Writing example essay topic

A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled. It is this intensity of experience that she seems to live in order to declare. There is an ambition about her book that I like, one that is deeper than the ambition to declare wonder aloud. It is the ambition to feel.

This is a guess. But if this is what she has at heart, I am not quite sure that in writing this book she wholly accomplished it. I don't say this, though, to detract from her declared intention in laying herself open to the experience of seeing. It is a state she equates with innocence: 'What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object.

It is at once a receptiveness and total concentration. ' ' But apparently it is an unself-consciousness that can be consciously achieved and consciously declared. And part of her conception of seeing is that in the act of doing it she is herself, in turn, being seen. '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.

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. ' ' What happens to that paragraph is what happens to her book. As the episodes begin, we can imagine an appealing young woman standing alert in a meadow, dressed in shirt and pants, holding her field glasses and provided with a sandwich: she is waiting to see, being very patient and still. By the chapter's end, we realize or suspect we are watching a dervish dancing. Receptivity so high-strung and high-minded has phases of its own. The author show us that it has its dark side too.

'The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. This is what we know.

The rest is gravy. ' ' I honestly do not know what she is talking about at such times. The only thing I could swear to is that the writing here leaves something to be desired. 'What's going on here?' ' is one of the author's refrains. 'The creator loves pizzazz,' 's he answers herself. She is better at stalking a muskrat: 'Stalking is a pure form of skill, like pitching or playing chess.

Rarely is luck involved. I do it right or I do it wrong; the muskrat will tell me, and that right early. Even more than baseball, stalking is a game played in the actual present. At every second, the muskrat comes, or stays, or goes, depending on my skill. ' ' This is admirable writing. So is her account of the polyphemus moth -- first in its cocoon, then emerging, then crawling away in the presence of a roomful of schoolchildren.

It has been directly experienced at what I should say is eye-level. Her account of the migration of the monarch butterflies, whi.