Promoting cultural diversity in work with children and young people Essay

Culture can have many different meanings and the way the word is used has changed over time. Culture can cut across nationalities and religions. It is what gives groups of people in our society their identity. Culture also refers to the way groups live, for example – travellers with, shared customs, thoughts, arts, language and social activity. Recognising and promoting cultural diversity of individuals and groups within the school will develop learning and encourage the knowledge and understanding of all pupils. It is important that schools celebrate the bilingual or multilingual skills of pupils. Schools will have a policy in place which states how to ensure inclusive practice, including the additional support for pupils who need to improve their English if it is not their first language. We have a child in our class (Year 2) who is learning 2 languages that are spoken in Venezuela, where his parents are from. He is learning Spanish and Warao. We have noticed that he is finding it difficult sometimes to comprehend instructions. As teaching staff we are understanding and sympathetic to his needs as we are aware he is learning about his culture which is extremely important to his parents and his upbringing. We repeat any instructions given and check he has understood them. Understanding and taking account of our pupil’s background and culture is essential for us to build effective relationships and provide support. The diverse cultures in our society should be recognised and reflected throughout the curriculum. For example, incorporating music, foods, stories and drama from a range of cultures will help to contribute to a prosperous curriculum. This demonstrates that we (as a school) are not only valuing the culture of groups but also supporting all pupils to explore and understand cultures which are different from their own. During International Week in school last year each class picked a country to explore and learn about. The children had to learn about the culture, language, foods, traditions and the flag of their chosen country. The class teacher also did the register in the language of the country and the children answered ‘good morning’ in the language also. At the end of the week we held a school assembly for each class to do a presentation of their work on their country and the interesting and cultural things they had found out.

Mezirow’s Theory of Perspective Transformation

Mezirow’s Theory of Perspective Transformation Mezirow’s Theory of Perspective Transformation Adults today are the products of their individual histories and experiences, which influence their attitudes, thinking processes, and conceptualization of their worlds. John Mezirow believed that adults can be transformed from these experiences; however, the transformative learning involves critical self-reflection (Mezirow, 1990). Mezirow understood that adults can be transformed through a process of intertwining a disorientating dilemma followed by critical reflection and new interpretations of the experience.Mezirow’s process of perspective transformation is often illustrated as linear, additionally; Mezirow characterized ten phases starting with disorienting dilemma and ending with perspective transformation (Mezirow, 1990). Understanding the transformative learning and the disorientating dilemma helps adults appreciate and understand Mezirow’s theory of persp ective transformation. The start of my transformation begins with an experience. For example, an experience that I encountered was this past May after graduating from Immaculata University under-graduate program.My disorienting dilemmas begins with choosing the continuation of my education to pursue a Master’s Degree or begin the long and tedious process of job seeking and interviewing in a bleak economy. I believe that my decision is life altering and will only help me pursue a flourishing life. Evidence from Mezirow’s theory and the phases of transformative learning suggests that my dilemma falls under the first process of a disorienting dilemma (Anonymous, n. d. ). After graduation I had a few months to figure out a strategy and implement my plan.While exploring my options and figuring out a plan I became struck with fear, this fear came from the â€Å"unknown† of my future. To overcome my fear of the â€Å"unknown† I first self-examine who I am. I nee ded to get a better idea of who I am today and who I want to be tomorrow. After I made my decision to go back to school I began to talk more and more about graduate school with my family and close friends. Once the discussion of me going back to school began, I started to hear about other’s pursuing a graduate degree all around me.For example I play basketball locally in two different leagues. Most of the teams are composed of collage or recently graduated students. After I told my friends in the basketball leagues about my plans of going back to school a few of them also stated that they were applying or already enrolled for graduate school. Hearing other’s committing to furthering their education and the process of enrolling helped calm the fear I had deep inside. Further reassurance was added that others also shared in common the same transformation that I was tackling.This shared transformation between friends falls under Mezirow fourth phase (Anonymous, n. d. ) On ce I overcame my fear of the â€Å"unknown† I started to initiate my plan of action which falls under the sixth stage of Mezirow’s theory (Anonymous, n. d. ). My plan started with looking at local schools in the area with either an MBA or MA program in Marketing or Leadership studies. I looked at a few specific schools such as West Chester, Widener, and Immaculata University’s.After researching these schools I applied to them and waited to hear back for good news. Unfortunately I did not get into my first choice of Widener because I was 70 points short of the requirement for my g-mat score. However, I did get accepted into West Chester and Immaculata. After I had gotten accepted into graduate school I felt a sigh of relief that I had accomplished my goal of starting the new path to further my education. When I entered into graduate school this was a completely new experience as well as a new role for myself.I wanted to build up my self-confidence in my new roles and environment to reach my upmost potential. Building up my self-confidence was tough at first but I began to slowly overcome this from the support of my family, classmates, and professors. Progress was slow at first because of the â€Å"unknown† that I was dealing with in a new program and environment. Once I got over my first road bump I really started to take off with self-confidence which falls under Mezirow’s ninth phase (Anonymous, n. d. ).The last phase of Mezirow’s theory is the action of the final component of the transformative learning process (Merriam, Caffarella, Baumgartner, 2007). When I was dealt with my disorientating dilemma I took a delayed action to retort my options and plan. After reality set in that now is the time to make my transformation this was the end of a new beginning. My action to follow through with my choice to further my education is based off of my new found perspective from my disorientating dilemma and Mezirow’s ten phases of transformational learning.Reference: Merriam, S. B. , Caffarella, R. S. , & Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3. ed. ). San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons. Mezirow, J. (1990). A guide to transformational and emancipatory pratice. PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning, 7, 1-14. Retrieved February 14, 2011, from http://www. iup. edu/assets/0/347/349/4951/4977/10251/AF0EAB12-C2CE-4D2C-B1A0-59B795415437. pdf Anonymous. (n. d. ) Transformational theory.

American Revolution vs. French Revolution

American Revolution vs. French Revolution From studying and learning about both revolutions, I guess you could say they had their similarities; they both had good intentions did they not? Both the Americans and the French people hungered for a new way of life, change is what they wanted. Change is indeed what they received. The American Revolution, to me, seemed more organized and well handled than the French Revolution. The Americans were tired of being under the British’s control, especially when the British tried forcing the American colonies to pay for the British army’s expenses in defending the colonists during the Seven Year War.The attempt to raise new taxes by the Stamp Act in 1765 led to riots and the law’s rapid appeal. The colonist disagreed with the British beliefs, that a single empire with Parliament as the supreme authority. The colonists were more comfortable with neither the king or Parliament interfering with their internal affairs and that no tax could be levied wit hout the consent of the people or their chosen representatives. The American colonists felt in 1776 that it was time to separate themselves from the Britain’s control.On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress released a declaration written by Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence, a page of parchment, had started the war for American Independence. The Second Continental Congress then authorized the formation of the Continental Army under George Washington’s command. Washington was the best choice for the job because he had political experience and military experience in the French and Indian War. The French were eager to gain revenge for earlier defeats from the British, so they supplied weapons and money to the American colonies at the beginning of the war.Some French officers even fought along the Americans side against the British. I think at the time, this was the best alternative for the 13 American colonies. They achieved their independence as the United States of America; put together the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It seemed to have worked out for them at the time. The main cause of the French Revolution was the differences between the three social classes that existed in France at that time. There was a severe amount of injustice in the tax system.The third estate paid the highest taxes, while the first estate was exempted from paying the French chiefs taxes (taille). The second estate was excused from paying any and all taxes. The rent for the Third Estate was raised. Consumer prices rose faster than wages, enabling peoples economic ability to pay. Although the third estate made up most of the population of France, it owned less land than the first and second estate. An immediate cause of the French revolution was the near collapse of the government finances.French governmental expenditures continued to grow due to costly wars and royal extravagances. On the verge of complete financial collapse, the government called a meeting of the Estates-General. The Estates disagreed with how the Third Estate wanted to vote, therefore, the Third Estate voted to constitute itself a national assembly and decided to draw up a constitution. The results to this was finding themselves locked out of the usual meeting place, so they made the Tennis Court Oath that they would continue to meet until they produced a French constitution.These actions by the third estate were said to be the first step into the French Revolution. The king sided with the first and second estate but the common people came together with many uprisings in the summer of 1789, one in particular was the Fall of Bastille, an attack on a royal armory, which had also been a state prison. The National Assembly voted to abolish seigniorial rights as well as the fiscal privileges of nobles, clergy, towns, and provinces.On August 26, 1789, the assembly provided the ideological foundation for its actions and an educational device for the nation by adopting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The king refused the decrees on abolition of feudalism and the Declaration of Rights, but after some Parisian women threatened the royal family, King Lou is XVI changed his mind. By 1791, the National Assembly completed a new constitution that established a limited constitutional monarchy. There was still a monarch: king of the French, but he enjoyed few powers not subject to review by the new Legislature Assembly.The Legislature Assembly would sit for two years; consist of 745 representatives chosen by an indirect system of election. The king attempted to flee, but was captured and brought back to Paris. Surrounding countries feared that the French behavior and rebellion would spread to their land, so those leaders planned to force the reestablishment of the monarchy authority in France. This just brought on more fire to the French. The political groups in Paris rose against the king and the Legislature Assembly.They organized a mob attack on the royal palace, took the king captive, and forced the assembly to suspend the monarchy and call for a national convention to decide on the future form of government. The first step the Convention took was to abolish the monarch and establish republic. They also passed a decree condemning Louis XVI to death. A nation in arms was put together, very quickly. It was a â€Å"people’s† war, the entire nation was involved in the war. I’m not even sure where or when the French Revolution ends, its ever-lasting it seems.

Language and Communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Language and Communication - Essay Example The same is true for India? McDonalds required some localization, taking into account various cultural components, to be successful. What adaptation and localization were inevitable for a successful launch of McDonalds in India? Various cultural components help in developing and determining the cultural identity of the person and the nation at large. The cultural identity of a person is basically one’s own perception of self which in turn is depicted in knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, values, traditions and ways of life. Thesis Statement Although various cultural factors had their role to play in the adaptation policy of McDonalds, only three major and relevant components of cultural identity i.e. Class, Geography and Philosophy, will be discussed here. How McDonalds has successfully managed the localization strategy yet retaining its brand image and global value chain. Class is a vital factor of cultural components and is determined by economic, social and educational class (J ameson, 2007). India has a huge population almost four times greater than United States (US), and hence the middle class population is the astounding figure of around 300 million. India is the fourth largest economy of the world with the eating out sector, growing at the rate of 6 percent, and urban fast food sector growing at the rate of 20 percent (Rangnekar, 2000). ... McDonalds was not a substitute to the local Indian food and it was not advertised as such. To cater to the concept of family meals, McDonalds introduced home delivery service or McDelivery and various family deals. In addition to this India’s working class is growing, in order to cater to the needs of the busy young executives, McDonalds opened kiosks at store entrances for customers in a hurry. Another aspect is the high literacy rate in the target market of McDonalds. For them, McDonalds not only introduced a range of low fat products and premium salads but also launched educational campaign about the active and healthy life style. Such efforts included a variety of wholesome and premium menus to increase repeat customers. So what McDonalds did in an attempt to adapt to this cultural component of class is to produce a bundle of product and service variations along with the marketing strategy to sell its products. Geography is another important cultural component which define s the attitudes, behavior and values of a large group of people and determine their cultural activities. Cultural activities cannot be restricted to the dance, music, sports and politics only; it also has a very strong impact on the eating habits and lifestyle of the people (Anderson, 2010). Geographic distinctions such as urban and rural population, density, small and big town actually transcend all boundaries and define the attitude and behavior of the people. So the values about privacy, property, time and space and other factors will be more or less the same for a particular cultural group (Jameson, 2007). The target market for McDonalds was the big cities mostly inhabited by upper and middle class educated people.

