Reply #18: SAMPLE PAPER: written in Zen mind, Zen paper. [View All]

[A-Schwarzenegger]

Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was about a bunch
of lovers running around in and out of doors and confusing
their identities. You could say almost anything about it and
it would be relatively applicable. Woody Allen also made it
into a movie in case you dont want to read the play. Their Eyes
Were Watching God was a novel in the 1930s about a light-skinned
black girl named Janie who was discriminated against by everybody,
men, women, whites, blacks. So ...

William Shakespeare lived at a time when romance thrived
and the hills rang with confusion and many opening and
closing doors. Basically, nobody knew what was coming next
because of so much love and masks and changing identities.
This is why Shakespeare decided to present a wacky picture
of romance and love and related things, focusing on the
entanglements that relationships can raise. So when Oscar
Wilde, a famous writer, says, "Literature always anticipates
life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its own purpose,"
he might as well have been talking about Shakespeare and
"Midsummer Night's Dream". Shakespeare, also known as "The Bard,"
was anticipating the many loves that each of us have in our lives,
but by exaggerating the pitfalls and wacky problems love brings, he kept from copying it, made it fresh as a box of rose that were
just picked, and molded it to his own purpose, which was to write
a play about it and have lots of people down through the ages leave
the theater thinking about love and how it can be both fun and yet
bring many assorted problems.

Zora Neale Thurston's book is a lot more serious than Shakespeare's
frothy delight of love's sometimes unfair deck. She is talking about real suffering, as opposed to Shakespeare's silly going-ons, although of course as fiction she was also making it up, but surely it was
based on her own personal experience and as such should be taken as
seriously as real life. Janie does not know where trouble is going to
come from next. She never fits in anywhere, so she has to be ready
for anything. She is a fighter but she also can't really fight the
world, because it is too big. That is why when Herman Melville, who
wrote Moby Dick and other famous books, says, "To producee a mighty
book, you must choose a mighty theme," he might as well have just been
reading Hurston's book, for Hurston has written a work which takes
about every big theme you can think of, like racism, gender problems,
social issues, economics, history, clothing, travel, talking, etc.,
and rolls it all into one big ball of wax that teems and steams with
interesting issues and related problems. Janie may not have been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, to say the least, but she makes the best of what she has been dealt, and that is all we can ask of anybody.