Literature
For as long as I can remember, I've loved to read: short stories,
fiction, nonfiction sometimes, even philosophy if nothing else were
available. This term I've been given more reading assignments than I
can ever remember having to deal with. This term has been extra special
because we studied no less than three types of literature: short
stories, poetry, and drama.
While I was in high school, a short story was a book with less than
three hundred pages. This term I learned that even though a short story
may be only a few pages long, there are chapters of interpretation,
ambiguity, and symbolism to understand. In "The Lottery" by Shirley
Jackson, I found a story teeming with so much symbolism that I had to
read the story twice before I understood half of it. In "Araby" by
James Joyce, I learned to look deeper than just the surface of the
original wording to find new meanings to the story.
Poetry, on the other hand, has been like a curse to me. I felt as if I
were out of my depth when forced to read it. I could read the words,
but comprehension was beyond me. Then, just last week I discovered
poetry is indeed a foreign language. "I've always picked up languages
easily," I thought. I then knew that all I had to do was translate the
dead language of poetry into terms I could understand, then, with a
blinding flash, comprehension dawned. E.E. Cummings is really just a
dirty old man. Carlos Williams is a political activist, and Dylan
Thomas is incredibly grief stricken about the loss of some loved one.
The emotions of the poems were almost too overwhelming to deal with.
Once I was told that as we evolve, so to does our...