Response to the veil

The Black Veil, written by the Romanticist Nathaniel Hawthorne is a book in which a man suddenly decides to wear a random veil to a church meeting. Everyone is shocked, simply because it does not fit their conformist ideals of wearing a plain clothes, especially of his position as a minister. Wearing a veil is one of the most outrageous things a person could probably do, especially a black veil. Black is usually the dim color of death, or anything taboo. A veil is something that hides secrets, because it does not show the wearer's face completely, thus it could mean that the audience of the church had somehow hypothesized in the back of their heads that the minister was hiding something, therefore finding his presence uncomfortable and then departing. The atmosphere of the whole area was just insane, because people were left probably with an uncomfortable feeling (I know I would be) when they sense his presence. A man reading at the altar, reading the Holy Bible, in a black veil.
It's signifying that he's hiding a secret. A minister, a man of God, a man of truth - hiding a secret!? A role model in their society that they had looked up to was concealing a secret? People know that people only hide things when they think others would it unacceptable or that they're doing it for personal gain. Obviously both of these are not accepted principles, so in their eyes he is, subconsciously, a heretic.

Parable

Once upon a time, a hungry boy was playing video games. After hours and hours of playing video games, home alone, he had to find a way to feed himself. He looked through his house for hours, and finally found one precious, golden cup of noodles. Inside the package was a packet of special powder flavorings, as well as another packet of dried vegetables. The chunk of noodles itself was so perfectly formed in its dried up state that the boy started drooling before he even added the hot water.
To his surprise, he had a kettle of water boiling for some reason already. He did not know how it got there, but he was thankful and didn't ask anymore questions.
He poured the hot water into the cup of noodles, and then added the flavoring and dried vegetables.
He was really hungry, so he grabbed a pair of chopsticks and started crunching on that block of noodles. He had a spoon too, and started drinking the scalding hot water that he had just added.
It was so hot it burned his tongue, and he swallowed it to get it out of his mouth. The water made its way down his throat and burned his whole throat as well as the insides of his mouth.
Lesson here: do not drink cup noodle soup without letting it cool down first.

The Saddest of All Prisons

In the society of today, guilt does not have as much of a significant meaning as it did in the past. Before, in the past, specifically during periods where religion dominated the human psyche so much people killed each other over it, that morals and guilt, sin, etc, were all of heavy values to the human mind.
Firstly, religion was established to put forth morals in the untrained human so that they can develop basic principals to live by, pretty much a rulebook that's been embellished to send out these morals in subliminal messages through the stories.
Now, we look back and think of how much religious weight had on our thoughts. It ruled a major portion, while today, our religious followers are in decline. People do not follow strict church attendance anymore, and religion has fallen out of its seat of power on the human.
Now, we put the pieces together and think, people were taught to atone their wrongdoings, and rid themselves of the guilt. If these teachings are decreasing at a rapid rate, then we do not hold these emotions to our heart as much as we did in the past.
Even though we still might carry guilt upon our chests, it does not have as much of an impact upon ourselves as it did in the past.

Comparing Poems

In Longfellow's first poem, The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls, he mentions of some sort of stranger - a stranger, in my opinion, that represents the unnamed as a whole - that fades away in time without anyone noticing. Like a tree falling in the forest, nobody hears it. It just happens. No one knows when it happens, no one knows how, no one really cares, all of us apathetic. In Longfellow's other poem, The Cross of Snow, he is specifically talking about his wife. This is because his wife had just passed away, and he woke up one night and was perhaps inspired to write this poem.
The second poem expresses his personal grief over the loss of his wife, of how it was like a cross he has to bear on his chest. Many romantics of the time were deeply obsessed with emotions and other sorts of feelings, and so they sought to express it in the most ornate and wordiest way (while rhyming and following the rules of poetry at the same time) to display their feminism and emotional interior.
These men were caring men, perhaps enjoyed a little bit of shopping, fine cloth such as silk, walking with a strut that displayed their donkage, and urinating while sitting.

Image of Grief

The image of grief in nature would probably be something that is withering away, such as a wilting flower, a sickly gazelle, or of something even simpler such as the clashing of two glaciers. Maybe not the glaciers, because it evokes a much more violent image - but perhaps, something like sand being blown away by the endless winds and forever lost in the evanescence of time. Something fading away, because our feelings of grief are usually associated with the loss of something, such as a dear family member or a beloved pet. When we lose things, something with a deep sentimental connection with us, with our hearts, we usually stamp that setting into our heads: something fading, something dying, etc.
In nature, when something dies, we automatically associate these feelings with the scene. When poets cleverly use these images to perturb these feelings, to stir up these emotions, they go beyond of directly transgressing with our feelings but instead violate them on a deeper level, which is to directly have ourselves call upon our own feelings of grief, sorrow, and misery with scenes that we have previously been conditioned to.
So, a fallen leaf, disappearing footsteps on the shores of a lonely beach, the drowning of an island, or the petrification of creatures (to me atleast) can call upon the image of grief.

Human Life: A Cycle?

In individual human lives, as I had stated in class, I believe we do exist in cycles. First of all, we are born unable to walk, then by the time we die we pretty much can't walk anymore since we've deteriorated so much. This is like a cycle with one rotation. But some people don't consider that being a cycle, so I guess an alternative way of explaining it could be that life is like a line with an apex. It reaches its zenith when we're in our twenties, and has been on a slow decline afterwards.
On the daily aspect, yes, we do live in cycles. We wake up, do our daily activities, with meals spaced throughout the day, and then we retire to sleep. That is living out in cycles. We continue this everyday, with slight changes daily that make a (small) impact to the thing as a whole, such as going out to live by ourselves, etc. We continue the cycle daily, until it accumulates to a number that adds up to be 365, then we simply add a tick mark to marking our lives by these dates and then we continue the cycle.
Life is a cycle.

Natural Cycles

I find this cycle quite confrontational. When talking about the aspect of nature, is it the aspect that it is full of lessons to be learned or is it the aspect of cycles? I find the truth to be revealing, because our lives are centered around nature. Mother nature presents us, our properties, facts, etc, in many different forms since we're related to other organisms as well as the fact that we're not the only thing that's alive on this planet. We share many things, many similarities between other creatures but since we have developed so far, strayed so far away from mother nature, we still possess some sort of uniqueness about us (human beings). The aspect of cycles in nature is one that is not new, simply, everything is in a cycle. I believe the most natural shape is probably a circle, (in my opinion... but who's to say and dictate what is the most natural shape and who would be the arbitrator of this decision? but I'll present my reasons... it's the only shape without any corners or anything and the distance from one point to the next is the same and at the same angle, and so many other properties I'm too lazy to name) and a cycle is like a circle. Like in Lion King, the song, The Circle of Life really gives this aspect of nature a true definition. Other things happen in cycles, such as rain, the winds, the earth around the sun, etc etc etc.