A Reflection on Storm of Steel

After perusing through my family's collection of books looking for a piece of literature that was instantly appealing, I had located a non-fiction title that caught my eye. I picked it up and dusted it off, and this book was 'Storm of Steel' by Ernst Junger. I normally like these types of war novels, and so I selected it to be my book. This novel is a sort of memoir of Junger's life, and it follows his experiences throughout his strife for the German Army in World War I.

Personally, I felt this novel to be a bit dry, as a majority non-fiction novels tend to be. It was dry mostly because the book was very nondescript of the things that were going on around him. He focused in mostly on his experiences. In fact, he was so nondescript that he rarely mentions any specific characters in depth. This made the book a bit hard to contemplate. At points, Junger would just write about death after death after death. Without any background, this was hard to understand. I theorized, after a bit of outside research, that Junger did this to signify just how monotonous and horrible this war was. Being stuck in a stalemate (as Junger was trying to prevent by being a stormtrooper) would have been as repetitive as parts of this book.

On another note, I believe that Junger wrote this book to signify the German cause at the time. After yet more background research, I learned that the author was a Nationalist in his country. He tries to glorify this in his book through attempting to focus more on the German part of the war through more description and devotion towards certain moments.

In all, the only thing that I really gained from this book was how to tolerate the reading of a non-fiction book. This book's blandness and devotion to German Nationalism really shut me down. Someone who could easily tolerate and understand those topics would find it a good read, but not I.

The Weird, Almost Perfect State

For my second choice essay, I read a rather peculiar article by Don Marquis titled 'The Almost Perfect State'. I picked this essay because out of the corner of my eye, I saw a reference to the Bolshevik group in Russia, which would inference Communism to be the main drive of the essay. This was not the case. The article, weird enough, was about how people should work as hard as they possibly can so they can plan out the last 10 years of their lives to be as debaucherous as possible. Marquis described this phase as the almost perfect life.

He believed that during the non-almost perfect phase of your life, you should live as prudent and sober as possible. He also then goes on to say that after your years of work, "[you] shall be the ribald, useless drunken outcast person [you] have always wished to be." Basically in Marquis perfect life, you get to #YOLO out for as long as you want when you're really old.

After Marquis has finished his details about this perfect end to life, he tells a very fatalistic tail. It is at this part where I believe Marquis to be a bit insane. From this point on, he rabbles on about things like Martians teaching humans things and kissing hot dog sandwiches. His writing style also gets more erratic, including many ellipses and capital locked words. He downgrades the style of the way humans do things on Earth, and then ends up saying that we all are nothing more than a low spot on Earth. What a cheerful way to lure in your readers.

Response to 'Advice to Youth'

The first essay that I selected was titled Advice to Youth, and it was written by Mark Twain. The title speaks for the whole essay; it is all advice to the youth of Twain's day. Although it doesn't say in the article, I would suspect that the essay was probably written so it could be spoken in a speech or published in a newspaper. Most of the pieces of advice are things that parents teach their children nowadays. These teachings contain things like 'always obey your parents' and 'be respectful to your superiors'.

I feel that these things are fairly simple to teach your children. Almost all of the things that are mentioned are things that are hardwired into our brains from as long as we can remember. It made me wonder why Twain would write an essay like this in a time where I would think that discipline would be stressed more. I believe that this essay could have been in response to an increasing amount of young factory workers. During the time that Twain wrote this, factories were becoming ever so plentiful, and many of the workers were young juveniles. As these kids are obviously not in school, their hooliganism would be more rampant. Twain then obviously felt a need to write an essay to remind kids what it really meant to be an upstanding child in society.

Is WikiLeaks Right?

The topic of WikiLeaks is a hot button in America. It gains access to many classified documents from around the world and posts them on Julian Assange's famous wiki. The governments that are being exposed by these documents obviously have a bone to pick with Assange. Many want him on trial. I would disagree, believing that what Assange and WikiLeaks are doing isn't wrong.

The way I see it, the sensitive documents that are being released on WikiLeaks are exposing the flaws that many administrations keep secret. These documents are being kept secret mostly for the reason that they are expressing something the government has done that is morally wrong. As this is the case, the people in the many nations have a right to know that these ethically incorrect things are taking place. I believe that allowing our government to keep these kinds of secrets from us isn’t right, and if they are unearthed, then so be it. Administrative secrecy has failed, and they must now face their wrongdoing with the brute disapproval of the people.