The Subject of Macroeconomics Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Subject of Macroeconomics - Assignment Example The good thing about children is that it's easier for them to burn what they eat. Meaning, we can afford to feed them with greasy and sugary fast food and yet with proper play and exercise they will be able to burn them. And though schools remove facilities for physical activities, I don't think this should prevent children from exercising. They could run around the block and it would not cost a thing. Also, you can give the children chores requiring physical activity. This may even address the increasing demand for work time. With the children doing chores, they get exercise and adults have more time to work. It's a win-win situation. My point is, even though economic indicators tend to favor the occurrence of obesity, non-economic factors can easily counter it. With the right mindset, we can go above these economic indicators and prevent obesity. On the contrary, Microeconomics deals with the behavior of individuals and how they decide to allocate their limited resources. In the study of Macroeconomics, we deal with certain indicators and factors. These are the unemployment rates, price indices, national income, among other things. It is with the relationship of these factors that determines how the economy functions. National income is the estimate of the value of goods and services produced in an economy, for example, the US economy. There are many ways to measure national income. It may either be measured as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Gross National Product (GNP) among other things.  Ã‚  

Freedom of Speech Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Freedom of Speech - Essay Example A very popular case of a Christian student of a public school, wearing a tee-shirt proclaiming ‘Homosexuality is shameful’ was found offensive by the school and illegal constitutionally by the federal court. The main reason cited by the judges was that it offended the sensibilities of the minority, in this case, that of sexual orientation and that ‘it interfered in their learning’. The reaffirmation of the illegality of the student’s case raised many pertinent cases and the main point of the case remained wide scope of free speech. Does declaring one’s point of mind or personal preferences should really be constituted as illegal and if that is so, what is the relevance of freedom of speech as awarded by the 1st amendment of the constitution? In the present time, freedom of speech is being taken as a fashion statement. While exerting their right of expression by words or deeds, people must ensure that their personal freedom does not impinge on somebody else’s rights and in any way violate their sense of self-esteem, religiosity or as stated sexual orientation. Freedom of speech is universally accepted as a right for free expression so long as it is confined to themselves and nonoffensive for others. It is equally true that people have been exercising this right for a long time for peaceful purposes through various means like media, public speeches, and debates etc. The controversial issues, being discussed publicly and hotly debated at public platforms, have produced some highly relevant results, favored by masses. Controversy, at times, becomes necessary for the dissemination of information which is so necessary for the resolution of disputed issues and controversial topics.

Child Watch TV is good or not Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Child Watch TV is good or not - Essay Example Several researches around the world has shown that on an average children who consistently spend more than 4 hours per day watching TV are more likely to be overweight. In earlier days before the television, children played outdoors more and used their minds to be more creative. Today, obesity is a major problem among children and health experts point out that television plays a major role in this. Excessive television viewing promotes inactivity and when it is combined with frequent snaking it leads to obesity. In addition, children are more and more influenced by advertisement and through television they're also bombarded with messages that encourage them to eat unhealthy foods such as potato chips and empty-calorie soft drinks that often become preferred snack foods. There is no doubt that television has its good side. It can be both entertaining as well as educational. It gives good opportunity for children to learn more about different cultures, and gain exposure to ideas they may never encounter in their own community.Besides, it also gives them a chance to see different places and learn about various aspects on culture in different parts of the world. However, if we think of a situation where there was no television, children who have an interest to learn about these aspects could use books and other sources to know about these things.

Market Structure Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Market Structure - Essay Example What is also significant to understand that the article discusses how the services are packaged together with the goods to deliver a unique combination of offering to the consumers? This combination of selling the services and goods as the bundled products are changing the way traditionally goods and services are being offered. This article discusses also the strategies of the leading players in the market and how the competition between them is shaping the future of the industry. This paper will discuss the market structure described in the article, how the externalities, environmental policies as well as the public goods are being offered and finally how the production takes place and the relative costs associated with it. Market Structure This article discusses an industry which is an oligopoly in nature. Oligopoly is that form of market structure where the industry or the market is dominated by smaller number of sellers. (McEachern 2008). Since in oligopoly, there are smaller num ber of sellers therefore each participant in the market is aware of what other is doing and thus the decisions of one firm is either influenced by the decisions of other firms or its decision influence the players in the market. The overall strategic planning process of each of the player in the market therefore takes into account the actions and strategies of other players. (Bowles 2006). This article discusses as to how the Apple, through its products especially smartphones, MP3 players and tablet computers is influencing the market. It is also important to note that unlike other firms in the market, Apple is offering both the hardware as well as the software thus affecting and influencing the market from both the ends. It is also important to note that Apple and other producers in the market i.e. Microsoft and Google specially are the price setters in the market rather than price takers. Barriers to the entry in the market are high too owing to the high cost involved in the acqui sition of sophisticated technology as well as economies of scales involved due to sheer production of number of units by each of the player in the market. Apple and other firms in the industry also seem to capture the long run profits thus ensuring that the new entrants into the market cannot access to the abnormal profits in the long run. This ability of the firms like Apple has allowed it to set higher prices for its products such as Apple IPAD and IPODs. Externalities, environmental policies and Public goods Public goods, in economics, are considered as the goods which are non-rival as well as non-excludable. Non-excludable goods are those goods which create the problems of so called free riders wherein once the goods are produced, it is almost impossible to exclude the people from using them even if they have not paid for it. Further, the non-rival nature of the goods suggests that the consumption of goods by one individual does not reduce the quantity available for consumption to other consumers. (Baumol and Blinder 2008). Considering the above clarifications in mind, it is important to note that the article has discussed that Apple and other companies in the market are offering free public goods.

Florida v. Jardines, 11-564 from the Supreme Court in March 2013 Research Paper

Florida v. Jardines, 11-564 from the Supreme Court in March 2013 - Research Paper Example nt amount of marijuana and evidence that he was a drug trafficker too, Jardines contested the warrant saying that it is was breach of the fourth amendment. Hence, rendering the raid, and the consequence (charges for possessing marijuana), null and void. The Supreme Court of Florida approved the decision of the trial court, holding that the evidence be suppressed as the officers had committed Fourth Amendment breach. They did not have a probable cause to search Jardines’ property (Florida v. Jardines, 2013). 5. Rationale: why did the court decide the case this way? Was there a decent? A concurring opinion? How many Justices voted with the majority? What were the reasons that different judges felt differently about parts of the case? The court is not a law machine set out to operate under given set of command. The law and courts operate to contribute towards a better society. The law is made to protect the citizen and not to harass them. The notion that no one should be held above the law needs to be practiced in such a way as decided the Supreme Court of Florida. The Fourth amendment upholds that the people have a right to be secure in their homes (Jardines v. State, 2011). The Fourth Amendment does not allow police or anyone to search someone’s property without probable cause. The term ‘search’ has been highlighted in the Fourth Amendment as when governments physically intrudes someone’s property (person, papers, houses or effects) it is a ‘search’ (Florida v. Jardines, 2013).. The citizens should consider home as safe from unreasonable investigations. If this sense of security is not provided to the citizens then the society will always feel vulnerable and under pressure of the government. The officers that searched Jardines’ house did not ‘see’ anything with their own eyes before entering his premises. There was apparently no suspicious activity around or in his house. Had the officers seen something then it would have been a reasonable

How to analyze an ad Essay Example for Free

How to analyze an ad Essay Analysis of how a particular advertisement attempts to appeal to consumers By giving form to audience motives and desires, advertisers have the best chance of arresting attention and affecting communication. This is an analysis of the lift advertisement for Maxwell House Coffee created by the design agency Ogilvy Beijing of China. When the doors opened, sleepy people in an office building were shocked awake, providing a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the effects of drinking a cup of Maxwell House Coffee. The marketplace has grown increasingly congested in a frenzied competition for the consumer’s attention. Within this context advertisers believe that in order to get consumers to buy their product ads need to have two orders of content: an appeal to deep seated emotions and information on the product. A sales pitch is used to attract attention and effectively convey the virtues of the product on offer. Elements of good layout are necessary to control the message. Emotional appeals seem to fall into several distinguishable categories. Every ad uses a variation of these appeals: the need for sex, affiliation, guidance, prominence, attention, autonomy, or the need to nurture, aggress, achieve, dominate, escape, or to feel safe. This ad totally circumvents all conscious reaction when the lift doors open to reveal a gaping hole. The illogical link between a gaping hole in the floor and a cup of Maxwell House Coffee is embedded in the metaphor: a better way to wake up. The link is forged pre-logically in the mind of the person who steps into that lift. Ones primal instinct is to protect oneself from falling. This is so deep-seated and spontaneous that the advertiser leaves no other option for the onlooker. This ad relies on aesthetic sensation for its appeal which, needless to say, has been executed with perfection. Nothing in this layout could be added or left out. Apart from the initial â€Å"shock† the onlooker has to admire the optical illusion and the cleverness of its presentation. The impact of this ad on all of one’s senses is undeniably large. Other appeals that are present in a lesser and overlapping degree are a need to nurture; a need for guidance; a need to escape; a need to feel safe; and a need for curiosity. Stylistic features are not appeals in themselves but influence the way the basic appeal is presented. This ad could be classified as avant garde. This ad is innovative, experimental and unconventional. The most striking element of the ad is the floor graphic which instantaneously grabs ones attention and penetrates the mind so profoundly, you’ll never forget the experience. The viewing angle on this ad relies on the premise that people instinctively look down when entering a lift, not only to look where they are stepping, but to avoid eye-contact with strangers. When they do look up, they look straight into the solution: a cup of steaming hot Maxwell House Coffee to â€Å"wake up†. Targeted customers: sleepy office workers. All the elements of the ad come together in a single appeal: drink Maxwell House Coffee to wake up. The vast majority of ads employ a common set of textual features: headlines, body copy, and slogans. Copywriting has a function: to sell the product. This ad epitomizes the words â€Å"art in pursuit of a business goal†. The floor graphics replace the need for a headline. The body is presented in a most refreshing way (no pun intended) and consists only of two words embedded in the steam to further engage ones imagination of the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Body copy follows a picture and caption style. The traditional need for a slogan is sufficed by the placement of the logo of the product on the coffee cup. The elements of the layout of this ad totally control the way the message is received. The message is delivered in a uniquely creative and totally unexpected way. There is no competitive â€Å"noise† as the presence of the ad takes up the whole space within the lift. All layout elements have been used to maximum effect: attention, balance, proportion, movement, unity, clarity, simplicity and emphasis. Balance is achieved by proper weight distribution. In this ad the weight is on the floor. One’s knowledge of the effects of gravity plays a subconscious role. The tonal quality of the floor graphic and its fear inspiring content visually pulls one â€Å"to the centre of the earth and back again†. The poster is optically centered so the reader cannot miss the â€Å"sales pitch† and the artistic composition is nothing short of excellent – the floor graphics, the bare lift, the metallic surface of the lift walls and the design and placement of the single poster. In a highly original way forceful emotions are brought forth in an experience of uncontrollable surprise. The presentation of the information in the poster is reserved, dignified, formal, clean, uncluttered. One’s emotions guide the consumer through the ad, from beginning to the end. Directional impetus favors the elements to be stressed. The onlooker has nowhere to go. The recipient is taken â€Å"inside† the advertisement. Inside the lift, there is nothing to compete with it. The layout is unified by the confines of the lift, the muted colors of the walls, and the complementary colors in the poster. The inside of the lift determines the parameters of the ad space. This is a classic use of â€Å"white space† where the advertiser cleverly employs the barest necessities in such a profound way that this ad and the product it offers become unforgettable. The two important elements of shock (floor graphic) and solution (poster) are uniquely and very cleverly tied together. The message is clear and simple. Wake up with Maxwell House Coffee. Emphasis is achieved through the dominant element, the floor graphic which contrast sharply in size, placement and most of all its the impact to that of the poster which is strategically placed in the optical centre of the lift wall, directly opposite the doors (shock versus solution). Perfect. Does this ad effectively appeal to its target market? Yes, profoundly. And here is why: The chief element of this ad is the clever use of graphics to depict a gaping hole in floor of the lift. The product information is minimal as it needs no elaboration. The logo and a cup of coffee are all that is required. The rest is dependent upon the recipient’s own experience and feelings towards the product. The target market is well defined. The communication between the producer and the consumer is crystal clear and totally unambiguous: This product is experienced to be genuinely gratifying to the prospective consumer and a even non-coffee drinker will enjoy the emotional â€Å"ride† offered by the advertiser. Here both ends of the communication channel have been abundantly rewarded. The ad is clever, innovative, refreshing and directed at one appeal: drink Maxwell House Coffee. This won an international award for â€Å"Best use of Ambient Media: Large Scale† in 2008.

