The Wanderer

What is backpacking? Many people ask me this question and I stare at them, wide eyed. But then I realised that this term didn’t get the acclaim that it deserves. No, I am not talking silly. Pick up any traveller that you know and ask them about the term, you will get the same reaction. Backpacking is something that in rough words can be translated into the bliss that is there out of your day to day schedule. Travelling is usually a way of living for people like us, travellers but it is also a…

Today I walked into a dark place at 7:33 am. I walked into this dark place everyday at the exact same time and I know this should not be considered a dark place because it is a place to grow, but to me, it is a place with no light. We are reading Dante’s Inferno in english, and to be honest it sounds nothing like the hell I am living in today. His hell involves the sins individuals occur more often as an adult than a teenager, well the majority of the things he discusses. Since we are reading…

Self Sacrifice and Eternal Glory Adolf Hitler believed in a society in which every man, woman and child would be willing to sacrifice themselves in order to better their nation and people as a whole. Hitler had a vision of the unification of Germany and its citizens, where each person would struggle and adapt in order to reach the “Final Solution”. Ernst Junger in his essay, “On Pain”, relates the struggle of pain with neutrality by stating that pain is a test that defines a person’s basic…

The Identity of America: Czolgosz Inadvertent Gift The concept of identity is an excessively fragile one and one with which all people struggle at some point in their lives. This fragility with regards to age is also prevalent when applied to nations, particularly the United States at the turn of the twentieth century during the time of William McKinley’s presidency. As is evident in Eric Rauchway’s book, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America, this fragility became…

Faster than Light and Other Explorations in Nature’s Curiosity Shop. In the first one hundred pages I read twelve short essays that addressed topics ranging from measuring the vastness of our universe to global warming In the first story I read, Sky Wanderers, the authors taught me about a beneficial acronym (My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Pies) to remember the names of the planets in order of closest to farthest away from the Sun. Furthermore the chapter discusses the major facts known…

Buddhism’s creation is credited to Siddhartha Gautama, who after seeing an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a mendicant, determined that the answer to stop human suffering was to engage in the life of a wandering ascetic. Buddhist edicts of wanderers include engaging in practices of austerities, cultivating meditative techniques to produce altered states of consciousness, and experiencing deeper knowledge of the natural world (Gethin 14-16). Although Buddhist doctrines involve the sacrifice…

Relationship Between God and Man Within Myths Gods have expectations that man struggles to understand. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, and Genesis, like many creation stories, show similar themes that create a common lesson for the reader to learn from. There are rules, laws and commandments that the gods use to instruct man on how to live. When these commandments are broken, the gods impose punishments that show their authority over man. The punishment is not only given to the immediate…

Throughout the story of The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has lost the sight of his own sovereignty. He experiences loss of sovereignty when he has to leave his school because he had failed 4 of his classes. Holden explains that he isn’t down at the football game because, “I wasn’t supposed to come back after Christmas vacation on account of I was flunking four subjects and not applying myself and all.” (2) He has lost the right and choice to participate in Pencey Prep anymore. This is…

Abdelaziz Hegazy Mrs. Douglas English 4/U Dec 16, 2015 King Lear Most of the characters downfall in the play are seen as being, the faults of themselves or the effects of other. The action of other characters does indeed affect different characters in the play. The downfall of these characters was and is the result of weakness and circumstance where certain characters have taken their role to the extremes where they cannot go back and correct them as they have already dug their holes up for…

A writer’s job is to use words to immerse a reader into a world of adventure and thought. To be able to do this requires great skills and many years of writing experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald was such a person who dedicatedly wrote through poems and plays during his earlier years and fiction later on, to convey little bits of himself in his writing. In his short story, “Babylon Revisited,” he uses the power of words to transport readers through feelings of an experience he knows personally. The…