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- Reading responses must be AT LEAST 200 words.
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All three readings left me feeling thoroughly enlightened. Each reading began with complex storytelling that ended with the moral of the story. In Joan Didion’s “In Bed,” she discusses her severe relationship with migraine headaches. Didion describes the multiple days in bed, the endless tortuous pain, and the hundreds of empty ice trays. Her anger and disdain for migraine headaches turns into appreciation as she realizes that they do not come during the hardest moments in her life rather they happen during the small meaningless times. After a migraine, her problems fade away along with the pain. In Pico Iyer’s
ReplyDelete“In the Dark,” Iyer recounts a trip to Bali, in which he undergoes mysterious experience with a guardian spirit. Towards the end of the story, he realizes that we go into the dark to get away from the known, but if we go further enough, we will realize that we will never see the light after being in the dark so long. Dinty W. Moore’s “El Toro Rojo,” is the most simple of the three stories. Moore discusses the inevitability of death with an allusion to bullfighting. In the opening scene, the matador dies after being killed by the bull juxtaposed to the bull dying in the end as a result of the matador and his bandilleros. Everyone and everything will ultimately face their fate in the end.
Kayla Garza
In the story, “ In Bed,” by Joan Didion, the writer explains how severe those ‘headaches” got and how she dealt with them as she suffered from them five times max. She later on explains how she now lives with it and accepts it as a friend to a certain extent. How the pain is momentary and once it’s gone she can enjoy her day and forget the pain she went through. She gets a sense of euphoria when everything settles and she can finally think straight again. How it comes when she seems troubled, but once gone it seems to take all the troubles she had been thinking about. Then the story of Dinty W. Moore changes the happy-go-lucky aura of the first story the intention of moving past the thought of forgetting one’s pain, to the thought of the cold grasp of death coming to take everyone in its path. The author explains how death does not discriminate on who it will take, but the thought of someone ending a life is the only difference and how it lingers around and gives you a taste of the knowledge of not knowing when it will happen, but knowing that no one is safe from the fact that we all meet our demise one day.
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“In Bed,” “In the Dark,” and “El Toro Rojo” were all unique reads in their own way. In “In Bed,” Joan Didion writes about her daily battle with migraines. In her essay, Didion explains that she used to be in denial of her condition because she believed it was insignificant to the world. In order to evade judgement she simply pushed the problem away rather that confront in. Didion continues to mention that she wasn’t happy until she learned to understand the severity of her condition and learn to accept it. In the essay, “In the Dark,” Pico Lyer writes about going off to an island called “Bali.” Lyer mentions that the island is known as a “magic island…that it is a forest of the kind you see in ‘A midsummer Night’s Dream.’ “ In other words, Lyer sees Bali as his little stowaway island. There, he is in search of love and possibility, but instead he meets a woman who takes him on a dangerous journey instead of an exciting adventure. She shows him the realities of the dark side. At the end of his essay, Lyer closes his essay with “You go into the dark to get away from what you know, and if you go far enough, you realize, suddenly that you’ll never really make it back into the light.” Furthermore, in “El Toro Rojo,” Dinty W. Moore writes about the death of a Bull. In my opinion, I feel like the author is being sympathetic towards the Bull because it is a living being just like we are.
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In Joan Didion’s “In Bed” I found the various factual information about migraines overwhelming. Even though she explains the medical terms she uses, I felt the need to skim over those details because I found it uninteresting. However, I enjoyed the way she gave her migraines a personality and to overcome them she made them a part of her life. For example, she states, “We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I” and I love the way she personifies her migraines to show that she realized they are going to be around her whole life. I felt that Pico Iyer’s “In the Dark” sounded more like creative fiction because some of the description about Bali seem unrealistic to me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the progression of his journey and the way the darkness is personified to make Bali seem mysterious in a way. For instance, he states, “it felt as if the darkness was chattering” because Bali is on an Island it demonstrates Bali must be underdeveloped due to its lack of light. In “El Toro Rojo” I found the title a bit ironic because it is called the red bull and it is said that bulls are attracted to the color red. Also, the way the bull fight is compared to a dance makes this horrific murdering of a bull seem like a work of art.
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I really enjoyed reading In Bed by Joan Didion. Her essay clearly exemplifies what migraines are and how it is very difficult for those who have not yet experienced its symptoms, to be able to sympathize with the pain and the effects of such. I believe she was able to convey this image in such great manner because of her use of details to make the essay more personal and understandable. On the other hand, the essay In the Dark was more confusing to me. Although there is a lot of good usage of wording throughout Iyer’s piece to clearly portray the island and his experience, the overall message or theme of the essay was not clear to me. Even though I may predict that it has to do with darkness, I couldn’t figure out the purpose. Lastly, El Toro Rojo, to me, was my favorite to read. Dinty W. Moore does an amazing job of creating such a short piece of writing, and it being enough to transmit in great detail the bullfight, and how in that moment he felt such a resemblance of the death of his father. When he says that “in your own life death has lingered” Moore eludes to how death is always there, waiting for the moment when it will be your turn. His essay was of interest to me as well, because of its poetic structure and the vivid images it makes the reader see.
