Corbin's Compare and Contrast Nov 1

After reading, Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle and To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This by Mandy Len Catron, it is easy to dissect a handful of differences. Catron uses her everyday life and real encounters as the foundation for her writing. She talks about love the same way the audience she is writing for thinks about love. As a young woman, she is hopeful about love. But, Doyle is an 81 year old author who uses science and logic to explain love; this also means that, due to his age, he will probably have a unique perspective on love. Doyle uses nature to express his beliefs; by using nature, he talks about the heart of a mockingbird, the heart of a blue whale, and the heart of a human. By making these comparisons, he says that the smallest heart, the largest heart, and a medium sized heart, although they are all different sizes, they are susceptible to feel pain and can allowed something to be hurt; I think Doyle's age comes out in this because it shows wisdom that he has acquired over many years.  As a result of this, Catron's piece is reflective and realistic while Doyle's piece is very descriptive and filled with imagery. These pieces also have similarities, for example, they both view love as something that is vulnerable and allows someone to be susceptible to pain. They both express the importance of love, they just do so in two different ways.

beauty

Alice walker is an African American author, and an award winning writer, whining the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. In her somewhat of a self biography,“Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”. Alice recalls her past remember how amazing her childhood was, saying how she was the most beautiful put of all her family and was beloved by her father for it. Yet all of that changed when she was accidentally blinded, when she was shot in eye by a BB gun. The rest of the story teaches an audience an very important lesson of self love and respect. She explains that is shouldn't matter how everyone else views you, but how you view yourself, that you should love yourself and be happy, instead about worrying about what everyone else believes. I totally agree with this message, are whole lives we are made to see that there is one way to seen as beautiful, but the truth is all those build boards and commercials, are a load of crap. Beauty is from within, we are and beautiful as we believe we are, and we can't let anyone take that away from us. After that accident Alice lost all her light and let darkness take her life, she fell in a depression, seeing her self as not beautiful. Yet after some time and some help fro her brother, Alice learned that her beauty came from what she believed and not from anyone else, and she never stopped teaching that lesson.

Alice Walker is an African-American award winning writer from Georgia whose works include The Color Purple. In her essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" she retells events from her past that shape her self image. Growing up she was very confident in herself exclaiming that her father would choose her to go to the fair because she was the prettiest of her eight siblings. Her self-confidence changed however when she was shot in the eye with a BB gun. Her eye was blinded and left scarred and often wandered. She never raised her head as long as the scar was on her eye. She became self-conscious. Only at the end of the story does she realize that her outward appearance has no effect on who she is inside. I agree that who you are inside stays the same, it is not based on outward appearance. It took her many years to realize this, but her appearance never changed who she was inside. Her inner self was always there, just disconnected because of her self-doubt.

"Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self"

Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, African-American novelist and poet that is most famous for authoring the well-known story, The Color Purple. Alice Walker’s novel “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self” she revisits her past and speaks about an event that happened in her childhood that would shape her future. She teaches her audience that they should accept themselves for who they are, and the only way to truly accept one’s self is to accept yourself from the inside out. I completely agree with this concept, even though it’s possibly one of the hardest things someone can do. To be able to accept yourself and not be afraid of standing out from everyone else would lead to a happiness that is unlike any other. To stand out from the traditional standards of beauty and be completely happy with who you are as an individual is to become truly brave.

In Alice Walker’s story, she begins writing about how as a young girl, she was confident in herself and everything she did, but after the BB incident with her brothers, she is left feeling lost and insecure. Her social and academic life have been severely affected by the accident. Alice Walker couldn’t accept herself for who she was now, and this had negative side-affects to her mentality. Whenever her closest brother helped her out by taking her to a doctor to remove some of what was left in her eye from the accident, she blossomed again. She became more confident and even found a person to love and begin a family with. She had begun the journey to finding self-acceptance, but she hadn’t fully come to terms with who she was until one night her daughter looked her in her bad eye and told her how she held the world in her eye. Her daughter didn’t see a flaw, but instead she saw something wonderful and something to be celebrated. Alice Walker’s daughter helped her come to accept herself fully, blind eye and all. This manifested itself as a dream of Alice dancing with herself, finally at peace with what happened to her and completely content with her life. She has found peace with herself and has found the confidence that she had last all those years ago after the life-changing accident.