Instead of covering up the debauched, the corrupt régimes should now be fixing their errors. In the end, this is what Assange is aiming for. By uncovering the shady governmental practices, he hopes to push the state towards practices that shouldn’t be frowned against by the people. The people are what will motivate the governmental change.

Reflection on A Vindication of the Rights of Women

I've been doing some looking around on some other student's blogs to figure out just what to make of this essay. I've got to say, I just don't really know what to interpret from it. I mean, between Mary Wollstonecraft's extensive vocabulary and the sheer length of the text, I got lost.

I could, however, identify her 'main idea' ("...why should they be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence?") and some of her deeper points, but the finer details that she more than likely utilized were hard to identify. One of the deeper points that Wollstonecraft was pressing was the haste for women's education. She states that, "By individual education...such an attention to a child as will slowly sharpen the senses..." Throughout the third page, she affirms that educating women at an earlier age, like men, would give women the power to "think and reason". I think that this is one of the solid points of the essay, and her overall goal has obviously been achieved through efforts of her and people with the same ideas.

I guess that it was also hard for me to understand the article because we have a different mindset nowadays as opposed to back then. We now live in a time where women have a lot more freedom then they did back then, so understanding the strife became a bit hard. In the end, the points that Wollstonecraft made were all agreeable, and the article had pressed some issues that are no longer a problem today. That's a good thing to see.

Google's Making Us Stupid?

This article is easy to relate to, as it brings up a topic that is pertinent in our daily lives. As an affect of digital tools like Google, the author, Nicholas Carr, states that, "The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle." Maybe it's just me and the time that I grew up, but I don't seem to have this effect to the same extent that the author has. Sure, if I've got big things on my mind, keeping focused on a long piece of literature can be a bit of a struggle. If I'm reading something for pleasure or for school, like this article, with a clear mind, it is much easier to stay on task.

I also thought that the author's analogy about the scuba diver and the jet ski was very interesting. They treat the thought of only skimming the top of topics quickly is a horrible thing. The author finds that taking in the literature is for the best. Don't get me wrong, it is a good way to read. I just found that Carr's opposition to how most people read nowadays to be unnecessary. The way I look at it, when we process and skim the way we do, we take in knowledge of a broader range of topics. In general, we understand more about what's going on around us.

Quick skimming is also supported by how the media is pushing out information. Carr tells about the New York Times's Shortcuts, which 'give harried readers a quick "taste" of the day's news'. With this way, readers can get straight to the point. In these fast-forwarded times, people just don't have the time in the day to sit down and deeply interpret an article. These snippets help us understand the point so we can move on to our rushed lifestyles.

I thought that the articles switch from reading to artificial intelligence was thought-provoking. The two founders of Google believe that, "If you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain...you'd be better off." I find this to be completely untrue. If everybody in the world had access to this technology, then raw intelligence wouldn't be a feat. It would simply be a commodity. We would slowly become emotionless, efficient robots, just like the people in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Taking it for Granted

Through this article, I received from Annie Dillard that she believes that we all overlook very significant things in our lives that we've always had. Once they are gone, however, we suffer and wish that they were here again.

She first expresses this when she recalls the reading about the gold miners. It is so hot in the mine shafts that the companies have to route air conditioning to the shafts. "If the air conditioners break, the miners die." The miners always expect the A/C to be there so that they can do their job, but if it were to go out, the miners would all cease to live.

Dillard, in the end, was trying to express her thoughts through her dismay about the total solar eclipse. Everybody else is fascinated that this huge scientific happening is going on while she describes the bleak landscape and the solemness of the situation. Everybody knows that the sun is going to come back, but Dillard looks at it in a different way. We see the sun everyday, and for as long as we live, it will always be there. But if it were to go, we would cease to exist. "If there would have been people on Earth, nobody knew it."

This thought is simplified through the common phrase, 'You don't know what you have until it's gone'. Her dismay is correctly showing her emotion for the momentary loss of the sun. When the sun leaves, she is showing what a bad thing it would be through her portrayal of the landscape. She's not necessarily saying that we need to worship the sun and all that it brings us, but that we all just must realize what we have and make sure that we never take it for granted.