Response to Lee Siegel "Against the Machine"

The Artificial World We Live In "The Internet"

By: Natalina (Sogang University)

Do you think that there is another world out there? I do think so. There is a world inside this world which is created by human and that is the Internet. Even though it just something that considered to be artificial, but it can connect all the people from all over the world. As we see, these days, people find it awesome to play with the Internet since it offers them so many things. As an example, they can see different people and different countries without needing to across the ocean, but only stare on their computers or Smartphone’s screen. Hence, all of the people have connection of internet to their computer at home or mobile laptop which can be carried with them everywhere they go, like tablets (iPad or Samsung galaxy) and Smartphones. The use of these devices can be viewed from two different sides since everything in this life has its good and bad sides, so does the Internet. 

First, there are so many positive things we get from the Internet. The Internet is a good tool for implementing the idea of freedom of speech, great facility for collecting information, and it is an easy means to build social connection to focus in Information, there is a lot that we can find such as: up-to-date news, entertainment, sometimes helps students to do their assignment. In modern technology where competition is everywhere, information is playing crucial role. For instance, if there is a job opening, people no more use paper to make the announcement instead they prefer to use internet as the mean to make announcement online. If you have no access to the Internet, to their website, then automatically you will have no access to the related information. Therefore, in this very competitive world, information is above all. The search engines like Google, Yahoo, or for most Korean people search engines like Naver and Daum, are the places where you can find variety of information just by typing a key word of the subject that you want to know. You can almost find any type of information and subject that you are looking for. 

Additionally, with the social sites that human being ever created can connect us throughout the world. We can make millions of friends just by using the Internet. With so many great ways for you to keep in touch with them, like email and instant messaging services from Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, MSN. 

However, in contrast of the positive things, the Internet also carries some negative things. For instance, people can steal your personal information such as name, address, credit card number. Because of this kind of thing happened, some people prefer to hide themselves, their identity. As Lee Siegel in his essay The World Is All That Is the Case, he said that for the first time in human history, a person can broadcast his opinions, beliefs, and most intimate thought-“not to mention his face, or any other part of his body” to tens of millions of other people. 

Another best example is people in these days have way more eye contact with their computers, or tablets, or Smartphone’s screen for hours rather than they do with other humans being. As described in the opening discussion of Lee Siegel’s essay, that everyone is sittings speechless in Starbucks. Instead of seeing each other and talking face-to-face, people feel more comfortable talking to each other through the wall on the Internet. It also happened to me several times, when I post something on my Facebook wall, some of my Korean friends comment a lot on that pretend like we know each other very well, but when we meet around at school we don’t even say hi to each other. This is funny but so true. I just don’t get why people should feel way comfortable like that. 

Aside from the example above, I sometimes faced some serious time management problems because I used to be so addicted to surfing the Internet, and I found myself unable to concentrate on my work before me. I sometimes also found the Internet awesome when I have bunch of work to do. I hated it when this happened to me. I always regretted after I spent an awful time on that each day, and I found my sleeping schedule ruined. However, I relieve now, because I’m not that addicted anymore to surfing the Internet. 

In the whole, from the essay of Siegel about the Internet, he is strong on pointing out the problems, but less impending about what he sees as the solutions. However, possibly it's necessary to understand the extent of the problems first before we start solving them. However, I think that the solutions are back to individual, to the people who use the Internet. Since the Internet is just a mean that does’t have brain to think like we do, so we can take good things of it and leave bad things. God gave us beautiful and smart brain, so we should use it very well, not to be a stupid person that easy to be manipulated by the machine.

Response to E.B White "Once More to the Lake"

E.B White: "Everything Was as It Always Had Been"

By: Natalina (Sogang University)

People usually like to retrieve their childhood memories when they get older. Sometimes they can remember what they have done in their childhood well, but sometimes they don’t. Revisiting the places where they visited the most when they were young, or seeing their childhood photo album again, or sometimes seeing themselves through the children around them who act the same way as they did when they were young are some ways of recalling childhood memories. E.B White, the author of “Once More to the Lake”, recalls his memories by revisiting the place that he went the most with his family every summer, a Maine Lake, in his childhood time. After he replaced his father’s position as a father and his son replaced his position as a son, he took his son with him to the lake one day to experience again the moments he had experienced. When he got there, he found out that things around the lake were unchanged although we all know that everything gradually changes with the passage of time. There are several examples we can see in White’s essay “Once More to the Lake” which prove that everything remains the same for him. 

The first example is the lake itself, the water and its small waves, the boat, the green grass, the farms and their farmhouses for White, the ways they all look have not changed. He describes things from the past as if nothing has ever changed, because he still feels very familiar with the place and the things around it. When he returns back to his childhood vacation spot, the lake, once more with his son, yet he clearly remembers all the things he saw at the first time he went there with his family. It shows that White has a very special feeling and view to this place as a holy spot not as a usual place. Imagine that this happens to us, I believe that we also can only remember places that we think are special although for others they are not. Therefore, even though it has been a long time White left the lake, but he still explicitly remembers all his memories in that place. 

