and relish in the good times, they might have a better quality of life. If we can all just stop fretting over what we didn’t do or what could have happened, we can just sit back, accept and enjoy life as it is. And Listen to the birds singing Poo-tee-weet.
Without the ability of choice in Jonas’s society there is no ability to improve of change. For example the ceremonies “I remember how proud my parents were” exclaimed father telling Jonas how he had participated in a ceremony and his parents before him. This is true because no one has differed from the set path life in the community. Also without choice there is no ability for improvement. Humans learn from mistakes and without choices there would be no mistakes therefore making it impossible to improve anything.
For class we read “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf and “The Death of a Moth” by Annie Dillard. This was the first time I had read either of these essays and I have found a new respect for their style of writing. I think that the amount of detail that they put into the two essays was astonishing. But, what impressed me the most was the difference between the types of detail.
In the modern world, people posses more than what they can actually keep tract of physically and mentally. Everyone wants to live the “good life” where they can have no limits to the things they want. Whether it is clothes, cars, jewelry, or houses, the need to buy things that are affordable and are in style preoccupies the minds of many people. The argument for necessity goes against this way of modern living, but agrees with Thoreau's view on it. The argument is that people should have enough of each just ...
The first chapter in Who Owns the Ice House is all about choice. There was a quote from the author that states, “The ability to choose the way we react to our circumstances is perhaps the greatest power that we have” (Taulbert 2010). This in my opinion is a very true statement. Our choices are what define us and set us apart from other people. As taulbert talks about in his book, people who dream and have great ideas either choose to do
Everybody wants to be accepted, yet society is not so forgiving. It bends you and changes you until you are like everyone else. Society depends on conformity and it forces it upon people. In Emerson's Self Reliance, he says "Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater." People are willing to sacrifice their own hopes and freedoms just to get the bread to survive. Although the society that we are living in is different than the one the Emerson's essay, the idea of fitting in still exists today. Although society and our minds make us think a certain way, we should always trust our better judgment instead of just conforming to society.
In “Living Like Weasels,” the writer, Annie Dillard, is talking about weasels by describing some of their living habits and narrating her sudden encounter with a weasel which made her change her mind towards the real meaning of life. In her essay, Dillard is comparing weasels’ life with humans’ life, and in some parts she is favoring weasel’s life over our life since they live freely, but our freedom has been limited .
A really good representation of choice and how what we choose impacts us is the knife Todd gets from Ben when he has to leave. On page 84, Todd thinks after his first real battle with Aaron, ‘‘But a knife ain't just a thing, is it? It's a choice,
In “Living like Weasels”, Dillard explores the concepts of the interconnectedness of nature as well the concepts of freedom and choice, both of which are quintessential transcendentalist ideas. This essay also seemed to me as strongly reminiscent of Thoreau’s Walden, another transcendentalist work. The central event in this essay was the encounter between Dillard and a weasel while she is visiting Hollin’s Pond. They lock eyes and seem to share an intimate moment, which Dillard describes as “a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons.” This is a pivotal point in the essay because it is after this moment that she begins to consider the way the weasel lives and examines the benefits of living animalistically over living as humans typically do.
Heschel approaches his discussion of the mode of opportunity through the comparison of man and animal. The life of an animal is fixed, and what it can be is determined at birth. With the human person, there is no fixedness or determinedness; instead, there is prospect and opportunity. In living, man navigates a unique “inner life” which is infinitely complex influenced by the experiences of life (39). Man possesses an endless capability to develop his inner self, an unbounding potentiality which is not present in any other being or animal. Heschel concludes with how it is difficult to conceptualize limitless possibilities to what a human is able to be (40). Opportunity is Herschel’s second most important constitutive trait of human being as it is crucial to realizing human potential. Every occurrence in a human lifetime provides the opportunity for growth, development and the ultimate fulfillment of destiny. Without opportunity, it is not possible for a human to set or even achieve any goals, an endeavor that is essential to a meaningful human life. Opportunity allows individuals to define themselves, broaden who they are, and shape who they become. Opportunity also allows a person to discover and embellish personal uniqueness to benefit all of humanity. Although essential to meaningful human existence, the quality of
The Importance of Being Earnest appears to be a conventional 19th century farce. False identities, prohibited engagements, domineering mothers, lost children are typical of almost every farce. However, this is only on the surface in Wilde's play. His parody works at two levels- on the one hand he ridicules the manners of the high society and on the other he satirises the human condition in general. The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest assume false identities in order to achieve their goals but do not interfere with the others' lives. The double life led by Algernon, Jack, and Cecily (through her diary) is simply another means by which they liberate themselves from the repressive norms of society. They have the freedom to create themselves and use their double identities to give themselves the opportunity to show opposite sides of their characters. They mock every custom of the society and challenge its values. This creates not only the comic effect of the play but also makes the audience think of the serious things of life.
Dillard’s essay delves into the way humans live, and says that we as humans “could live any way we want" (Dillard 66). All Dillard encountered was a mere weasel. An ordinary
It is not a common everyday question you ask yourself but do you know how many choices you have to make in an average day? Every second of everyday we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. We do not take note of the choices we make, it almost just comes as common nature but the number is much higher than we all may think.
The weird complexity of nature is rather intriguing, finding a definite answer for why anything happens in the animal kingdom seems almost impossible. American author Annie Dillard wrote an essay titled, "Jest and Earnest" (a chapter from her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) published in 1974 where she shared her thoughts about nature, and she essentially questions the cruelty and randomness in nature while still trying to persuade deeper thinkers of life that there may still be beauty beneath it all. Dillard provides some reasoning to this claim by giving three different types of acts: one being downright horrible, another being description of beauty, finally one being both, and she also cites contrasting thoughts from credible
When growing up in this day, with many of our fellow men and women trying to get a taste of the good life. They will try to obtain happiness in very different ways with how they treat each other. The choices I have made have given me great opportunities to create a better and more fulfilling life for me. The reason I believe that choices affect our lives so greatly is because most of us our given a fair chance in todays world. An example from my life is being able to get over family problems with my dad. I made a life choice not to have contact with him because of the man I saw when I was a child. The troubles in my family will help me be a strong and more independent person throughout my life. Having independence will help me continue to grow into a hopefully more successful adult. Making the choice in not having contact with my father was a difficult decision. It was hard to keep a relationship with my real brother because he still keeps in touch with my dad. My older brother may look down on my choice, but I believe that I made a better choice. In the future I may have regretted in not speaking to my father, but for right now I think it is better to cut all communication with him. Being able to make a hard choices in cutting communicati...