Survival Outcome Neonates Early Sepsis Health And Social Care Essay

Survival Outcome Neonates Early Sepsis Health And Social Care Essay A Retrospective Comparative Study on the Survival Outcome of Neoates with Early -Onset Sepsis with Sclerema Given Fresh Frozen Plasma at Davao Medical Centern Nursery-A One Year Review Objectives: To determine and compare the survival outcome of patients with early onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema given fresh frozen plasma plus standard therapy of neonatal sepsis to those who were only given standard therapy alone. Fresh Frozen plasma contains immunologic factors which is deficient in a neonate. This study would help us validate the role of FFP transfusion in a sick neonate with sclerema. Design: Cohort Study design Setting: Tertiary care hospital Participants:All neonates presenting with clinical signs of neonatal sepsis with sclerema admitteded at Davao Medical Center nursery for the year 2008. Results and Conclusion: INTRODUCTION Neonatal sepsis is a clinical syndrome of bacteremia characterized by systemic signs and symptoms of infection in the first month of life1. It has taken so many lives of newborn babies. The mortality rate continuously increases especially in the third world countries like the Philippines so that early recognition, diagnosis and treatment of infection is important because it is largely a preventable disease. Neonatal Sepsis can be divided into two main classes depending on the onset of symptoms related to sepsis- early-onset and late-onset neonatal sepsis2. Early onset is mainly due to antepartum infections vertically transmitted while late-onset is the combination of the former and nosocomial infection. The incidence of neonatal sepsis varies from one institution to another with higher rates in developing countries. In the United States , the incidence of a culture-proven sepsis is approximately 2 per 1000 livebirths and increases to 25 per 1000 livebirths in infants with birthweight less than 1500 grams3. It is considered to be a major cause of fatality during the first month of life contributing to 13-15% of all neonatal deaths with highest rates seen in premature infants and in small for gestational age infants. The mortality rate in neonatal sepsis may be as high as 50% for infants who are not treated3. A local study conducted at MCU-FDTMF Hospital nursery found the incidence of neonatal septicemia to be 9.6 %4 as compared to other studies at UP PGH which is 5.5%. At Davao Medical Center the incidence and the case fatality rate of neonatal sepsis for the year 2008 are about 5/1000 livebirths and 1.3% respectively5. Considering the nonspecificity of the early clinical signs of neonatal sepsis and the neonates relative state of immunosuppression, early diagnosis and treatment is of utmost important. The mainstay of treatment is antibiotic. Supportive management is geared towards thermoregulation to prevent hypothermia or hyperthermia, ensuring good ventilation/oxygenation to vital tissues, provision of optimal nutrition preferably with enteral feeding or TPN, prevention of hypoglycemia and electrolyte imbalance by administration of parenteral fluids and vasopressors for hypotension. Adjunctive therapy includes fresh frozen plasma transfusion, exchange transfusion, immunoglobulin therapy, granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor, and granulocyte transfusion. Sclerema is the uniform hardening of the skin and subcutaneous tissues to the extent that the skin could not be pitted nor picked up or pinched into a fold6.It is considered as a sign of a potentially fatal underlying disease process like neonatal sepsis especially gram- negative sepsis. Neonatal septicemia is invariably fatal when associated with sclerema7. Its reported mortality rates range from 67-88% with death occurring hours to days after onset8. Although literature about the benefits of Fresh Frozen Plasma transfusion in septic neonates with sclerema is scarce, our experienced at SPMC nursery suggests improved outcome from neonatal sepsis with sclerema when given FFP. We do not give FFP to septic neonates without sclerema. We are doing this study to validate if indeed our perception is correct and if this practice is valid. The study will be limited to comparison of septic patients with sclerema only. This preselects the most seriously ill patients. By limiting the study to early onset neonatal sepsis, opportunistic infections from less virulent pathogens like candida and staphylococcus epidermides are likely to be excluded and infection is most likely vertically transmitted and not nosocomial. This is to limit the varaiables due to etiologic agents that may affect outcome and interpretation of the result. Review of Related Literature The defense system of the human body consists of three components: physical , cellular and humoral. Neonates are particularly deficient in all three so that a more aggressive management is mandatory to improve survival outcome when neonates develop septicemia. The physical and chemical barriers to infection in the human body are present in the newborn but are functionally deficient. The skin of a preterm infant is only a few cell-layers thick and is poorly cornified hence can easily be damaged paving the way for infection. The protective fatty acid production is also low making them more vulnerable. At 23 weeks gestational age the fetus possesses T and B lymphocytes, macrophages, monocytes, polymorphonuclear cells and the capacity to synthesize all known immune factors. The ability of the T and B lymphocytes to produce cytokines is less in comparison to adults, however neonates are capable of generating appropriate adaptive immune responses. Langerhans cells are important in local infection and are present in the neonate at 18 weeks gestation. Phagocytes from preterm neonates show normal activity when suspended in normal adult serum, however neonatal serum is deficient in immunoglobulin and complement so there is a marked reduction in adherence and chemotaxis. The neonatal neutrophil or polymorphonuclear (PMN) cell, which is vital for effective killing of bacteria is deficient in chemotaxis and killing capacity. Also neonatal PMNs are less deformable therefore they are less able to move through the extracellular matrix of tissues to reach the site of inflammation and infection. The limited ability of neonate for phagocytosis and killing of bacteria is further impaired when the infant is clinically ill. Lastly neutrophil reserves are easily depleted because of the diminished response of the bone marrow especially in the premature infant. The neonate is capable of synthesizing IgM in utero at 10 weeks gestation, however IgM levels are generally low at birth unless the infant was exposed to an infectious agent during the pregnancy, thereby stimulating increased IgM production. During pregnancy IgG is transported actively and passively across the placenta from about the 20th week of gestation and at full term the neonates IgG levels are higher than his mothers levels. The IgG in an infants plasma has a half-life of about three weeks.Until the infant is able to generate his own IgG, IgM and IgA there is a period of postnatal hypogammaglobulinemia. In a preterm neonate of 26 weeks gestation the plasma IgG levels are markedly lower and diminish to ineffective levels very quickly, increasing the risk of infection. Complement protein production can be detected as early as 6 weeks gestation; however the concentration of the various components of the complement system widely varies among individual neonates. While some infants have had complement levels comparable with those in adults, deficiencies appear to be greater in the alternative pathway than in the classic pathway. The terminal cytotoxic components of the complement cascade that leads to killing of organisms, especially gram-negative bacteria are deficient. The deficiency is more marked in preterm infants. Mature complement activity is not reached until infants are aged 6-10 months. Neonatal sera have reduced opsonic deficiency against GBS, E. coli, and S pneumoniae because of decreased levels of fibronectin, a serum protein that assists with neutrophil adherence and has opsonic properties. Most common organisms causing early- onset neonatal sepsis include group B streptococci, gram -negative enteric organisms like E. coli. Listeria monocytogenes and Klebsiella are also a common isolates. Less common organisms include staphylococcus, other streptococci, anaerobes, and Haemophilus influenza9. The host-defence mechanism of neonates are immature. They have a markedly decrease levels of C3, Cy properdin and factor B which are very important in the alternative pathway of complement. Levels of IgM and IgA are also low at birth. Although IgG levels may be normal in term neonates, it is low in preterm infants. These relative deficiency of the neonates immune system complicated by low birthweight and decreasing age of gestation makes them more susceptible to life threatening infections10. Sadana,et al mentioned that the incomplete development of the host defense system of the neonate is largely responsible for the high mortality in neonatal sepsis11.In his study an increase in the levels of IgG, IgM, IgA andC3 was noted after exchange transfusion.Exchange transfusion offers removal of bacteria and toxins, improves oxygenation and perfusion as well as decreases hemorrhagic complications. The relative immunodeficiency state and susceptibility to sepsis and complications is the impetus for exploring treatment modalities other than antibiotics. There was an increase in the levels of IgG antibodies in septicemia patients with coagulase negative staphylococcus after FFP administration in the study made by Krediet, et al12 The neonate being deficient in both humoral and cellular immunity is more vulnerable to infection. There are literature that suggests the usage of Fresh Frozen Plasma in patients with neonatal sepsis to compensate for the immunologic deficiencies. FFP improves neonatal chemotaxis, provides humoral or cellular factors13 and increases the levels of immunoglobulin such as IgG, IgA and IgM. FFP remains the only approved source of factors V,XI, protein C, protein S and plasminogen14 and basically all the clotting factors. Others would say that FFP transfusion in neonatal sepsis is good because it increases levels of IgG, IgA and IgM15 that will increase chances of survival. FFP contains immunoglobulins anc complement factors16. Fresh frozen plasma, the plasma separated from a unit of whole blood and frozen at -18 oC within 8 hours of collection. It is a platelet-poor plasma17.Each bag has a volume of 175 to 250 ml and contains between 1 and 2 units of each coagulation factor per ml and 400 to 800 mg fibrinogen. It contains fibrinolytic and complement factors. It carries the same risks of viral transmission as other blood components and can cause allergic reactions and fluid overload. Indications for fresh frozen plasma, once used routinely in the support of critically ill-infants and children, have become more specific as evolving evidence has confirmed or disproved the efficacy of plasma in various circumstances. Fresh frozen plasma is currently indicated to treat the coagulopathies of massive hemorrhage, liver failure, disseminated intravascular coagulation and sepsis18. In an infant the fat has a higher saturated- to-unsaturated fatty acid ratio compared to adult fat and thus a higher melting point. Prematurity, hypothermia and shock and anatomic abnormalities have been postulated to further increase this ratio,possibly as a result of enzymatic alteration allowing precipitation of fatty acid crystals within the lipocytes. This condition has been suggested to result in