Color Against the Dark

In the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, a young boy named Christopher is a boy with rules that don’t seem to make sense about how to live life. I think Haddon is trying to relate Christopher to us when we were younger. The concept of innocence lays right out in front of you when you read this book. Christopher, with his disablility of autism, is just trying to make as much out of his time as he can. Many of us still wish we could be like Christopher and have the freedom to think in the ways he does; never lie, know everything in the world, base our days on colors. He doesn't worry about growing up and all of the "what if's", but instead he is derected to a different view of life; things that are not as obvious to us. This young boy never has a bad day. Is it we who decide to have our bad days, or is it others? It is our own decision; we choose who we are. Christopher--just a young boy--knows that life should always be filled with color and not even a speck of darkness belongs.

Soul Searching for Forgiveness

Author's Note - This is a response to The Power and the Glory.

Judas--one of the twelve apostles of Jesus in the New Testament and best known for his role in betraying Jesus into the hands of Jewish religious authorities--is much like the mestizo in the novel, The Power and the Glory. The irony is that although he means the priest nothing but harm, he actually provides prospects for the priest to commend heroic and gallant acts.

An illness falls upon the mestizo the first time the priest and him meet. The priest makes a small sacrifice for mestizo and refuses to leave him. Put on a mule and sent toward a town, mestizo knows that death surrounds him, but has faith in the priest to comfort him with health and hospitality along the way. When the mestizo reaches the other side of the border, the trap he has set becomes an opportunity for the priest to turn away from the life of leisure, and recommit himself to his ideals and his duties. During his night in the hut with the mestizo, the priest has trouble keeping himself awake, recalling the night Jesus spends in the garden with the disciples who cannot seem to keep themselves awake. The mestizo, with a never ending desire of selfish devotion, asks the captured priest to pray for him. The priest then begins to tell him that forgiveness just isn't handed to you, but instead it must be earned.

In order to find forgiveness of your sins true soul-searching will lead your way. You need to find yourself first and understand that the sins you have committed were wrong and have some reason to why they should be forgiven. The mestizo is, in many ways, a mirror image of the priest. The priest--who has done this soul-searching-- despairs over having no listeners to hear his confession. But, while the priest attempts to root out all self-interested motivations from his mind, the mestizo is concerned only with his own advantage. Nevertheless, the priest's actions towards the mestizo make the mestizo a seem like a sympathetic character. Since the characters are carefully emphasized to have the free will to decide their own paths in life, their decisions on what paths they take will lead them to the amount of power and glory they get in life.

The Power of Love

Authors Note: This is a response to a quote from the novel, The Bean Trees, about a girl named Taylor who is given the gift of a beautiful child, Turtle, but Taylor doesn't know how to undergo the customs and actions of a mother. Will she learn to love Turtle and not let her fears hold her back?

"The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds." (chapter 12)This is during the time of the first rain, when Mattie takes her young friends into the desert so they can see the natural world come to life. This quotation, typical of Kingsolver’s descriptions of the natural landscape, shows her consciousness of the environment. It also shows Kingsolver’s use of unusual metaphors. The land embodies a life lived from birth to death. Taylor falls in love with the Arizona land and sky, and her appreciation for nature in all its forms, with all its surprises.

While Taylor falls in love with the long lost land of Arizona, she is falling in love with Turtle as well. Realizing the beauty of mother nature makes her understand that a child is a gift, understanding that Turtle is a gift. The land describes Turtle and Taylor's relationship from the start. When Kingsolver says, "The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city…" it is showing there are so many more experiences and adventures and so much time to grow and love, but there is this barrier holding Taylor back from wanting do venture and explore a new world, a life style of a mother. It seems as though she is scared and her fears are holding her back.. You cant let your fears defeat you, you have to defeat your fears. When Taylor saw how wide and beautiful the world was she also realized that there are so many opportunities. When this opportunity to have Turtle in her life forever she didn’t want to miss out. She took advantage of the opportunity and made it the best experience because she looked passed her fears and realized there was more to life than hiding behind yourself.

Author's note: This is a poem about the novel, The Bean Trees, where a girl is confronted with a child named Turtle, and she grows to care and love for turtle. This poem has to do with teenagers and their choices with any situation.


