Lavender's AP Lit Class Blog
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Transcendentalist Essay
For the essay I want to talk about imagination. In Walden, Thorough briefly brings up imagination. "My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of several farms,-the refusal was all I wanted,-but I never got my fingers burned by actual possession." Thorough was a grown man, yet he was still talking about the powers of his imagination. He walked through land and thought about what it could be, if he bought it. His imagination would go wild, but he never actually got the land. I believe that currently, people have less imagination. Toddlers and kids have tons of imagination, about Santa Claus or becoming a millionaire. But, as they get older their imagination becomes weaker. Teenagers have imagination about weird things. But as they become adults, it goes away. They fall into the routine of regular life. After graduating high school you go to college. After college you move somewhere and get a job. Monday through Friday you work 9-5 with the holidays off. After work you go home, take care of your pets, clean the house, cook dinner, and watch TV. Then you wake up and do it all over again. Imagination disappears when reality becomes evident. People can't dream about having more money then they can handle, travelling wherever they want to, and having the perfect material life they wanted when they were younger. They accpted the fact that they won't get that, and if they keep letting their imagination go wherever it wants, they will only get led to more disappointment. The point of the essay would be how over time imagination has went from being in everyone, to only being in kids.
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Mallory,
ReplyDeleteGreat topic (and you're already off to a good start with it, it seems). You might want to acknowledge early on that Thoreau seems like a proto-slacker here (he's too lazy to actually take on the hard work of really running a farm, but rather seems content just to daydream about it). Then, go ahead and turn things around by defending the key role imagination ought to play in our lives--not (as in Thoreau's case) by serving as a substitute for getting out there and fulfilling our dreams, but as a force that can actually prompt us to do so. I don't want to make this sound cliche (positive thinking, etc), but the fact is--as you point out--if we can dream a dream in the first place, how will we ever be able to actually live one through? I'm looking forward to seeing where your first draft takes you!