Bookends

unrealized dream simply sags heavy at the side of the dreamer, adding weight to life’s baggage and difficulty to its journey. As for line eleven of Hughes’ work, which reads simply, “Or does it explode?” it is positioned alone and almost as a pairing bookend with the opening inquiry. As a result, the reader may conclude that this is the most likely outcome of pushing back a dream. Perhaps, if never attained, a dream will simply grow too large to fit inside the heart of the dreamer and eventually…

Obsessive or not, any parent wants to believe that she is making a big difference in the kind of person her child turns out to be. Otherwise, why bother? The belief in parental power is manifest in the first official act a parent commits: giving the baby a name. As any modern parent knows, the baby-naming industry is booming, as evidenced by a proliferation of books, websites, and baby-name consultants. Many parents seem to believe that a child cannot prosper unless it is hitched to the…

Thematically, the common thread among the three short stories “The Secret Miracle” by Jorge Luis Borges , “Journey Back to the Source” by Alejo Carpentier, and Julio Cortazar’s “Continuity of Parks” is the manipulation of time. Each use the cyclical nature of time to tackle a sort of worldly completion. Hladik finishes his book, the reader in “Continuity of Parks” becomes the ultimate reader by being completely absorbed by his book, the house in “Journey Back to the Source” comes full circle and…

My biggest failure has been failing a certification test that would make or break my Air Force career. Security +, the test, was required to graduate and continue to my next duty assignment. The two week class acted as a bookend of a six month networking school. Meant to be a test of competence and qualification, this class would be much more difficult than what the training program had to offer leading up to the final test. We were taught at breakneck speed. In two weeks I was expected…

receives from constituents. I generally skim the letters and research relevant information for five minutes before I start writing as the Assemblyman. Every letter begins, “Dear Mr. XX” and ends “Sincerely, Your Assemblyman.” In between those two bookends, I write what seems like overly vague statements from David Hadley’s perspective, creating the illusion that he wrote the response instead of I, an eighteen-year-old high school student. I am not critiquing David Hadley; this letter writing…

IMAGINE A RUIN so strange it must never have happened. First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A…

maid being the only one who cares about him, yet when Jim offers his jacket, this broadens his worldview; it shows him that there are other people who care. This marks the beginning of their interactions with each other, as well as serving as a bookend for the movie: in the beginning, Jim offers Plato his jacket, and he doesn’t take it. At the climax, however, Jim offers his jacket again, and this time, Plato accepts. Offering the jacket symbolizes their growth as characters throughout the …

cerebral, and Romantic art was passionate. Neoclassicism represented the state of art before the first French revolution. Romanticism is the result of classically trained French artists living within the historical context of two bloody revolutions as bookends to the Napoleonic…

fox, or rather, as an idea rattling around a desolate brain, until finally, it comes about in its own business free of criticism and onto the page. The poem also examines the moments before and after these images, which Hughes writes as cyclical bookends underlining the loneliness of writing. The piece begins and ends with a starless sky. But Hughes makes the argument that those lonesome moments before the fox are worth it for the green forest, and for the printed page. The writer, the speaker…

the character’s new friends. Soto says, “I stayed with the ugly boys who leaned against the chain link fence and looked around with propellers of grass spinning in our mouths. We saw girls walk by alone, saw couples, hand in hand, their heads like bookends pressing air together. We saw them and spun our propellers so fast our faces were blurs.” This is showing us that because of his jacket, he is hanging out with the “greasers” of his school. He is also becoming one. This is all because of…