the dramatic clinical findings in the affected skin. Xray diffraction techniques have confirmed that infants with sclerema have an increase in saturated fats and that the crystals within the fat cells are composed of triglycerides. The exact incidence of sclerema neonatorum is unknown . All studies describe SN as extremely rare. The number of reported case in recent years have declined, probably as a result of a better neonatal care. Because sclerema neonatorum invariably is associated with serious underlying disease process, the mortality rate is high. In different series, the reported mortality rates range from 67-88%, with death occuring hours to days after onset. If the underlying disease is treated successfuly, the skin softens and returns to normal. Sclerema neonatorum shows a slight male preponderance, with an estimated male-to-female ratio of 1.5:1. Sclerema neonatorum is a disease confined to the newborn period. It can present at birth, but onset within the first week of life is more common. The oldest reported infant presented with Pseudomonas septicemia is 106 days old. According to literature one half of the affected infants are premature, , and the others are full term but have a serious underlying disease. They are often of low birth weight and have cyanosis and low apgar scores.In one series, 75% of the mothers were healthy, while 25% had preeclampsia, placenta previa, or infection. Labor is usually normal and the delivery is spontaneous and nontraumatic. Physical findings appear suddenly, first on the thighs and on the buttocks and then spreading rapidly often affecting all parts of the body except the palms and the soles and the genitalia. The involved skin is pale, waxy, and firm to palpation. The skin cannot be pitted or pinched up because it is bound to the underlying tissues. The affected infant often dispalys flexion contractures at the elbows, knees and hips, temperature instability, restricted respiration, difficulty in feeding and decrease in spontaneous movement.17 Recognition and the prompt institution of therapy specific to the underlying disease process are mandatory such as antibiotics, steroids, exchange transfusions and FFP transfusion. Definition of Terms Neonatal sepsis- It is a clinical syndrome of bacteremia characterized by systemic signs and symptoms of infection in the first month of life. Neonatal sepsis encompasses systemic infections of the newborn including septicemia, meningitis, pneumonia, arthritis, osteomyelitis and urinary tract infection of the newborn19. Associated factors for early onset neonatal sepsis include lowbirthweight, PROM, foul smelling liquor, multiple vaginal examinations and maternal fever20 Early onset neonatal sepsis- It usually presents within the first 48 hours of life. In severe cases, the neonate may be symptomatic in utero, (fetal tachycardia, poor beat to beat variability) or within the first few hours after birth. The source of the infection is generally in the maternal genital, gastrointestinal, urinary tract . Clinically neonates usually present with respiratory distress and pneumonia. Presence of some perinatal risk factors has been associated with an increased risk of early onset sepsis. Frozen Frozen Plasma It is the plasma removed from a unit of whole blood and frozen at or below 55 degrees Fahrenheit within 8 hours of collection. It contains all the coagulation factors in normal amounts and is free of red cells, leukocytes and platelets. It is not a concentrate of clotting factors. Sclerema Neonatorum- It is derived from the Greek word sclerosmeaning hard. It is considered best as a sign of a potentially fatal underlying disease process in the newborn period. Physical findings appear suddenly first on the thighs and buttocks and then spreading rapidly, often affecting all parts of the body except the palms, soles and genitalia. The involved skin is pale, waxy and firm to palpation. The skin cannot be pitted or pinched up because it is bound to the underlying tissues.It can present at birth but onset within the first week of life is more common. Associated underlying conditions include septicemia, pneumonia, hypothermia, metabolic acidosis, respiratory distress syndrome, congenital heart defects, gastroenteritis and intestinal obstruction. Clinical Signs of Neonatal Sepsis: (At least 2 clinical signs supported by laboratory findings) 1.sclerema 2.hypoglycemia/hyperglycemia 3.temperature instability 4.tachypnea/respiratory distress 5.Apnea 6.Poor perfusion Laboratory findings: 1..I/T ratio> 0.2 2.leukopenia 3.Neutropenia 4.Thrombocytopenia Research Question Will FFP transfusion improves the survival outcome of the sick neonates with early onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema given the standard therapy plus FFP? Is the use of FFP justifiable in the treatment of neonatal sepsis with sclerema in terms of cost and survival outcome? Significance of the study Many studies have been done to improve the survival outcome of neonates with septicemia. The progress in terms of the available adjuctive therapies in the treatment of neonatal sepsis entail a higher cost which is an issue to our marginalized patients who cannot afford such expensive add on treatment hence inspired the researcher to study fresh frozen plasma transfusion which is much more affordable and readily available to the neonates with septicemia particularly with sclerema. FFP contains immunologic factors helping the immunologically deficient neonate in fighting serious infections. This study aims to evaluate the effects of FFP transfusion in the subset of neonates with high case fatality rate. They are the candidates that would benefit from the terminal cytotoxic complement with the coagulation cascade that FFP may provide. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY General Objective: To determine and compare the survival outcome of patients with early- onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema given the standard therapy (antibiotic + supportive care ) plus fresh frozen plasma to those with early -onset neonatal sepsis given only the standard therapy (antibiotic + supportive care ) at Southern Philippines Medical Center- Nursery for the year 2008 . Specific Objectives: Determine the incidence of sclerema in early onset neonatal sepsis in SPMC. Determine the rate of early onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema in SPMC. Determine the mortality rate of neonates with early onset sepsis with sclerema. Identify the possible the maternal fetal/neonatal factors related to early neonatal sepsis with sclerema Compare the outcome 1.resolution of sclerema Chapter 2 METHODOLOGY Study Design This paper will be an observational descriptive and comparative study on the survival outcome of patients with neonatal sepsis with sclerema admitted at Southern Philippines Medical Center for the year 2008 using a Cohort study design. Population This study will include all neonates with early-onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema admitted at Southern Philippines Medical Center -Nursery for the year 2008. Inclusion criteria: All neonates admitted at Southern Philippines Medical Center -Nursery who presents with the clinical signs of early- onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema. Exclusion criteria: 1.All neonates presenting with clinical signs of neonatal sepsis with sclerema occurring beyond 48 hours of life. 2. All non-institutional deliveries presenting with early onset neonatal sepsis with sclerema. 3. All neonates admitted at the NICU with obvious congenital anomalies like syndromic features, cleft lip and palate etc. Data Collection Data will be collected by the researcher through a retrospective chart review. The researcher will scan and evaluate each chart of the patient with neonatal sepsis for the presence of sclerema in the progress notes. A data sheet will be use for each patient.Research consultant will be asked for validation of diagnosis. Independent variable -Fresh Frozen Plasma transfusion Dependent variable- survival outcome of neonates with early onset sepsis with sclerema Sample Size: All neonates admitted at Southern Philippines Medical Center-Nursery who fulfilled the inclusion criteria for the year 2008 will be used as a sample in this study. Data Analysis: correlation coefficient and odds ratio will be used to summarize the data for the comparative part. Means and standard deviation for the descriptive part and percentage and rates as per standard definition. Ethical Consideration The approval of the hospital research committee and the ethics committee will be sought before the conduct of the study. No identification data or marks will be placed in each patient included in the study. The data will be kept by the researcher for 5 years. Table 1.Patient clinical profile Name: AGA___SGA___LGA___ Age: Weight: AOG: Sex: Medical record number: length of stay in the hospital: Date of admission : Date of discharge: Diagnosis upon admission: Final diagnosis: OUTCOME: [ ] died [ ]survived [ ] HAMA [ ] transferred [ ]transout to blue area Cause of death: Age at onset of sepsis(hours) Age at onset of sclerema(hours) Antibiotics Ampicillin/Gentamycin Cefotaxime/Amikacin Piperacillin + Tazobactam/Amikacin Meropenem Cefepime Neonatal risk factors Birthweight 1.VLBW 2.LBW 3.normal weight 4.LGA APGAR SCORE (5 minute) 0-3 4-6 7-10 Ballard Scoring 34-37 >37 Comorbidities Neonatal pneumonia Meconium aspiration Intubation Pulmonary hypertension Pneumothorax Others (specify) MATERNAL RISK FACTORS Premature labor and delivery Prolong Rupture of membrane Antenatal Steroid Chorioamnionitis Manipulative Operative Delivery Maternal infection within 2 weeks of delivery UTI RTI Preeclampsia/eclampsia Placenta previa/ abruptio Others (specify) SCLEREMA Hours first noted FFP transfusion Yes /hours before transfusion No Resolution of sclerema post FFP Yes- number of hours first noted resolution No- OUTCOME Died Survived COMPLICATIONS NOTED Table 2. ANTIBIOTICS Standard care+FFP Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % Ampicillin+Gentamycin Cefotaxime +Amikacin Piptazo+Amikacin Meropenem Cefepime Total Table 2.BIRTHWEIGHT Standard care+FFP Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % VLBW LBW AGA LGA Total Table 3. APGAR SCORE(5 MINUTE) Standard care+FFP Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % 0-3 4-6 7-10 Total Table 4. BALLARDS SCORE Standard care+FFP Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % 34-37 weeks >37 weeks Total Table 5. Comorbidities Standard care+FFP Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % Neonatal pneumonia Meconium aspiration Intubation Pulmonary hypertension Pneumothorax Others (specify) Total Table 6. Maternal Risk Factors Antibiotic+Standard care+ FFP Antibiotic +Standard care Total No. % No. % No. % Preterm labor/delivery RBOW Antenatal Steroid Chorioamnionitis Operative Delivery Maternal infection UTI RTI Preeclampsia/eclampsia Placenta previa /abruptio Others (specify) Total Table 7. Onset and Resolution of Sclerema Antibiotic+Standard care+ FFP Antibiotic +Standard care only Onset resolution Total time of sclerema Table 8. Outcome Survived Dead Total No. % No. % No. % Antibiotic+Standard care+ FFP Antibiotic +Standard care Total Conceptual framework: Babies admitted at DMC nursery 2008 No sepsis Compare results Sepsis with sclerema Antibiotic+Standard care+ FFP Antibiotic +Standard care Sepsis without sclerema Early-onset neonatal sepsis COST/BUDGET: COUPON BOND.P.400.00 PRINTINGP700.00 RESEARCH MATERIALS ..1,000.00 ______________________ P 2,100.00 TIME TABLE (May 2009- December 2010) May PRESENTATION TO RESEARCH COMMITTEE AND ETHICS June -October DATA GATHERING November PRESENTATION OF RESULTS December SUBMISSION OF HARD COPIES

