In “The Plague”, by Albert Camus, Joseph Grand experiences a creative stagnation. He cannot get past his opening sentence: “One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenue of the Bois de Boulogne.” Having revised it and rearranged it for years, he cannot make sense of it and fails to generate a story. His idea of perfection ruins his creative side. He frantically wants the precise words and thinks that learning Latin will make him a better writer. He uses all of his time and energy creating a first perfect sentence, something that he never achieves. Every time he finishes the sentence, he is unsatisfied and writes it again. He does not allow himself to create his masterpiece since he is so preoccupied with the degree of correctness and clarity.
Indirectly through out his novel, Camus compares people who rely too much on their logic and rationality, versus those who accept that our world is confusing and unpredictable. Similar to his thinking, in “Crickets, Bats, Cats and Chaos” Lewis Thomas suggests that chaos stimulates the brain and actually suggests that even crickets or cats have thoughts during chaotic or unpredictable situations. Even though I have always seen chaos as a total lack of order, a desperate situation in which an individual loses control, Thomas gave me a new concept for chaos. He says that it emerges when a system is altered by a small change or small uncertainty in its interior; chaos is then the lack of predictability retaining some mathematical rules, not, the lack of order.
Thomas makes an analogy between humans and crickets. When they are several meters away, crickets ...
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... position is very radical. He thinks civilization has brought disorder and has distance the human beings from nature. It is true that the ambition to dominate the planet has caused some people to destroy natural resources, increase the levels of contamination and lose the respect for our own nature. However, I cannot disregard all the progresses that humans have done through out the years, which have helped improve the quality of our life. The respect for nature has to continue along with the growth of our knowledge.
Works Cited
Camus, Albert, “The Plague.”
Cooper, Bernard. “Labyrinthine.” Occasions for Writing . Ed. Robert DiYanni and Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson, 2007. 345- 47. Print.
Thomas, Lewis. “Crickets, Bats, Cats & Chaos.” Occasions for Writing . Ed.
Robert DiYanni and Pat C. Hoy II. Boston: Thomson, 2007. 490-93.
Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis.”
The majority of this piece is dedicated to the author stating his opinion in regards to civilization expanding beyond its sustainable limits. The author makes it clear that he believes that humans have failed the natural environment and are in the process of eliminating all traces of wilderness from the planet. Nash points out facts that strengthen his argument, and quotes famous theologians on their similar views on environmental issues and policies. The combination of these facts and quotes validates the author’s opinion.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Updike, John. "A&P." Thinking and Writing About Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001. 981-86. Print.
I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things – a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in whi...
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Literature and the Writing Process. Elizabeth Mahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 6th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice, 2002. 977-986
He believes that the wilderness has helped form us and that if we allow industrialization to push through the people of our nation will have lost part of themselves; they will have lost the part of themselves that was formed by the wilderness “idea.” Once the forests are destroyed they will have nothing to look back at or to remind them of where they came from or what was, and he argues everyone need to preserve all of what we have now.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Revelation." Literature for Composition: Reading and Writing Arguments about Essays, Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. By Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2007. 414-427. Print.
Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. An Introduction to Literature. New York: Pearson Longman, 2006.
Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. 5th ed. of the book. Boston: Heinle, 2004.
Glaspell, Susan. Trifles. Literature and the Writing Process. Eds. Elizabeth McMahan, Susan X. Day, and Robert Funk. 4th Ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 1996. 999-1008.
Barnet, Sylvan, William Burto, and William E. Cain. Literature for Composition. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing About Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. Ed. Frank Madden. 4th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. 1151-61. Print
Walker, Alice. "Everyday Use." Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Sixth edition. Eds. X.J. Dennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.
...en as unpredictable. An individual cannot necessarily go off of what one person does and generalize it to a whole population. Chaos theory forces one to look at people as individuals. It promotes the idea that each person is an individual complex system that may or may not behave as predicted.