Strength To Forget Essays - Hosiery, Lingerie,

Strength To Forget Courage means a lot of things. Sometimes courage is the will to fight and overcome; sometimes it is the foresight to run away. And maybe, when the past obscures the present like the shadow of a ghost, courage is the strength to forget. In his compilation of short fiction, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien uses the Vietnam War, a shadow of his own past, to illustrate courage in many ways. ?Stockings? is the story of Henry Dobbins, whose courage to fight comes from a good luck charm: his girlfriend's pantyhose. Henry liked ?putting his nose into the nylon and breathing in the scent of his girlfriend's body . . . More than anything, though, the stockings were a talisman for him. They kept him safe.? (O'Brien, 129). The stockings would be powerless around anyone else's neck. But they represent something for Henry Dobbins that brings him peace within himself when the world around him is at war. On a practical level, it is impossible for the stockings to provide any real protection for him. Nonetheless, Henry was ?invulnerable? (Ibid), and this single word captures O'Brien's attitude towards ?courage' as a motivation to fight. Vulnerability is not a fault in a flak jacket. It's a breach of self-confidence. And in a theater that puts men at war with themselves as much as it pits them against their enemy, courage comes from within. Is a man without courage a coward? That's what O'Brien calls himself in ?On the Rainy River?, a story about a man with one foot out the door and the other stuck in quicksand. Before he went to war, he thought that courage came ?in finite quantities, like an inheritance?(Ibid, 40), that it could be stashed away in times of cowardice, to be tapped like a reservoir if ever ?the evil were evil enough, [or] the good were good enough.?(Ibid) When he got his draft notice in 1968, his reservoir went dry and he fled for the border. Sitting in an aluminum fishing boat on the Rainy River, halfway between Vietnam and Canada, he realized that he did not have the courage to run away. Every muscle in his body tried to pull him across the water to freedom, but behind him he heard the whole world cheering for him to stay. ?Like some weird sporting event . . . a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors?(Ibid,60) managed to hold him back. In ?The Man I Killed?, O'Brien's lack of courage also bars him from forgetting his most painful memory of the entire wara slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty . . . with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive . . . one eye shut . . . the other [a] star-shaped hole.? The image he presents is gruesome, and it is easy to understand why he cannot brush it from his memory. In fact, O'Brien creates an fictional life for the deceased man as a memorial and a sort of reparation for the fact that he killed the man himself. He is a coward for lacking the strength to forget, and at the same time strong for bearing the weight of his own actions. This is the greatest paradox in O'Brien's depiction of courage: although courage often means fighting and defying and ignoring, it takes a different kind of courage to stand up and accept reality for what it is. Memories were the heaviest things they carried, and courage is not strength to forget. Bibliography The Things they Carried by Tim O'Brien.

Anatotitan Facts and Figures

Anatotitan Facts and Figures Name: Anatotitan (Greek for giant duck); pronounced ah-NAH-toe-TIE-tan Habitat: Woodlands of North America Historical Period: Late Cretaceous (70-65 million years ago) Size and Weight: About 40 feet long and 5 tons Diet: Plants Distinguishing Characteristics: Large size; broad, flat bill About Anatotitan It took paleontologists a long time to figure out exactly what type of dinosaur Anatotitan was. Since the discovery of its fossil remains in the late 19th century, this giant plant-eater has been classified in various ways, sometimes going by the now-unfashionable names Trachodon or Anatosaurus, or considered a species of Edmontosaurus. However, in 1990, a convincing case was presented that Anatotitan deserved its own genus in the family of large, herbivorous dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs, an idea that has since been accepted by most of the dinosaur community. (A newer study, however, insists that the type specimen of Anatotitan was really a superannuated specimen of Edmontosaurus, hence its inclusion in the already-named species Edmontosaurus annectens.) As you might have guessed, Anatotitan (giant duck) was named after its broad, flat, duck-like bill. However, one shouldnt take this analogy too far: the beak of a duck is a very sensitive organ (a bit like human lips), but Anatotitans bill was a hard, flat mass used mainly to dig up vegetation. Another odd feature of Anatotitan (which it shared with other hadrosaurs) is that this dinosaur was capable of running clumsily on two legs when it was chased by predators; otherwise, it spent most of its time on all four feet, munching peacefully on vegetation.