Gilligan’s Island Essay -- Personal Narrative Vacation Traveling Essay

Gilligan’s Island No inhabitants, a major tourists spot, a clear blue ocean, but no sign of the Professor, the Skipper, or Mary Ann. Can you guess where this is? You got it! Gilligan’s Island located in the beautiful South Atlantic Ocean. During Spring Break of 2003, my best friend, Danielle, and I took a flight to Orlando, Florida, a car to Fort Lauderdale, and a cruise through the Bahamas that had beautiful subtropical weather. For one day out of four during the cruise, we were able to chose what we wanted to do whether it was snorkeling, shopping, or taking an off land excursion to Gilligan’s Island. Of course, Danielle and I chose sun tanning on the beautiful, sandy beaches at Gilligan’s Island. As we boarded the tiny, white, sixty passenger, excursion boat, we headed east from Nassau, Bahamas with a population of about 300,000, to the tiny island called Gilligan’s Island that had no inhabitants. Approaching the island, all we could see was crystal clear breathtaking blue water that looked like a huge sheet of glass. The water was so calm and so clean. As we drew closer to the island, Danielle said, â€Å"Look at all those huge palm trees.† She was right, the island was covered with giant palm trees that must have been there from way back when the Gilligan’s Island TV show was filmed (probably longer). The boat captain announced in a deep Creole accent over constant clicks and flashes of cameras â€Å"Enjoy your day here at Gilligan’s Island, one of the seven hundred islands here in the Bahamas. Remember that food and drinks will be served all day from the Pavilion. Departure time is at 4 p.m.† I was so excited to explore the tiny island, e tch many memories in my mind, but still enjoy my time at the beach. As the excursion... ...e learned a lot about the Bahamian cultural and their way of life. Not one Bahamian does a thing for themselves. Their goal is to feed their family and make sure that their family is taken care of first. They are also very hospitable people to the tourist and they make sure that you enjoy your stay and that you have plenty to eat and drink. As I look back at my trip, I realized that I may not have met Gilligan, the Skipper, the millionaire and his wife, the movie star, the Professor, or Mary Ann, but the Bahamian people were sure welcoming. They were nice to allow us to travel to Gilligan’s Island. After all, how many of you can say that you have traveled to Gilligan’s Island? Works Cited â€Å"Bahamas.† http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia. 13 Aug. 2004. â€Å"The Bahamas.† http://www.bahamas.com. 13 Aug. 2004. â€Å"The Bahamas.† http://www.cia.gov/cia. 13 Aug. 2004.

