Annie Dillard Essay
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
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It starts rather peacefully, Dillard seemly amused by nature and its inhabitants; however, she starts to notice this one out of place frog amidst all the other normal ones, and this is the starting part in where Dillard quickly shifts her tone from peaceful to disturbing. This was her first time ever to witness killing, which was a water bug eating a frog, and it left her in shock. This act makes her question the idea of an ordered, meaningful existence, and going as far as questioning rather God created the water bug, and living things in general, out of jest or earnest. When she starts to question these things she again switches her tone. The act of the water bug was very horrible thing, and nothing beautiful or meaningful seems to come out of it. Dillard does not find a concrete answer to this question herself, but she uses her own experience with nature to …show more content…
She quotes Allah questioning rather God made heaven or earth “in jest.” (231) Suggesting if God made these things for amusement or as a sort of cruel joke. However, she later quotes Albert Einstein saying, “God is subtle,” and that he is, “not malicious.” On one side you have a god written in the books saying that he made stuff out of jest, but on the other side you have a well-known scientist saying god does not practice in malicious ways like in just jest. Dillard provided these two contradicting quotes to support her stance that nature can be random and is not always fully comprehensible. God, in theory, is supposed to control the entire world, and that includes nature. Dillard suggest that humans can never probably fully understand nature, only god can. Again, she backs up this statement by using two quotes from different opposing sides. We don’t know if either of them is right or wrong because the only true way we can possible know why God created the things he did is by asking him directly. This, in the end, shows the reader that not everything can be fully understood and that some stuff in nature is purely just random to
Adding to this idea that nature and all of its ugliness and abnormalities is still in fact nature, Quammen goes on further by addressing the human attitude towards nature’s intricacies. By this, Quammen refers to the human attitude towards nature as a whole based solely upon his/her opinion of one organism. As textual evidence for this idea, the example of the spider can be used again. Most people associate the black widow as being venomous and deadly, and so they unfairly associate the same characteristics with harmless beneficial house and garden spiders as well. This attitude toward the spiders can also be applied to nature as a whole. Since humans posses this attitude towards nature, a lot of nature’s beauty is often overlooked.
Instead of allowing a peaceful compromise between how humans takes on nature there seems to be a lot more indecisive decisions on how humans might think of nature and how vital it is to us and that it's another substance on the earth we live in that must be respected. The actions in this essay this is what had created Johnson's idea on this text giving us the image of what happens to some of these creature without remorse and it is a sad idea to process for some as for others it's a fun process to think about. When she first sees the fox it's described almost as a hero of some sort as it runs with a chip on it's shoulders but until she gets the closer looks she explains the fox saying “Her eyes were cold and amber…there were ticks in her ears and one ear was bitten and ragged on the edges” (72), what once was looked at with high standards is not looked at with confusion and sorrow. After seeing the chilling image of the fox we start to feel like if only there were something that could be done to help ant part of nature from being beaten up. In the end Johnson explains how a while after seeing the fox she comes to understand that man had become the conqueror of the that area by saying “And that winter a hunter trapped and killed all the foxes of these woods and fields for miles around” (72), not something that should be bragged upon by others. What would you yourself think of this situation she was in finding out of a man who hunted all the foxes in that area and now to not be seen
Early in the essay, she describes herself living alone with her two cats, and she, somehow, makes joke with them although it was not so sure how often she did that in a day. There we can see that she is solitary, yet has some sense of humor lies in herself. Revealing her living environment, that would signal the reader about the upcoming adventure of her with the moths. Some may question why Dillard chose Moths instead of other interesting bugs like a caterpillar or flies to relate to human life. Plus, she does not only explain how the moths dies, but also provides a vivid detail of them dying so that the reader to
Annie Dillard portrays her thoughts differently in her passage, incorporating a poetic sense that is carried through out the entire passage. Dillard describes the birds she is viewing as “transparent” and that they seem to be “whirling like smoke”. Already one could identify that Dillard’s passage has more of poetic feel over a scientific feel. This poetic feeling carries through the entire passage, displaying Dillard’s total awe of these birds. She also incorporates word choices such as “unravel” and that he birds seem to be “lengthening in curves” like a “loosened skein”. Dillard’s word choice implies that he is incorporating a theme of sewing. As she describes these birds she seems to be in awe and by using a comparison of sewing she is reaching deeper inside herself to create her emotions at the time.
When needing to seek refuge, Annie Dillard goes to Tinker Creek and immerses herself in nature. During one of these trips, she has a little snippet of a revelation, which makes her see the beauty and the ugliness of the world in harmony and thus a sense of what the world is. In this passage, Dillard uses symbolism, verb choice and similes to explain how even though something might be ugly and appalling, it is part of the beauty of life.
