Seashell

She Who Has Earned the Rose Must Cultivate Her Garden In times of great pain or crisis, it can often be healing to seek one’s own emotional journey on the pages of a story. Disassociating one’s self from the vivid reality of the present and experiencing the trials and revelations of a fictional counterpart can aid in the personal coping process. Given the present circumstances, I have been finding new and deeper meaning in and empathy for Voltaire’s Candide. I feel that many members of the…

A criminal in one world and a saint in another; so which is it? In the novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury shows the readers how Montag slowly changes from an ordinary man to an individual unlike any other. But was his drastic transformation for the better? Unfortunately, Montag struggles to find his own path in his everyday life, his poor judgement constantly leading him into unnecessary chaos. With Montag’s inferior traits and intentions, Bradbury presents his main character as a careless and…

Have you ever wondered why a dollar or even a coin has any value at all? It’s just a piece of paper or metal and just as easily seashells or beads could have been given value for trade, right? Well what’s stopping other physical objects, or in this case pieces of code, from having value? Virtual currency or “cryptocurrency”, so called because it is a currency that uses a form of cryptography, is a type of currency that exists solely online. One of the most successful cryptocurrencies to emerge…

McClellan, his young neighbor, he stares into her eyes and he is struck by a memory of his mother from when he was a child. The electricity had gone out and his mother lit a candle. The two of them spent hours rediscovering a life without TV walls or Seashell earphones. When the fire is discussed in this passage, words such as illumination, comfortably, and rediscovery are used in a way that points to peace, not damage. Fire changes yet again when Montag is walking down a set of railroad tracks…

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451, is the story of a fireman named Guy Montag, who learns to think beyond what he has been told his whole life. Bradbury creates a technological society that Montag lives in to be a driven area where no one thinks for himself, doesn’t have an original idea, and where everybody has no opinion on where they belong in the community. Montag discovers that burning books and not thinking for himself isn’t the whole truth as he continues to open his mind to…

Poets, writers, and artists have suffered with the monsters of mental illness for decades; however, the theory that there may be a correlation between creativity and mental illness goes all the way back to Aristotle’s time. Although there have been many different surveys conducted over time testing the connection between mental illness and creativity, it is still unclear if there is a distinct connection between the two. Many believe that mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and…

Fahrenheit 451: A Revelation in The Sea of Faith Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury discusses the dangers of a society without authenticity and human connections. Bradbury and Matthew Arnold, author of the poem Dover Beach, both offer criticisms on this fruitless and idle way of life. In Fahrenheit 451, the world in which Guy Montag and Mildred live has chosen simple pleasures and mere distractions over intellect and free thinking, which are “evil.” Dover Beach complements these themes by…

Millie is a homemaker, “an expert at lip reading from ten years of apprenticeship at Seashell ear thimbles,” who longs for a fourth wall-TV to be installed in her living room, despite the fact that she just got the third two months ago and that the devices cost fully one-third of her husband’s annual salary (Bradbury 18), 20). Her modern…

walls in your home. They are completely oblivious to emotion or what is happening around them like Montag says “His wife stretched on the bed.., her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk, coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind” (58). Knowledge is important and can be bad but not having knowledge affects the community in many ways and can…

Imagine this: being alive and dead at the same time. Is this even possible, existing in life but be considered dead? Indeed it is, and Modernist literature combined this element, as well as other truths, in their writing. The Modern Era lasted from around 1900 to 1950. World War I, World War II, Great Depression, and Dust Bowl are just some of the events that influenced the literature such as: The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Mrs. Dalloway by…