Source: jasperjournal.com

The second example is the behavior of his son which is exactly the same as his when he was a young boy. “I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat.”, (White, 187-188) and it shows that his son’s attitude reminds him of how he was always the first up, although now he lays still while his son sneaks out earlier in the morning. Everything that he sees from his son’s behaviors makes him think that his son was him. As he says “I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father” (White, 188). Many times he keeps repeating the same thing that he got confused and unable to distinguish who he was, whether a father with his son or him with his own father, because he and his son in the present share and do the same thing as he and his father did in the past. That’s why White says that change is changeless since both the past and the present have no big difference for him. We all know that time goes on, and people change, and sometimes the nature and things around it do change as well, but still some of them remain the same to recall our memories and bring us travelling back to where we were. However, it depends also on individual perspective that whether or not things and the person himself change. 

The last example is his feeling of being a young boy again when he returns there. Throughout the essay, White says that he frequently finds himself seeing the lake through the eyes of his son. He imagines and rethinks himself as a young boy by standing in his son’s shoes. The place brings him to an illusion world which got him confused about him, and this clearly represents that he struggles by letting of his child inside of him. However, he seems enjoy the illusion of returning back to the past as he was a little boy, and experiences the unchanging lake once more. If we happened to revisit any places that we had been the most, it surely brings us back to the past, to who we were and the things that we did at the time until we left the place, because as humans, we all experience something for the first time which will stick with us for the rest or our lives. 

In short, White’s illusion makes everything he sees around the lake seems like they bring his past to the present even though it just happens for a while artificially. The lake gives White a sense of his boyhood life because years after years it remains the same. He does realize that time has moved forward and he is growing when he hears the unfamiliar nervous sound of the outboard motor. However, some things don’t change, only the role in which he plays. Hence, the past is just something that we cannot erase from your memory, or maybe some can, but surely someday all the memories recover accidentally without us expecting that, just like what happened to White. All the senses, whether it is smell, sight, hearing, taste, touch, can physically bring back memories, because in fact through these senses White recalls his memories. As White says in the sentence “Outside, the road was tarred and cars stood in front of the store. Inside, all was just as it had always been”. It can be analyzed that White tries to say outside there we could see everything changes as time goes on, but inside, the whole things that we already done stay the same.  

Living Like Weasels - Annie Dillard

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label. 

And once, says Ernest Thompson Seton--once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant? Or did the eagle eat what he could reach, gutting the living weasel with his talons before his breast, bending his beak, cleaning the beautiful airborne bones? 

I have been reading about weasels because I saw one last week. I startled a weasel who startled me, and we exchanged a long glance. 

Twenty minutes from my house, through the woods by the quarry and across the highway, is Hollins Pond, a remarkable piece of shallowness, where I like to go at sunset and sit on a tree trunk. Hollins Pond is also called Murray's Pond; it covers two acres of bottomland near Tinker Creek with six inches of water and six thousand lily pads. In winter, brown-and-white steers stand in the middle of it, merely dampening their hooves; from the distant shore they look like miracle itself, complete with miracle's nonchalance. Now, in summer, the steers are gone. The water lilies have blossomed and spread to a green horizontal plane that is terra firma to plodding blackbirds, and tremulous ceiling to black leeches, crayfish, and carp. 

This is, mind you, suburbia. It is a five-minute walk in three directions to rows of houses, though none is visible here. There's a 55-mph highway at one end of the pond, and a nesting pair of wood ducks at the other. Under every bush is a muskrat hole or a beer can. The far end is an alternating series of fields and woods, fields and woods, threaded everywhere with motorcycle tracks--in whose bare clay wild turtles lay eggs. 

So, I had crossed the highway, stepped over two low barbed-wire fences, and traced the motorcycle path in all gratitude through the wild rose and poison ivy of the pond's shoreline up into high grassy fields. Then I cut down through the woods to the mossy fallen tree where I sit. This tree is excellent. It makes a dry, upholstered bench at the upper, marshy end of the pond, a plush jetty raised from the thorny shore between a shallow blue body of water and a deep blue body of sky. 

The sun had just set. I was relaxed on the tree trunk, ensconced in the lap of lichen, watching the lily pads at my feet tremble and part dreamily over the thrusting path of a carp. A yellow bird appeared to my right and flew behind me. It caught my eye; I swiveled around—and the next instant, inexplicably, I was looking down at a weasel, who was looking up at me. 

Weasel! I'd never seen one wild before. He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard's; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin; maybe two brown hairs' worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn't see, any more than you see a window. 

The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key. 

Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don't. We keep our skulls. So. 

He disappeared. This was only last week, and already I don't remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel's brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life and the urgent current of instinct. He vanished under the wild rose. I waited motionless, my mind suddenly full of data and my spirit with pleadings, but he didn't return. 

Please do not tell me about "approach-avoidance conflicts." I tell you I've been in that weasel's brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes-but the weasel and I both plugged into another tape simultaneously, for a sweet and shocking time. Can I help it if it was a blank? 

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won't say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose leaf, and blown. 

I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to Hollins Pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about it. That is, I don't think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasels: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will. 

I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel's chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow? 

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. 

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles. 

From Twenty-Five Great Essays Book Third Edition, Robert DiYanni, New York University