ReplyDeleteAna T. Flores
Joan Didion’s “In Bed” allowed the reader to gain a painfully fresh perspective from the struggles of an individual that suffers from migraine. The journey of acceptance and dealing with the debilitating condition that creates a wall between the author and daily living is the catalyst that brings forth “the imposed yoga, [and] the concentration on the pain.” While reading this, I felt as though she had attained some sort of enlightenment in the middle of the suffering, something that cannot be found without a price. This struck a chord deep in me. Everything has a price to pay. Even Didion acknowledges this at the end when she gratefully “counts [her] blessings.” This gratefulness of what one has is definitely highlighted in Dinty W. Moore’s “El Toro Rojo.” The essay immediately begins with the loss of life and the struggle for victory. Both partakers in the event,whether voluntary or involuntary must forfeit their lives for entertainment. Also, it is interesting to note how the narrator separates themselves from death even though they acknowledge that it lingers. They consciously choose to ignore the sympathy of dancing with death for the sake of enjoyment. This greatly puzzled me, and almost seemed hypocritical. However, upon closer inspection it is very typical, as it is easy to shut down the parts of you that sympathize when it is to your benefit.
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Each story stands out in their own way. “In Bed” focuses on a Female that has had terrible migraines since the age of eight years old. She mentions how she would deny her condition to avoid giving power to it and letting it consume her. She eventually accepts that its something she can’t change and must live with; in a way it has become part of who she is. “El Toro Rojo” was one of those stories where you have to put two and two together to understand it but what I was able to comprehend was that there’s one of those events where you sway around a piece a fabric to cause a bull to charge at you and when they do, you stab them. This usually happens until the bull dies or sometimes the person. But specifically, with the person, I think he feels bad for the bull, and what he’s doing seems like a norm or perhaps the culture, so he continues to do it. The author of “In The Dark” uses to Creative Fiction to make “Bali” a sort of mysterious dark and twisted place where he finds love but turns out to be the opposite.
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After reading these essays I had many different emotions with each one. In the essay of “In Bed” I could feel Joan’s pain that came with her migraines, and was able to relate in a small level with her experience. I was able to feel her pain, and all of the events that she goes through when they do occur. The fact that she mentioned that her husband had them as well, made me somewhat relieved that she shares her life with someone that understands. “In the Dark” made me want to understand, feel and experience everything Pico was going through. Not understanding the whole essence of Bali like the locals had me intrigued. The description of his surroundings and his own internal battle to fully understand what’s going on, took me to a different mindset that might be the one that is required to understand what Bali is really about. With this said, now I want to make Bali part of my “must go to” places in the world, and try to figure out the hidden messages, and secrets that it holds. As far as “El Toro Rojo”, I had very mixed feelings about the essay. Even though it was short and descriptive, I have no idea how I could relate it to my own feelings or experiences. In a way it just made me both sad and angry towards the his second that killed the bull. Nonetheless emotions were felt very differently with each of these essays.
ReplyDeleteAndrea Videgaray
In the first story it seems as though the girl that Didion women character experiences a bad case of migraines just like how majority of people do when they lack, are overstressed and such. She explains that it is hereditary from her grandmother and so on. She seems to be making excuses in the beginning of the essay for her migraines and comes to terms with accepting it at the end, “I open the windows and feel the air, eat gracefully, sleep well”. I believe the purpose of this story was to show that the women she took these migraines as a way of who she was. “In the Dark” seem more of a mystic story with the with a man searching for love in “Bali” I was honestly a little puzzled about this story bit admired the imagery it gives the audience, “where couples walk on full moons… where villages are given over to ritual dance”. The third story “El Toro Rojo” of course we see it often in Texas where they kill the bull in bullfighting which honestly is cruelty to me, I just don’t get joy in watching a bull being messed around and making it seem like it’s a beauty of art, just to have it life taken in return which is what Moore shows through this essay of having sympathy for the bull as well as having us reflect from our understating of death maybe ?
ReplyDeleteAlyssa Duque
"In the dark" focuses on the story of dreams and the often dreary meetings they have with reality. The author writes about going off to an Island known to the reader as Bali, reminiscent of the magical, enchanted island portrayed in the musical "South Pacific," sharing the name "Bali Hai." It is there that he encounters a femme fatale that leads him to a treacherous adventure, instead of the wistful exploration he often dreamed off. I quite enjoyed the message of going into the dark so deep you forget to see the light. "In Bed" is all about denial and it's poisons. Author Joan Didion lives in constant denial of the severity of her migraines and underplays her pains. Once she begins to acknowledge the seriousness of her conditions, she is able to better move forward and live in tandem with her migraines, as we often cannot kill our demons, but learn to live with them. I've never been one for animal deaths, and having really experienced the death of a bull in front of me, "El Toro Rojo" by Dinty W. Moore hit personally. The author portrays the bull in a majestic and artistic light that it obvious he sympathizes with it due to the fact that no matter how we may see them, animals are living, breathing things like us humans, and deserve a more honorable ending rather than being discarded as such.
ReplyDelete- Padini Paolo Santiago
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