Assignment#2 English 101

Questions and Responses for 3 Essays

On George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”: “Despite the difficulties you may have understanding specific allusion, what advice from Orwell can you apply to your own writing? To your reading?”

One of Orwell’s suggestions for clarity in prose writing is “…to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations” (567). One possible application of this suggestion would be to actually draw a picture of a concept, or situation that I want to put into words. Along with a picture, I could add a list of “sensations”. Let’s say I want to recapture the morning of my grandmother’s death. I could sketch my memory of her as she lay in her bed, her closed eyes, the position of her hands, and her white wisps of hair spread upon her pillow. I could add the sense of peace I felt, noticing she was at rest and no longer struggling. My sketch might act as a cue to prompt further memories. Or, if I wanted to write about the concept of injustice, I could sketch or imagine a scene where injustice was occurring. Then I could jot down a list of images and sensations. This suggestion also applies to reading. I’m remembering something Robin Moore said. (He’s the author of a book on writing, the title of which I can’t remember right now.) Moore said that books are dead tree carcasses with ink blotches and that there are no stories in books. The stories are in our heads and we discover them through the images we are able to translate from the written page. (This is a very loose paraphrase.) In other words, when reading, it is a natural occurrence for me to translate the letters into images, and the images into stories. For a particularly difficult passage of reading, I could pause, close my eyes, and pay attention to the images that come to my mind. Or, if I want to understand a character better, I could read a portion of character description, then imagine the character, then sketch or write about what I imagined.

On Cynthia Ozick’s “The Seam of the Snail”: “In this essay Ozick describes two different kinds of excellence—one of “ripe generosity” and one of narrow perfectionism. Can you find examples of these two kinds of excellence in your own experience? Write an essay in which you explore the contrasts between these two kinds of excellence in broader detail.”

Are perfectionist tendencies at odds with generousness of spirit? Ozick uses one set of characteristics to describe herself and the other to describe her mother. But, all of these tendencies are at work in me. As I once explained to my mother, my house is usually messy because I am a perfectionist. This made no sense to her, so I explained further. When I clean house I become a domestic dictator. Are you finished with that glass? Then you need to put it in the dishwasher? Are those your schoolbooks? Take them to your room. Did you wipe your feet? Please put the lid back on the peanut butter and put it in the pantry. I’m relentless! Over and over again I have pleaded with my children, If you worked very hard constructing a building and, after you were finished, someone came and knocked it down, how would you feel? Well, that’s how I feel when I’ve been cleaning and you come along behind me and mess everything up. I’ve said these things over and over again and have even thought about putting them on a tape recording so I could just push a button instead of wasting my breath. But I hate the way these tirades make me feel. So, these days, my house looks very lived in. As long as I don’t go on one of my perfectionist cleaning binges, I don’t mind as much if it gets messed up. I figure I’ll clean house again when my kids are all grown. Still, I’m not always generous where my children’s sloppy habits are concerned. Before the day is out I’ll be telling my sons: You know, the dishwasher is just a foot away from the sink. Is it that much extra effort to turn your body 30 degrees and but your bowl in there?

On Loren Eiseley’s “The Flow of the River”: “ ‘If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water,’ Eiseley writes in his opening sentence. Elaborate on this statement, focusing on your own experiences with nature.”

I am thinking of all the bodies of water I have had the privilege of becoming acquainted with. When my sister Sandra and I were girls, we would strip to our undies on rainy days and play in the marsh wet back yard had become. I can still feel the sponginess of earth, and the slippery tentacles of grass against my feet. I remember playing in the stream which ran alongside the park below my childhood home, carefully lifting big flat stones so as not to disturb the silt along the creek bed, and scooping up crawdads in rusty tin cans. And, I remember being absolutely fascinated by the rainbarrel which set on the back edge of my grandmother’s house where rain ran tumbled from gutter pipes to become its contents. In her early years, my grandmother used water from the rainbarrel to wash clothes. Later, my grandparents kept it in case the house caught on fire. I loved staring into the rainbarrel, its black surface speckled with bits of insect wings glistening in the sunlight. I love the sound of water: rain falling on the roof and skylight, rapid water gurgling over stones, waves of ocean crashing upon the shore. Some of my journaling buddies and I have wracked our brains trying to come up with a new and startling way to say “babbling brook”. Like Eiseley, I never learned to swim properly. Still, I can stay afloat and have done so in all types of waters: pools, ponds, creeks. Lakes, rivers, oceans. In Turkey, I walked barefoot over a hard beach of polished stones so I could step into the cold January waters of the Mediterranean. And I have steamed in the healing waters which flow down from the Travertine Mountains in Cappodocia. My toes have explored the warmer waters of the Pacific from the shores of Mazatlan, Mexico, the pull of the undertow in rough currents of the Atlantic, and the calm of the big blue bathtub off the island of St. Martin. I’ve seen falls, from the small trickles which pour over the sides of mountains after rain, to larger ones like Black Water, and the mammoth Niagara. When I am stressed, closing my eyes and imagining any of these waters calms me. I am helped along by the bubbling of a small terra cotta fountain beside my desk.

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