Selfless Dancing - Caronina Reyes

Alice Walker is an African American writer, she describes herself as a ‘scandalous writer’ who often writes on self acceptance, romance and bildungsroman. In her novel “Beauty: When The Other Dancer Is The Self” she teaches her readers that self acceptance occurs both internally and externally. I agree with Walker’s lesson because she sends a message to her readers, men, women, children, teens and everything in between, that the idea of self-acceptance is much greater than trying to conform with the rest of the world’s standards of beauty. Instead, we should be able to learn to accept who we are, both mentally/ emotionally and physically.
In the story, young Alice Walker does not realize this lesson of full self acceptance till the end when she is dreaming of dancing with herself and she realizes that as a woman and a human being, she has come through alright. This dream symbolizes her old self binding with her new self as they both come to a true epiphany that being “beautiful” does not actually define a person. It also explains that the definition of beauty is not essential in order to feel genuinely happy in one’s life. The message she conveys in the ending also helps her readers understand her message of self acceptance and selfhood. Selfhood is defined as “the state of having an individual identity.” Throughout the story, Alice feels like she is having trouble finding this individual identity and accepting it, however, she does not realize that throughout the whole entire story, she is an individual. She just can’t accept that she is different and that she is still beautiful. But by the end of the story she comes to peace with her outer features, flaws included, and finds peace with her internal ones, such as confidence, self-worth, self-esteem and happiness.

Me not We

The mind is such an intricate organ and it processes our thoughts in individualized way, which is why I believe that we think as ourselves as a singular being and not a collective.  Bloom describes the mind as having a multitude of identities, for example "There is no inconsistency between someone’s anxiously hiking through the Amazon wishing she were home in a warm bath and, weeks later, feeling good about being the sort of adventurous soul who goes into the rain forest. In an important sense, the person in the Amazon is not the same person as the one back home safely recalling the experience." (Bloom) This claim is like saying that each phase change that we go through in our mind is a different side of ourselves, and that we only can really experience one state of mind at a time depending on the circumstances we are in, unless you have dissociative identity disorder. My thoughts are we have a singular consciousness. The lady in the amazon has one consciousness but is simply thinking back on her past experiences. Of course the woman is going to wish she was home but thats because she is in an uncomfortable place and misses simple comforts she is used to , not due to another side of her mind that comes out after an adventure. The consciousness may seem to be divided at times like making a difficult decision, the devil and angle on their respective perches, but in the end they are consolidated into that singular entity, you.

First Person Plural

Each one of us contains a multitude of selves. I believe that I myself contain a multitude of many "me's" that each have their own place when needed. In "First Person Plural" it stated, "The notion of different selves within a single person is not new."  Philosophers like Plato and David Hume both believed this to be true . Walt Whitman  gave us an easier version to understand than that of David Hume's explanation. Walt Whitman said, "I am  large, I contain multitudes."  I can say that I agree to this on some level I do have moments where I feel like there are many versions of myself. I can be a quiet person who likes to stay in the shadows, but I can also be a person who loves being in the spot light. I'm not saying that I totally change into a different person just that there are different parts of myselves that only a few people know about or get to see. I have different personalities that are good when a situation arises and I need to conform to that situation. We as humans are always needing to conform to our surroundings and new things that arise. I am not saying that I have split personalities or anything just that there are times when I feel the need to be different than who I am currently being. There's nothing wrong with wanting to try out something new whether it be a new wardrobe or a new personality. I am still me but there are times in my life where I want to be a little different and try something new. I remember one time after a swim meet I was so exhausted but I knew I had so many things that I needed to do that I could have done right then and rested a lot longer the next morning but instead of doing the work right then and there. I decided to just do it the next day. The next day came and I had forgotten that I was supposed to help some relatives move into their new house. By the time I finished helping my relatives move into their new house it was late and I was exhausted. I did my assignments that night and turned them in the next day and I was surprised that I didn't get as good a grade as I ususally did. I blamed the lazy part of me that could have gotten the work done much earlier and have gotten a better grade on it for not getting the work done at an earlier time. So I do believe that there are multitudes or plurals of ourselves and that they each have there own moments where they come out and make themselves known to us.  We as humans have many different parts of us that only a few lucky people get to see.