Hemingway and Morrison

There will indeed be some blog-specific writing on this site quite soon, so do check back. Until then, here are two essays I recently wrote.

Concept of the "Home" in Beloved by Toni Morrison

Unlike the thousands of immigrants who have traveled to America to forge for themselves a new home, imported Africans were forced into America as property. They were stripped from a livable past and shackled into a foreign, unlivable future. The story of the American slave is thus the story of the African’s search for a home in a hateful land.

The Human Connection in For Whom the Bell Tolls

There is something mildly perverse about love at first sight. In one glance, the whole of human experience must be felt. In one glance, the lovers must see parts of themselves unfulfilled, fragments of their future that must be righted, bits of their world that need to be completed. First-sight love – extolled by poets as an emotional apotheosis, denounced by cynics as rubbish, idealized by teenage girls with bubblegum mouths and cordless phones as an expectation – depends, in this way, on the utter destruction of time. It depends on life lived in the instantaneity of “now.”
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Sexual embracement – needed for the survival of the species and the regeneration of the individual – thus, is ultimately universal, and, lying on nature’s simultaneous birthplace and cemetery, the forest floor, Robert and Maria unite with all species of all time when they make love.