Learning, Growing, Experiencing


Why do we act with such a sense of uninterest?
Like we don’t care or understand what is being said.
We only think of ourselves and ideas that we create.

Trouble is just another word.
It highly defines the average teenager.
What we put ourselves into .
But for a reason nobody can understand.
For a reason that I can’t understand myself.

This seven letter word has no significant meaning behind it.
So why do we portray ourselves to it?
The good out of it is more harmful than the dismay.

Our lives are not fair as teenagers.
Our parents are the rule makes of our lives.
Our thoughts may impact on our perspectives of fairness.
But what it comes down to is
The fine line your parents make between right and wrong.

Listening without words is often the best thing to do.
Understand the other side of the story before you make a decision.
Decisions are a part of life no matter how hard they are.

We as humans are very opinionated people.
We don’t react well when others prove our statements to be incorrect.
This is what causes trouble in our lives.
Learning to open up is self evident in the learning process of life.

That is what we as teenagers are doing.
Learning
Growing
Experiencing
We all make mistakes, but it’s just the matter of learning how to except
that.

Trouble
No need for more trouble
It’s just another seven letter word
With no significant meaning behind it

Just Two Words

Do you take this man to be your lawful wedded husband?
The phrase is like a sudden shock throughout my body.
I do?
I don't?
Ding dong ding dong
The church bells build up the pressure

Waiting, waiting for the answer he hopes
Waiting for me to say
I do
But what does my heart say?

I love this man
And he loves me
He will soon put this ring on my finger
Excepting and confirming our feelings towards one another

Who would have ever thought
The answer to the hardest decision in my life
could be as simple as two words.
Two simple words that could change my life forever

I prepare myself to let out my final answer
Fear overwhelms me for a moment
The fear soon turns to a heart warming feeling
A burst of happiness
A burst of excitement
A burst of curiousness

My future is unfolding at this very moment
Of course I want to marry this man
Spend the rest of my life with him
I love him
And he loves me

I do is just two words
Two words that may change my life forever
Two words that mean the world
With that being said,
I do

Religious Beliefs

The novel, Life of Pi, starts off with an old man that states, "I have a story that will make you believe in God." Two closely linked ideas in the novel are storytelling and religious belief. Pi has three religions, Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Each comes with its own tales, fables that are used to spread the teachings of beliefs of that faith. Pi enjoys the richness of these stories, but also gets the sense that each story might be aspects of a greater story about love, coming from Father Martin who assured that Pi was true of Christianity.

Life of Pi also has links to stories and religious beliefs because Pi declares that both require faith on other human beings as well. Surprisingly, Pi admires atheists, for him being such a religious young man. Pi is showing that you should be believing in something no matter what it is. It is better to have faith in something than nothing at all, and that something is what gives life a purpose. Although religion can be a taboo to most people, that doesn’t mean you can't have your different beliefs than others. Pi can appreciate the atheists and their ability to believe in the absence of God without knowing about the truth of absence. To Pi, people that can't make a leap of faith in any direction are like people who can't appreciate the truth inside a fictional story.

What Can You Find Behind the Story?

"Books say nothing! Nothing you can teach or believe. They're about nonexistent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction. And if they're nonfiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun. You come away lost." (62) Beatty is trying to put ideas into Montags head that he may not believe. Montag has not read a book and he doesn't know if Beatty is being truthful to him. Bradbury is trying to convey the thought that people think there are more important things to life than reading. Books put you into a world of unreal ideas and things that the writers want you to believe, but are not true. He said it would be better if people got out and run around and have fun. Montag doesn't believe this is true and is desperate to read the books he has hidden from his wife all along.

In this novel, people fear books, they are afraid that it will change them--the way they act, the way they think. Montag is seeing the other side of the fear he used to be in. He sees something brighter and deeper that may be living in books. "...for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." (page 51-52)

The man behind each book is important because they put their time and effort to use their imagination to create, after all, a not so horrible story. Stories cleanse us and make us see things differently than others. It makes you think of what the writer actually means behind the text itself rather than just reading the book and understanding the story. Books do say something, but you just have to dig deep to find it.