The Scarlet Letter Essay -- Literary Analysis, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sin. The word itself is synonymous with evil, shame, and a host of other negative connotations. Everyone sins. Still, each individual copes with his or her sin uniquely. Do they burrow their ignominy inside or do they confess their wrongdoing? Which one is more preferable over the other? Author Nathaniel Hawthorne takes a stab at answering some of these profound life questions in The Scarlet Letter. Through the events that occur in the lives of the characters Roger Chillingworth, Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynn, Hawthorne conveys his opinion that confessing and repenting sin is better than hiding sin. Roger Chillingworth’s character serves to represent the detrimental side effects that are conceived in a life as a result of continuing in sin without confessing. Chillingworth realizes what he has become due to his sinful vengeance when he says, â€Å"No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for himself, -kind, true, just, and of constant, if not warm affections? And what am I now? I have already told thee what I am! A fiend!† (Hawthorne 118). Roger is enslaved by his desire for revenge towards Dimmesdale, and in doing so, transforms himself from a wise, peaceful man, into a revenge-driven monster. In fact Hawthorne writes that, â€Å"This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (177). During Arthu r’s death scene Roger has, â€Å"†¦a blank, dull, countenance, out of which life seemed to have departed† (Hawthorne 175). He also explains that, â€Å"†¦old Roger Chillingworth’s deceas... ...nt as each of the men feel in their own hearts. While Dimmesdale’s extreme depression most likely causes his fatal disease, Chillingworth’s vengeful attitude towards Arthur mutates him into a gargoyle whose sole purpose is to frighten away any joy that may exist in Dimmesdale’s life. On the other hand, Hester emerges victorious in the denouement of the tale, counseling countless other hurting women and successfully raising a daughter, Pearl. There is no doubt that Hawthorne utilizes the incidences in the lives of Arthur, Hester and Roger to illustrate that keeping your sin from the rest of the world is not the way to go, and that, to receive the most from life, like Hester, you must confess your sin. In the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne-â€Å"Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!† (177).

The Time Machine :: essays research papers

As fabled as fairies and dryads, only slightly more scientific, the imaginary device referred to as the â€Å"time machine† has gained many prospective engineers over the years. Young boys ponder thoughts of returning to Jurassic times in a time machine of their own, while little girls dream of princesses in castles. Even as we grow older, we fancy that such an appliance might help us revoke that angry diatribe towards our boss, or take us back to yesterday when we bought that lotto ticket. Certainly, the contraption has procured a wonderful spot on our list of â€Å"Things I Wish Bill Gates Would Hurry Up And Design.† But who exactly was it that first conjured up such an idea? Most definitely not Bill Gates. In the late 1800s, H.G.Wells entertained many, as well as making a reputation for himself in the writing business, when he composed his â€Å"extraordinary voyage† The Time Machine. The Time Machine was perhaps the first book that allowed the world to accep t the thesis that seeing is not believing. Our â€Å"voyage† begins much like any other book of the 1800s, with many respectable people gathered together in a drawing room. Not only is it redundant, but it is the forecast of a positively boring book. However, we must remember that just as weather forecasts have a way of being uncannily incorrect, book forecasts are commonly wrong as well. There is a psychologist, a medical man, a very young man, Filby, a provincial mayor, our narrator, and the Time Traveller himself. The group listens rather skeptically as the Time Traveller attempts to convince them of the validity of such trekking, even when he presents them with a miniature replica of the time machine he claims to have built for himself in the laboratory. When the â€Å"mini-machine† seems to disappear in mid air, they pass it off as a clever party trick. However, the resolute scientist invites the group back for a second dinner party the following week where he hopes the true device will be completed. The following week, the assemblage returns only to find that their host is absent. Mid-way through the main course, the Time Traveller appears, looking rugged and distressed. After shoveling the entrà ©e into his mouth in a manner very much resembling a feasting lion, he sits to tell his story. The group listens intently as he divulges the details of his experience traveling to the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.

Rethinking Teaching In The Digital Age Education Essay

We live in a universe of rapid economic and technological alteration. Digital engineerings have a really strong impact on every facet of our lives, impacting how we communicate, find and provide information, concept relationships, trade and purchase goods and, critically, how we learn and teach. Now learners conveying rich experiences to the schoolroom acquired from a technologically enhanced universe. Younger scholars grow up utilizing nomadic devices, games and other electronic equipment for communicating and amusement. Mature scholars, meanwhile, are bit by bit more likely to hold internet entree at place and to utilize engineering at work. In the old ages in front, the diminishing cost of calculation will do digital engineerings handy to about everyone in all parts of the universe, from inner-city vicinities of developed states to the rural small towns in developing states. We can name it a digital age as these engineerings are transforming the lives of the people ; how and what people learn throughout their lives. It is merely similar to the â€Å" green revolution † which was made possible by the biotechnologies, now the new digital engineerings will decidedly convey â€Å" learning revolution † in instruction sector. But certain requirements are required to do learning revolution possible. These digital engineerings in instruction and peculiarly in the schoolroom will work merely when the thoughts and attacks ( traditional or conventional methods ) are transformed into constructive one. Research reveal the fact that in malice of utilizing ICT in the instruction and acquisition procedure, thoughts and attacks remain mostly unchanged. To take full advantage of new engineerings, we need to basically rethink our attacks to larning and education- and our thoughts of how new engineerings can back up them. Integrating engineering in instruction is a complex issue taking many signifiers that differ in intent. This will run from retroflexing bing educational patterns through digital media with engineering as tools, to transforming instruction to convey about new acquisition ends. The inactive 3 R ‘s should be replaced by the more dynamic 3 C ‘s of coaction, creativeness and communicating. These characteristics challenge the traditional footing for learning in schools.Learning versus Information:When people think about instruction and acquisition, they frequently think about information. It indicates our way to the conventional/behaviorist method of learning where a instructor is the beginning of information who pours his/her information into the empty vass i.e. scholars. Now, it ‘s rather natural that people see a direct connexion between computing machines and instruction. Computers permit people to convey, entree, represent, and manipulate information in many new ways . Because instruction is associated with information and computing machines are associated with information, the two seem to do a perfect matrimony. But this focal point on information is restricting and falsifying both for the field of instruction and for computing machines. If we want to take full advantage of new digital engineerings, and if we want to assist pupils go better minds and scholars, we need to travel beyond these information-centric positions of calculating and acquisition. Over the past 50 old ages, psychologists and educational research workers, constructing on the pioneering work of Jean Piaget, have come to understand that acquisition is non a simple affair of information transmittal. Teachers can non merely pour information into the caputs of scholars ; instead, larning is an active procedure in which people construct new apprehensions of the universe around them through active geographic expedition, experimentation, treatment, and contemplation. In short: people do n't acquire thoughts ; they make them. As for computing machines, they are more than merely information machines, despite the common usage of the phrase â€Å" information engineering † or â€Å" IT. † Of class, computing machines are fantastic for conveying and accessing information, but they are, more loosely, a new medium through which people can make and show. If we use computing machines merely to present information to pupils, we are losing the advanced potency of th e new engineering for transforming acquisition and instruction.Fig. 1, Learning in the Digital AgeICT is like â€Å" finger pigment † which can be used for planing and making things and merely so these digital engineerings can populate up to its potencies. Merely making and planing activities offer the greatest new larning chances with computing machines. Psychologists and philosophers like Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner and Dewey have besides shown that our best acquisition experiences come when we are engaged in planing and making things, particularly things that are meaningful either to us or others around us. When kids create images with finger pigment, for illustration, they learn how colourss mix together. When they build houses and palaces with edifice blocks, they learn about constructions and stableness. When they make watchbands with coloured beads, they learn about symmetricalnesss and forms. Like finger pigment, blocks, and beads, computing machines can besides be used as a â€Å" stuff † for doing things-and non merely by kids, but by everyone. Indeed, the computing machine is the most extraordinary building stuff of all time invented, enabling people to make anything from music picture to scientific simulations to robotic animals. Computers can be seen as a cosmopolitan building stuff, greatly spread outing what people can make and what they can larn in the procedure. Learning in a Digital Age explores ways in which engineering can assist higher instruction establishments meet the challenge of womb-to-tomb and work-based acquisition.Rethinking Teacher ‘s Function:In the recent old ages school instruction sector has realized that the instructor is the ultimate key to educational alteration and school effectivity. The instructors do non simply present the course of study, but they besides develop, define and reinterpret. It is the undertaking of instructors to undertake with the engineering and to turn their scholars to get â€Å" accomplishments of the twenty-first century † . In the current scenario, the voice of the advanced instructor in the state is hardly hearable. We still have instructors who are autocratic in nature and represent themselves as the exclusive beginning of information. These types of instructors resist altering their pedagogical patterns in malice of confronting jobs and challenges during teaching-learning procedure in the digitally turning universe. Fixing scholars for the demands of the twenty-first century requires committed, advanced instructors willing to force bing limitations. It is besides approximately efficaciously utilizing the emerging engineerings to heighten instruction and acquisition schemes. The alone and rapid alterations go oning in this field present assorted jobs for instructors who are willing to experiment with their instruction and acquisition, functions and duties, larning atmosphere and state of affairss, forms of interaction, schemes and theories, every bit good as, manners of appraisal. ICT has given new functions and duties to the instructor. ICT challenges the bing autocratic function of the instructors as the exclusive beginning of cognition and information and demands to be themselves learner foremost. Teachers themselves need to larn the new manner of acquisition, and in add-on to new ways of assisting others learn. This besides means a considerable displacement in the function of the instructor a nd in all structural facets of the school system.Fig. 2, Roles & A ; Duties of the Teacher in the Digital AgeThe greatest instructors teach of course. It flows from them like a soft rain ; they ca n't assist but learn. ICT is merely another tool in the tool chest of a good instructor. ICT expects instructors to give the pupils in-between phase in the schoolroom, supplying chances to research and ask for their acquisition. Teachers should move as ushers, facilitators and advisers, constructing linkages between their pupils ‘ single involvements and apprehensions and the common accomplishments and knowledge society expects them to get.Rethinking Learner ‘s Function:Students in a traditional schoolroom are inactive. They listen and react to the instructor ‘s direct direction. NCF, 2005 besides articulates that â€Å" kids ‘s voices and experiences do non happen look in the category. It further says that kids will larn merely in an ambiance where they feel they are valued and our schools still do non convey this to all kids † . But ICT has changed the manner pupils learn and the manners of larning they adopt. The scholar today has multiple resources available to them. They are in front of their instructors in utilizing the engineering and accessing information in assorted Fieldss. They are less dependent on instructors and prescribed text books. They build upon their bing cognition and deduce their ain significances. It has provided them freedom and flexibleness which was non available earlier. Learners have active, brooding function in this digital age.Fig. 3, Learner in the Digital ageToday ‘s kids are â€Å" turning up digital. † Their position of the universe is really different from that of grownups, thanks to exceeding entree to information, people, and thoughts across extremely synergistic media. Today ‘s kids are the latest theoretical account of human being. Looking at the universe of kids is non looking r earward at our ain past-it ‘s looking in front. They are our evolutionary hereafter. But, it besides proposes the biggest job in the teaching-learning procedure in the present digital age. A common scenario today is a schoolroom filled with digitally literate pupils being taught by linearaˆ?thinking, technologically obstructed instructors. Students have been exposed to these engineerings or similar 1s early on during their formative old ages while their instructors have merely been exposed to it merely late. As a consequence, the pupils are sometimes more capable with the engineering. In malice of this instructors are seldom given the opportunity to larn how to utilize this technologyaˆ?aˆ?teachers are given the tools, but non the cognition. Teachers progressively are larning the engineering on their ain clip. Students on the other are confident plenty to utilize these technological promotions efficaciously and they even prefer it more on traditional methods of instruction and acquisition. Learners now have freedom to research, discover and inquire whatev er they want.REFORMING Education:Now bulk of the states are acknowledging that bettering instruction is the best manner to increase wealth, enhance wellness, and keep peace. India is one of those states who have already moved towards the way of educational reform. But, these reform enterprises are superficial and incremental, and do non acquire at the bosom of the job. These enterprises included new signifiers of proving and appraisal, but leave in topographic point bing course of study and bing learning schemes. We need to transform the pedagogical attacks and functions that instructors and pupils are playing soon. Following facets needs to be believing critically and transformed if India wants to come on and travel in front in this technologically advanced universe: Rethink how people learn: We need to basically reorganise school schoolrooms. Alternatively of a centralized-control theoretical account ( with a instructor presenting information to a roomful of pupils ) , we need a constructive attack to larning. Students can go more active and independent scholars, with the instructor as facilitator and usher to the acquisition. Alternatively of spliting up the course of study into separate subjects ( math, scientific discipline, societal surveies, linguistic communication ) , there is a demand to concentrate on subjects and undertakings that cut across the subjects, taking advantage of the rich connexions among different spheres of cognition. It merely means incorporate attack. Alternatively of spliting pupils harmonizing to age, we should promote pupils of all ages to work together on undertakings, enabling them to larn from one another. Rethink what people learn: Much of what kids learn in schools today was designed for the epoch of paper-and-pencil. We need to update course of study for the digital age. One ground is obvious: Schools must fix pupils with the new accomplishments and thoughts that are needed for life and working in a digital society. Second new engineerings are altering non merely what pupils should larn, but besides what they can larn. There are many thoughts and subjects that have ever been of import but were left out of traditional school course of study because they were excessively hard to learn and larn with lone paper, pencil, books, and chalkboard. Some of these thoughts are now accessible through originative usage of new digital engineerings. Finally, and possibly most significantly, we need to transform course of study so that they focus less on â€Å" things to cognize † and more on â€Å" schemes for larning the things you do n't cognize. † As new engineerings continue to sp eed up the gait of alteration in all parts of our lives, larning to go a better scholar is far more of import than larning to multiply fractions or memorising the capitals of the universe. Rethinking Technologies: In add-on to rethinking our attacks to larning and instruction, we besides need to rethink the engineerings that we provide to immature kids. Most of the available computing machines are meant for the grownups merely but there is demand to develop such engineering that is worthy for the immature kids. Programmable bricks are such illustrations of these engineerings. Digitally manipulative blocks and faculties need to be developed and incorporated so that pupils can themselves acquire hold of their acquisition.FINAL Remark:Contemporary beliefs sing larning have moved off from cognition transmittal theoretical accounts of merely leaving information to constructive cognition theoretical accounts where cognition is constructed. In the procedure of intending doing, engineering is roped in to back up the communicating and building of new cognition ensuing in new acquisition. The function of ICT in instruction can be seen as larning about, larning with and larning t hrough ICT. ICT or digital age resources today offer great chances in instruction sector and particularly to our schools for the beneficiary function they provide in information, acquisition and research. It clearly states that instructors should be digitally literate in order to utilize these ICT resources and tools. Existing traditional patterns and functions needfully be changed by the usage of engineering in the schoolroom. Teachers must be a facilitator and direct the pupils towards the right way where as pupils should be provided with the freedom to research, discover and inquire. Resources should be made available to the schools in order to carry through this aim and instructors must be educated digitally. It means, course of study of instructor instruction will finally be transformed into ICT based course of study and explorative pedagogical patterns. Constructivism has already emerged as the new educational theory and engineering will follow it in pattern as it emphasizes o n collaborative acquisition, real-world undertakings with reliable appraisals with pupils accepting duty for their ain acquisition. Teacher developing course of study besides need to be redesigned as instructors should themselves be learner and digitally educated to be capable of utilizing these ICT tools. Success in the hereafter will be based non on how much we know, but on our ability to believe and move creatively. The detonation of digital engineerings has established the demand for originative thought in all facets of our lives, and has besides provided tools that can assist us better and reinvent ourselves. Children should play a cardinal function in this passage to the â€Å" Creative Society † . Childhood is one of the most originative periods of our lives. We must do certain that kids ‘s creativeness is nourished and developed, and we must assist kids larn how to widen and polish their originative abilities, so that the creativeness of childhood persists and grows throughout life. To accomplish these ends will necessitate new attacks to instruction and acquisition and internal inspiration and support system from our instruction system every bit good as the preparedness to alter and larn from everyone even from the pupils.REFRENCES:Anderson, L. and Krathwohl, D. ( 2000 ) : Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom ‘s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Allyn & A ; Bacon: New York. Bruner, J. ( 1966 ) : The procedure of instruction ; Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Burden, K. ( 2010 ) : ‘Conceptualizing instructors ‘ professional acquisition with Web 2.0 ‘ , Campus-Wide Information Systems 27, no. 3: 148-161. A Churchill, D. ( 2006 ) : Teacher ‘s private theories and their design of technology-based acquisition ; British Journal of Educational Technology, 37 ( 4 ) : p. 559-576. Dewey, J. ( 1938 ) : Education and experience ; New York: Macmillan. Dewey, J. ( 1956 ) : The kid and the course of study ; Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dey, B. , Saxena, K.M. & A ; Gihar, S. ( 2005 ) , Information and Communication Technology and teacher Education: An empirical survey: The Journal of Education, Vol. 1 ( 2 ) , pp.60-63 Ellis, V. ( 2007 ) : Taking Capable Knowledge Seriously: From Professional Knowledge Recipes to Complex Conceptualizations of Teacher Development, The Curriculum Journal 18, 3: 447 – 462 Gardner, H. ( 1983 ) : Frames of head: A theory of multiple intelligences ; Basic Books: New York. Glaserfeld, V. ( 1989 ) : Constructivism in instruction ; Pergamon Press: England. Jonesaˆ?Kavalier, B. , Flannigan, S. ( 2006 ) : Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the twenty-first Century ; Educause Quarterly, 29 ( 2 ) , 1aˆ?3. Leask, M. & A ; Paschler, N. ( 2003 ) , larning to learn utilizing ICT in the secondary schools, Routledge: London. National Curriculum Framework ( 2005 ) : National Council of Educational Research and Training: New Delhi. Piaget, J. ( 1973 ) : To understand is to contrive ; New York: Grossman. Piaget, J. ( 1926 ) : The linguistic communication and idea of the kid ; London: Routledge & A ; Kegan. Vygotsky, L. ( 1962 ) : Thought and linguistic communication ; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vygotsky, L. S. ( 1978 ) : Mind in society ; Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. Woolfolk, A. ( 2007 ) : Educational Psychology ( 10th Edition ) ; Canada: Pearson Publishers.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

