11/13/13 Lenses and Maps To Anywhere

Lenses first started out as this little kid who liked to look at things through binoculars and telescopes. Then it moved on to her liking to look through this microscope at tiny pond water creatures and algae. She was fascinated how they would dry up and die by her control of the lamp under them. It was like she enjoyed playing God and controlling their lives. The story then changes and becomes about swans and how the girl is older and likes to watch them. My favorite sentence is at the part where she talks about the Daleville Pond, "I used to haunt the place because I loved it; I still do." This sentence kind of contradicts itself with the dark type of word "haunt" and the lighter/happier type of word "love" and how she put them together in a sentence. That way she put them together is almost in sense as if she is obsessed with the pond. She goes on about how beautiful the swans are in their natural habitats and how they change from white swans in front of the mountains into black swans in the sky. This gives a calming sense of how beauty lives on it's own and can't be controlled like some science experiment.

Maps To Anywhere is an interesting collections of short fragments of the author's life. The beginning was fun to read about how people had a hard time remembering his name and that he could never find anything in stores that ever had his name on it. All of that reminded me about my own childhood, I had the same problem, wishing that my mom would have given me a simpler name that was common to everyone. It wouldn't be until I was older that I learned to love it's uniqueness. "The Miracle Chicken" made me think of actual miracles like how could it still possibly live, but by the end of that part I wondered if it actually was alive or not since the doctor said it has life in the tissue yet he can't say whether it's dead or actually alive.

What I found interesting in "On The Air" was how everybody does assume that in the future, our cities will be high up above Earth, floating in the sky. Bernard talked about Louis was living ahead of his time, he looked forward to the time where everywhere was some perfect little utopia. This story about futuristic talk of life and utopia kind of foreshadowed the story "Utopia," yet he isn't in the future his life is kind of like a utopia. He does a routine every day: work, market, home. Then he goes on about how he wanted to visit the library, but it burned down and he doesn't want to go to another library because it would be out of his realm of norm.