Mary Oliver’s unique responses to the owls illustrate the complexity of nature by displaying its two sides. Mary Oliver at first enjoys owls and all they have to offer, yet she later emphasizes her fear of a similar animal. The visual imagery she uses in her descriptions
While Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth” and Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” both use animals as a symbol of life to share their viewpoint of life, Woolf uses sad and sympathetic tone and usual description of a typical autumn morning and Dillard uses cheerful and positive tone and almost dreamlike description of a beautiful summer evening to convey that people should live their lives the way they choose, since death is inevitable anyway.
As a result of her transformational journey, the narrator has succumbed to madness because of her fantasies, death as a result of her confrontation with a life without passion, and resignation as a result of her acceptance of death. Water, the green-world token, leads her to passion and death, which for the narrator become one in the same.
From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.
Audubon and Dillard’s general outlook of the flocks of birds in flight and how they are affected by their experiences differ. In the end, both writers exhibit their own perception of beauty through their encounter with the birds, although Audubon saw the beauty in factuality, and Dillard saw it in her own interweaved thoughts and emotions.
Irony in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is full of irony. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the protagonists in the play, get themselves into a complicated situation called Bunburyism (as Algernon refers to it). They pretend to be someone that they are not to escape their daily lives. They lie to the women they admire, and eventually the truth is revealed.
The poems, "The Bull Moose" by Alden Nowlan, "The Panther" by Rainer Maria Rilke, "Walking the Dog" by Howard Nemerov, and "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop, illustrate what happens when people and nature come together, but the way in which the people react to these encounters in these poems is very different. I believe that when humans and nature come together either they clash and conflict because individuals destroy and attempt to control nature, which is a reflection of their powerful need to control themselves, or humans live peacefully with nature because they not only respect and admire nature, but also they can see themselves in the nature.
Nature is often a focal point for many author’s works, whether it is expressed through lyrics, short stories, or poetry. Authors are given a cornucopia of pictures and descriptions of nature’s splendor that they can reproduce through words. It is because of this that more often than not a reader is faced with multiple approaches and descriptions to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a deeper and personal observation as in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, while other authors tend to focus on a more religious beauty within nature as show in Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”, suggesting to the reader that while to each their own there is always a beauty to be found in nature and nature’s beauty can be uplifting for the human spirit both on a visual and spiritual level.
“A Bird came down the Walk,” was written in c. 1862 by Emily Dickinson, who was born in 1830 and died in 1886. This easy to understand and timeless poem provides readers with an understanding of the author’s appreciation for nature. Although the poem continues to be read over one hundred years after it was written, there is little sense of the time period within which it was composed. The title and first line, “A Bird came down the Walk,” describes a common familiar observation, but even more so, it demonstrates how its author’s creative ability and artistic use of words are able to transform this everyday event into a picture that results in an awareness of how the beauty in nature can be found in simple observations. In a step like narrative, the poet illustrates the direct relationship between nature and humans. The verse consists of five stanzas that can be broken up into two sections. In the first section, the bird is eating a worm, takes notice of a human in close proximity and essentially becomes frightened. These three stanzas can easily be swapped around because they, for all intents and purposes, describe three events that are able to occur in any order. Dickinson uses these first three stanzas to establish the tone; the tone is established from the poet’s literal description and her interpretive expression of the bird’s actions. The second section describes the narrator feeding the bird some crumbs, the bird’s response and its departure, which Dickinson uses to elaborately illustrate the bird’s immediate escape. The last two stanzas demonstrate the effect of human interaction on nature and more specifically, this little bird, so these stanzas must remain in the specific order they are presented. Whereas most ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882), the leader of the Transcendentalism in New England, is the first American who wrote prose and poem on nature and the relationship between nature and man Emerson's philosophy of Transcendentalism concerning nature is that nature is only another side of God "the gigantic shadow of God cast our senses." Every law in nature has a counterpart in the intellect. There is a perfect parallel between the laws of nature and the laws of thought. Material elements simply represent an inferior plane: wherever you enumerate a physical law, I hear in it a moral rule. His poem The Rhodora is a typical instance to illustrate his above-mentioned ideas on nature. At the very beginning of the poem, the poet found the fresh rhodora in the woods, spreading its leafless blooms in a deep rock, to please the desert and the sluggish brook, while sea-winds pieced their solitudes in May. It is right because of the rhodora that the desert and the sluggish brook are no longer solitudes. Then the poem goes to develop by comparison between the plumes of the redbird and the rhodora . Although the bird is elegant and brilliant, the flower is much more beautiful than the bird. So the sages can not helping asking why this charm is wasted on the earth and sky. The poet answers beauty is its own cause for being just as eyes are made for seeing. There is no other reason but beauty itsel...