annie dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Richard It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out. —HERACLITUS Contents Epigraph 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest iii 3 2 Seeing 16 3 Winter 37 4 The Fixed 55 5 Untying the Knot 73 6 The Present 78 7 Spring 105 8 Intricacy 124 9 Flood 149 10 Fecundity 161 11 Stalking 184 12 Nightwatch 209 13 The Horns of the Altar 225 14 Northing 247 15 The Waters of Separation 265 Afterword 278 More Years Afterward 283 About Annie Dillard 285 About the Author Other Books By Annie Dillard Cover CopyrightAbout the Publisher Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1 Heaven and Earth in Jest I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest. I’d half-awaken. He’d stick his skull under my nose and purr, stinking of urine and blood. Some nights he kneaded my bare chest with his front paws, powerfully, arching his b ack, as if sharpening his claws, or pummeling a mother for milk. And some mornings I’d wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood; I looked as though I’d been painted with roses.It was hot, so hot the mirror felt warm. I washed before the mirror in a daze, my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp. What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain. I never knew. I never 4 / Annie Dillard knew as I washed, and the blood streaked, faded, and finally disappeared, whether I’d purified myself or ruined the blood sign of the passover.We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence†¦. â€Å"Seem like we’re just set down here,† a woman said to me recently, à ¢â‚¬Å"and don’t nobody know why. † These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you’re lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing.I still think of that old tomcat, mornings, when I wake. Things are tamer now; I sleep with the window shut. The cat and our rites are gone and my life is changed, but the memory remains of something powerful playing over me. I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing. If I’m lucky I might be jogged awake by a strange bird call. I dress in a hurry, imagining the yard flapping with auks, or flamingos. This morning it was a wood duck, down at the creek. It flew away. I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blu e Ridge.An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks—Tinker and Carvin’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 5 hat providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all. Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will.The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home. The wood duck flew away. I caught only a glimpse of something like a bright torpedo that blasted the leaves where it flew. Back at the house I ate a bowl of oatmeal; much later in the day came the long slant of light that means good walking. If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good. Water in particular looks its best, reflecting blue sky in the flat, and chopping it into graveled shallows and white chute and foam in the riffles. On a dark day, or a hazy one, everything’s washed-out and lackluster but the water.It carries its own lights. I set out for the railroad tracks, for the hill the floc ks fly over, for the woods where the white mare lives. But I go to the water. Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing.All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing. West of the house, Tinker Creek makes a sharp loop, so 6 / Annie Dillard that the creek is both in back of the house, south of me, and also on the other side of the road, north of me. I like to go north. There the afternoon sun hits the creek just right, deepening the reflected blue and lighting the sides of trees on the banks. Steers from the pasture across the creek come down to drink; I always f lush a rabbit or two there; I sit on a fallen trunk in the shade and watch the squirrels in the sun.There are two separated wooden fences suspended from cables that cross the creek just upstream from my tree-trunk bench. They keep the steers from escaping up or down the creek when they come to drink. Squirrels, the neighborhood children, and I use the downstream fence as a swaying bridge across the creek. But the steers are there today. I sit on the downed tree and watch the black steers slip on the creek bottom. They are all bred beef: beef heart, beef hide, beef hocks. They’re a human product like rayon. They’re like a field of shoes.They have cast-iron shanks and tongues like foam insoles. You can’t see through to their brains as you can with other animals; they have beef fat behind their eyes, beef stew. I cross the fence six feet above the water, walking my hands down the rusty cable and tightroping my feet along the narrow edge of the planks. When I hit th e other bank and terra firma, some steers are bunched in a knot between me and the barbedwire fence I want to cross. So I suddenly rush at them in an enthusiastic sprint, flailing my arms and hollering, â€Å"Lightning! Copperhead! Swedish meatballs! They flee, still in a knot, stumbling across the flat pasture. I stand with the wind on my face. When I slide under a barbed-wire fence, cross a field, and run over a sycamore trunk felled across the water, I’m on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 7 through next to the steers’ pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish.In summer’s low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current. Water striders patrol the surface film, crayfish hu mp along the silt bottom eating filth, frogs shout and glare, and shiners and small bream hide among roots from the sulky green heron’s eye. I come to this island every month of the year. I walk around it, stopping and staring, or I straddle the sycamore log over the creek, curling my legs out of the water in winter, trying to read. Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I’m drawn to this spot.I come to it as to an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm. A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy â€Å"Yike! † and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. As I walked along the grassy e dge of the island, I got better and better at seeing frogs both in and out of the water.I learned to recognize, slowing down, the difference in texture of the light reflected from mud bank, water, grass, or frog. Frogs were flying all around me. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He was exactly half in and half out of the water, looking like a schematic diagram of an amphibian, and he didn’t jump. He didn’t jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island’s winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag.The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin 8 / Annie Dillard emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and ru mple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. â€Å"Giant water bug† is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs—all but the skin—and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.This event is quite common in warm fresh water. The frog I saw was being sucked by a giant water bug. I had been kneeling on the island grass; when the unrecognizable flap of frog skin settled on the creek bottom, swaying, I stood up and brushed the knees of my pants. I couldn’t catch my breath. Of course, many carnivorous animals devour their prey alive. The usual method seems to be to subdue the victim by downing or grasping it so it can’t flee, then eating it whole or in a series of bloody bites. Frogs eat everything whole, stuffing prey into their mouths with their thumbs.People have seen frogs with their wide jaws so full of live dragonflies they couldn’t close them. Ants don’t even have to catch their prey: in the spring they swarm over newly hatched, featherless birds in the nest and eat them tiny bite by bite. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 9 That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But a t the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks, â€Å"The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest? † It’s a good question.What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of the house with the Thanksgiving turkey? God is subtle,† Einstein said, â€Å"but not malicious. † Again, Einstein said that â€Å"nature conceals her mystery by means of her essential grandeur, not by her cunning. † It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God â€Å"set bars and doors† and said, â€Å"Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further. † But have we come even that far?Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat? Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who? ), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous. About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a 10 / Annie Dillard traight vertical de scent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star. The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Another time I saw another wonder: sharks off the At lantic coast of Florida. There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights.One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding frenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six-or eight-footlong bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence. We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous vents are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 11 millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammer ed out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.At the time of Lewis and Clark, setting the prairies on fire was a well-known signal that meant, â€Å"Come down to the water. † It was an extravagant gesture, but we can’t do less. If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has een on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. I have come to the grassy island late in the day. The creek is up; icy water sweeps under the sycamore log bridge. The frog skin, of course, is utterly gone. I have stared at that one spot on the creek bottom for so long, focusing past the rush of water, that when I stand, the opposite bank seems to stretch before my eyes and flow grassily upstream.When the bank settles down I cross the sycamore log and enter again the big plowed field next to the steers’ pasture. The wind is terrific out of the west; the sun comes and goes. I can see the shadow on the field before me deepen uniformly and spread like a plague. Everything seems so dull I am 12 / Annie Dillard amazed I can even distinguish objects. And suddenly the light runs across the land like a comber, and up the trees, a nd goes again in a wink: I think I’ve gone blind or died. When it comes again, the light, you hold your breath, and if it stays you forget about it until it goes again.It’s the most beautiful day of the year. At four o’clock the eastern sky is a dead stratus black flecked with low white clouds. The sun in the west illuminates the ground, the mountains, and especially the bare branches of trees, so that everywhere silver trees cut into the black sky like a photographer’s negative of a landscape. The air and the ground are dry; the mountains are going on and off like neon signs. Clouds slide east as if pulled from the horizon, like a tablecloth whipped off a table. The hemlocks by the barbed-wire fence are flinging themselves east as though their backs would break.Purple shadows are racing east; the wind makes me face east, and again I feel the dizzying, drawn sensation I felt when the creek bank reeled. At four-thirty the sky in the east is clear; how coul d that big blackness be blown? Fifteen minutes later another darkness is coming overhead from the northwest; and it’s here. Everything is drained of its light as if sucked. Only at the horizon do inky black mountains give way to distant, lighted mountains—lighted not by direct illumination but rather paled by glowing sheets of mist hung before them. Now the blackness is in the east; verything is half in shadow, half in sun, every clod, tree, mountain, and hedge. I can’t see Tinker Mountain through the line of hemlock, till it comes on like a streetlight, ping, ex nihilo. Its sandstone cliffs pink and swell. Suddenly the light goes; the cliffs recede as if pushed. The sun hits a clump of sycamores between me and the mountains; the sycamore arms light up, and I can’t see the cliffs. They’re gone. The pale network of sycamore arms, which a second ago was transparent as a screen, is suddenly Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 13 opaque, glowing with light.Now t he sycamore arms snuff out, the mountains come on, and there are the cliffs again. I walk home. By five-thirty the show has pulled out. Nothing is left but an unreal blue and a few banked clouds low in the north. Some sort of carnival magician has been here, some fasttalking worker of wonders who has the act backwards. â€Å"Something in this hand,† he says, â€Å"something in this hand, something up my sleeve, something behind my back†¦Ã¢â‚¬  and abracadabra, he snaps his fingers, and it’s all gone. Only the bland, blank-faced magician remains, in his unruffled coat, bare handed, acknowledging a smattering of baffled applause.When you look again the whole show has pulled up stakes and moved on down the road. It never stops. New shows roll in from over the mountains and the magician reappears unannounced from a fold in the curtain you never dreamed was an opening. Scarves of clouds, rabbits in plain view, disappear into the black hat forever. Presto chango. The audience, if there is an audience at all, is dizzy from head-turning, dazed. Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see. And, I might as well warn you, like the bear, all that I could see was the other side of the mountain: more of same.On a good day I might catch a glimpse of another wooded ridge rolling under the sun like water, another bivouac. I propose to keep here what Thoreau called â€Å"a meteorological journal of the mind,† telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped dim reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead. I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.He hasn’t the 14 / Annie Dillard faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will ha ve learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why. So I think about the valley. It is my leisure as well as my work, a game.It is a fierce game I have joined because it is being played anyway, a game of both skill and chance, played against an unseen adversary—the conditions of time—in which the payoffs, which may suddenly arrive in a blast of light at any moment, might as well come to me as anyone else. I stake the time I’m grateful to have, the energies I’m glad to direct. I risk getting stuck on the board, so to speak, unable to move in any direction, which happens enough, God knows; and I risk the searing, exhausting nightmares that plunder rest and fo rce me face down all night long in some muddy ditch seething with hatching insects and crustaceans.But if I can bear the nights, the days are a pleasure. I walk out; I see something, some event that would otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell. I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves â€Å"lightning marks,† because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees.The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 15 dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow in to whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. Something pummels us, something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights.We’re played on like a pipe; our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. When I cross again the bridge that is really the steers’ fence, the wind has thinned to the delicate air of twilight; it crumples the water’s skin. I watch the running sheets of light raised on the creek’s surface. The sight has the appeal of the purely passive, like the racing of light under clouds on a field, the beautiful dream at the moment of being dreamed.The breeze is the merest puff, but you yourself sail headlong and breathless under the gale force of the sp irit. 2 Seeing When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always â€Å"hid† the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw huge arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 17 I wou ld be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got great plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight of a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way?It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get. I used to be able to see flying insects in the air. I’d look ahead and see, not the row of hemlocks across the road, but the air in front of it. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit. Now I can see birds. Probably some people can look at the grass at their feet and discover all the crawling creatures. I would like to know grasses and sedges—and care. Then my least journey into the world would be a field trip, a series of happy recognitions. Thoreau, in an expansive mood, exulted, â€Å"What a rich book might be made about buds, including, perhaps, sprouts! † It would be nice to think so. I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people. One collects stones.Another—an Englishman, say—watches clouds. The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater which 18 / Annie Dillard he examines microscopically an d mounts. But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness. Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-youdon’t affair. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven; the brightest oriole fades into leaves.These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration; they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift, the revelation of a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away.They simply material ized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of red-winged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened.Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a final hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the c reek and scattered. One show to a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 19 customer.These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees. It’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incredibly wellhidden things. A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.More recently an author advised me to set my mind at ease about those piles of cut stems on the ground in grassy fields. Field mice make them; they cut the grass down by degrees to reach the seeds at the head. It seems that when the grass is tightly packed, as in a field of ripe grain, the blade won’t topple at a single cut through the stem; instead , the cut stem simply drops vertically, held in the crush of grain. The mouse severs the bottom again and again, the stem keeps dropping an inch at a time, and finally the head is low enough for the mouse to reach the seeds.Meanwhile, the mouse is positively littering the field with its little piles of cut stems into which, presumably, the author of the book is constantly stumbling. If I can’t see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I’m always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I’ve not seen one. I bang on hollow trees near water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared. In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray.The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to ke ep my eyes open. A photography professor at the University of Florida just happened to 20 / Annie Dillard see a bird die in midflight; it jerked, died, dropped, and smashed on the ground. I squint at the wind because I read Stewart Edward White: â€Å"I have always maintained that if you looked closely enough you could see the wind—the dim, hardly-made-out, fine debris fleeing high in the air. White was an excellent observer, and devoted an entire chapter of The Mountains to the subject of seeing deer: â€Å"As soon as you can forget the naturally obvious and construct an artificial obvious, then you too will see deer. † But the artificial obvious is hard to see. My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head; I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect. I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions.Finally I asked, â€Å"What color am I looking for? † and a fellow said, â€Å"Green. † When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark. The lover can see, and the knowledgeable. I visited an aunt and uncle at a quarter-horse ranch in Cody, Wyoming. I couldn’t do much of anything useful, but I could, I thought, draw. So, as we all sat around the kitchen table after supper, I produced a sheet of paper and drew a horse. â€Å"That’s one lame horse,† my aunt volunteered.The rest of the family joined in: â€Å"Only place to saddle that one is his neck†; â€Å"Looks like we better shoot the poor thing, on account of those terrible growths. † Meekly, I slid the pencil and paper down the table. Everyone in that family, including my three young cousins, could draw a horse. Beautifully. When the paper came back it looked as though five shining, real quarter horses had been corralled by mistake with a papier-mache moose; the real horses seemed to gaze at the monster with a steady, puzzled air. I stay away from horses now, but I can do a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 21 creditable goldfish.The point is that I just don’t know what the lover knows; I just can’t see the artificial obvious that those in the know construct. The herpetologist asks the native, â€Å"Are there snakes in that ravine? † â€Å"Nosir. † And the herpetologist comes home with, yessir, three bags full. Are there butterflies on that mountain? Are the bluets in bloom, are there arrowheads here, or fossil shells in the shale? Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me.A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: â€Å"This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is. † A fog that won’t burn away drifts and flows across my field of vision. When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.So I see only tatters of clearness through a pervading obscurity. I can’t distinguish the fog from the overcast sky; I can’t be sure if the light is direct or reflected. Everywhere darkness and the presence of the unseen appalls. We estimate now that only one atom dances alone in every cubic meter of intergalactic space. I blink and squint. What planet or power yanks Halley’s Comet out of orbit? We haven’t seen that force yet; it’s a question of distance, density, and the pallor of reflected light. We rock, cradled in the swaddling band of darkness.Even the simple darkness of night whispers suggestions to the mind. Last summer, in August, I stayed at the creek too late. 22 / Annie Dillard Where Tinker Creek flows under the sycamore log bridge to the tear-shaped island, it is slow and shallow, fringed thinly in cattail marsh. At this spot an astonishing bloom of life supports vast breeding populations of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals. On windless summer evenings I stalk along the creek bank or straddle the sycamore log in absolute stillness, watching for muskrats.The night I stayed too late I was hunched on the log staring spellbound at spreading, reflected stains of lilac on the water. A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection just as suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floating, so that I couldn’t see the creek bottom, or life in the water under the cloud. Downstream, away from the cloud on the water, water turtles smooth as beans were gliding down with the current in a series of easy, weightless push-offs, as men bound on the moon.I didn’t know whether to trace the progress of one turtle I was sure of, risking sticking my face in one of the bridge’s spiderwebs made invisible by the gathering dark, or take a chance on seeing the carp, or scan the mud bank in hope of seeing a muskrat, or follow the last of the swallows who caught at my heart and trailed it after them like streamers as they appeared from directly below, under the log, flying upstream with their tails forked, so fast. But shadows spread, and deepened, and stayed. After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests.I stirred. A land turtle on the bank, startled, hissed the air from its lungs and withdrew into its shell. An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue th ere, gave great suggestion of lurking beings. Things were going on. I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow. Tremendous action Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 23 roiled the water everywhere I looked, big action, inexplicable. A tremor welled up beside a gaping muskrat burrow in the bank and I caught my breath, but no muskrat appeared.The ripples continued to fan upstream with a steady, powerful thrust. Night was knitting over my face an eyeless mask, and I still sat transfixed. A distant airplane, a delta wing out of nightmare, made a gliding shadow on the creek’s bottom that looked like a stingray cruising upstream. At once a black fin slit the pink cloud on the water, shearing it in two. The two halves merged together and seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Darkness pooled in the cleft of the creek and rose, as water collects in a well. Untamed, dr eaming lights flickered over the sky. I saw hints of hulking underwater shadows, two pale splashes out of the water, and ound ripples rolling close together from a blackened center. At last I stared upstream where only the deepest violet remained of the cloud, a cloud so high its underbelly still glowed feeble color reflected from a hidden sky lighted in turn by a sun halfway to China. And out of that violet, a sudden enormous black body arced over the water. I saw only a cylindrical sleekness. Head and tail, if there was a head and tail, were both submerged in cloud. I saw only one ebony fling, a headlong dive to darkness; then the waters closed, and the lights went out. I walked home in a shivering daze, up hill and down.Later I lay open-mouthed in bed, my arms flung wide at my sides to steady the whirling darkness. At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphin s, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face. In orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour. The solar system as a whole, like a merry-go-round unhinged, spins, bobs, and blinks at the speed of 43,200 miles an hour along a course set east of Hercules. Someone has 24 / Annie Dillard iped, and we are dancing a tarantella until the sweat pours. I open my eyes and I see dark, muscled forms curl out of water, with flapping gills and flattened eyes. I close my eyes and I see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite cone. â€Å"Still,† wrote van Gogh in a letter, â€Å"a great deal of light falls on everything. † If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results. Peter Freuchen describes the notorious kayak sickness to which Greenland Eskimos are prone. The Greenland fjords are p eculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away†¦. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirrorlike water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking†¦.Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. † Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families. Sometimes here in Virginia at sunset low clouds on the southern or northern horizon are completely invisible in the lighted sky. I only know one is there because I can see its reflection in still water. T he first time I discovered this mystery I looked from cloud to no-cloud in bewilderment, checking my bearings over and over, thinking maybe the ark of the covenant was just passing by south of Dead Man Mountain.Only much later did I read the explanation: polarized light from the sky is very much weakened by reflection, but the light Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 25 in clouds isn’t polarized. So invisible clouds pass among visible clouds, till all slide over the mountains; so a greater light extinguishes a lesser as though it didn’t exist. In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They’re out there showering down, committing hara-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps at last into the ocean.But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I’d never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the insi de of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.Darkness appalls and light dazzles; the scrap of visible light that doesn’t hurt my eyes hurts my brain. What I see sets me swaying. Size and distance and the sudden swelling of meanings confuse me, bowl me over. I straddle the sycamore log bridge over Tinker Creek in the summer. I look at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt. I look at the water: minnows and shiners. If I’m thinking minnows, a carp will fill my brain till I scream.I look at the water’ s surface: skaters, bubbles, and leaves sliding down. Suddenly, my own face, reflected, startles me witless. Those snails have been tracking my face! Finally, with a shuddering wrench of the will, I see clouds, cirrus clouds. I’m dizzy, I fall in. This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great autumn 26 / Annie Dillard hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own.I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them. I staggered. Everything advanced and receded by turns; the world was full of unexplained foreshortenings and depths. A distant huge tan object, a hawk the size of an elephant, turned out to be the browned bough of a nearby loblolly pine. I followed a sharp-shinned hawk against a featureless sky, rotating my head unawares as it flew, and when I lowered the glass a glimpse of my own looming shoulder sent me staggering. What prevents the men on Palomar from falling, voiceless and blinded, from their tiny, vaulted chairs?I reel in confusion; I don’t understand what I see. With the naked eye I can see two million light-years to the Andromeda galaxy. Often I slop some creek water in a jar and when I get home I dump it in a white china bowl. After the silt settles I return and see tracings of minute snails on the bottom, a planarian or two winding round the rim of water, roundworms shimmying frantically, and finally, when my eyes have adjusted to these dimensions, amoebae. At first the amoebae look like muscae volitantes, those curled moving spots you seem to see in your eyes when you stare at a distant wall.Then I see the amoebae as drops of water congealed, bluish, translucent, like chips of sky in the bowl. At length I choose one individual and give myself over to its idea of an evening. I see it dribble a grainy foot before it on its we t, unfathomable way. Do its unedited sense impressions include the fierce focus of my eyes? Shall I take it outside and show it Andromeda, and blow its little endoplasm? I stir the water with a finger, in case it’s running out of oxygen. Maybe I should get a tropical aquarium with motorized bubblers and lights, and keep this one for aPilgrim at Tinker Creek / 27 pet. Yes, it would tell its fissioned descendants, the universe is two feet by five, and if you listen closely you can hear the buzzing music of the spheres. Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other. It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign. But I can’t see. Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small. No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest. But it could be that we are not seeing something.Galileo thought comets were an optical il lusion. This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope. What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upsidedown over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger. I turn from the window. I’m blind as a bat, sensing only from every direction the echo of my own thin cries.I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating on dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth. Von Senden collected accounts of such cases; the histories are fascinating. Many doctors had tested their patients’ sense perceptions and ideas of spa ce both before and after the operations. The vast majority of patients, of both sexes and all ages, had, in von Senden’s opinion, no idea of space whatsoever.Form, distance, and size were so many meaningless syllables. A patient â€Å"had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness. † Before 28 / Annie Dillard the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing. One patient called lemonade â€Å"square† because it pricked on his tongue as a square shape pricked on the touch of his hands.Of another postoperative patient, the doctor writes, â€Å"I have found in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow limits which she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus when I asked her to sho w me how big her mother was, she did not stretch out her hands, but set her two index-fingers a few inches apart. † Other doctors reported their patients' own statements to similar effect. â€Å"The room he was in†¦he knew to be but part of the house, yet he could not conceive that the whole house could look bigger† â€Å"Those who are blind from birth†¦have no real conception of height or distance.A house that is a mile away is thought of as nearby, but requiring the taking of a lot of steps†¦. The elevator that whizzes him up and down gives no more sense of vertical distance than does the train of horizontal. † For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: â€Å"The girl went through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw, but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness. † Again, â€Å"I asked the patient what he could see; he answered that he sa w an extensive field of light, in which everything appeared dull, confused, and in motion.He could not distinguish objects. † Another patient saw â€Å"nothing but a confusion of forms and colors. † When a newly sighted girl saw photographs and paintings, she asked, â€Å"‘Why do they put those dark marks all over them? ’ ‘Those aren’t dark marks,’ her mother explained, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 29 ‘those are shadows. That is one of the ways the eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows many things would look flat. ’ ‘Well, that’s how things do look,’ Joan answered. ‘Everything looks flat with dark patches. ’† But it is the patients’ concepts of space that are most revealing.One patient, according to his doctor, â€Å"practiced his vision in a strange fashion; thus he takes off one of his boots, throws it some way off in front of him, and then attempts to gau ge the distance at which it lies; he takes a few steps towards the boot and tries to grasp it; on failing to reach it, he moves on a step or two and gropes for the boot until he finally gets hold of it. † â€Å"But even at this stage, after three weeks’ experience of seeing,† von Senden goes on, â€Å"‘space,’ as he conceives it, ends with visual space, i. e. with color-patches that happen to bound his view.He does not yet have the notion that a larger object (a chair) can mask a smaller one (a dog), or that the latter can still be present even though it is not directly seen. † In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of colorpatches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. Soon after his operation a patient â€Å"generally bumps into one of these color-patches and observes them to be substantial, since they resist him as tactual objects do.In walking about it also strikes him—or can if he pays attention—that he is continually passing in between the colors he sees, that he can go past a visual object, that a part of it then steadily disappears from view; and that in spite of this, however he twists and turns—whether entering the room from the door, for example, or returning back to it—he always has a visual space in front of him. Thus he gradually comes to realize that there is also a space behind him, which he does not see. † The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves over- 0 / Annie Dillard whelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair. â€Å"The child can see, but will not make use of his sight.Only when pressed can he with difficulty be brought to look at objects in his neighborhood; but more than a foot away it is impossible to bestir him to the necessary effort. † Of a twenty-one-year-old girl, the doctor relates, â€Å"Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. A fifteen-year-old boy, who was also in love with a girl at the asylum for the blind, finally blurted out, â€Å"No, really, I can’t stand it anymore; I want to be sent back to the asylum again. If things aren’t altered, I’ll tear my eye s out. † Some do learn to see, especially the young ones. But it changes their lives. One doctor comments on â€Å"the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen. † A blind man who learns to see is ashamed of his old habits. He dresses up, grooms himself, and tries to make a good impression.While he was blind he was indifferent to objects unless they were edible; now, â€Å"a sifting of values sets in†¦his thoughts and wishes are mightily stirred and some few of the patients are thereby led into dissimulation, envy, theft and fraud. † On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 31 the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is â€Å"something bright and then holes. † Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, â€Å"It is dark, blue and shiny†¦. It isn’t smooth, it ha s bumps and hollows. A little girl visits a garden. â€Å"She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it. ’† Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world. Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, â€Å"The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight. One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that â€Å"men do not really look like trees at all,† and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did n ot recognize any objects, but, â€Å"the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God!How beautiful! ’† I saw color-patches for weeks after I read this wonderful book. It was summer; the peaches were ripe in the valley orchards. When I woke in the morning, color-patches wrapped round my eyes, intricately, leaving not one unfilled spot. All day long I walked among shifting color-patches that parted before me like the Red Sea and closed again in silence, transfigured, wherever I looked back. Some patches swelled and loomed, while others vanished utterly, and dark marks flitted at random 32 / Annie Dillard over the whole dazzling sweep.But I couldn’t sustain the illusion of flatness. I’ve been around for too long. Form is condemned to an eternal danse macabre with meaning: I couldn’t unpeach the pe aches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color-patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I’m told I reached for the moon; many babies do. But the color-patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plain. The moon rocketed away.I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, a world where space makes a kind of terrible sense. What gnosticism is this, and what physics? The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window—silver and green and shape-shifting blue—is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the distant lawn. That humming oblong creature pale as light that stole along the walls of my room at night, stretching exhilaratingly around the corners, is gone, too, gone the night I ate of the bittersweet fruit, put two and two together and puckered forever my brain.Martin Buber tells this tale: â€Å"Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ Why didn’t someone hand those newly sighted people paints and brushes from the start, when they still didn’t know what anything was? Then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason, Eden before Adam gave names.The scales would drop from my eyes; I’d see trees like men walking; I’d run down the road against all orders, hallooing and leaping. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 33 Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, â₠¬Å"not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen. † My eyes alone can’t solve analogy tests using figures, the ones which show, with increasing elaborations, a big square, then a small square in a big square, then a big triangle, and expect me to find a small triangle in a big triangle.I have to say the words, describe what I’m seeing. If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present. It’s not that I’m observant; it’s just that I talk too much. Otherwise, especially in a strange place, I’ll never know what’s happening. Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio. When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some ays when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall. But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer. 34 / Annie Dillard It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the mud dy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it.It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time.Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fou ntain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone. When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer. But I can’t go out and try to see this way.I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a Pilgrim at Tinker Creek / 35 discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover un iversally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness.Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance. â€Å"Launch into the deep,† says Jacques Ellul, â€Å"and you shall see. † The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.