To Think or to Do, or Perhaps Neither in My Case

I am a thinker and doer both in the worst of times for each. Today I hit a car, because I did do and did not think; I sent an angry email, because I did not think; and today, I missed a treasured opportunity to catch up with an old friend, because I thought of all the complications of the meeting, rather than taking the minuscule risk to do, and to speak to the friend.

Not only are thinking and doing unrelated, but I seem to suffer dismally from a disconnection of the two in some region of my brain. They say I am "book-smart" and deprived of common sense, brutally so, and the statement could hardly be more accurate.

Today, I thought excessively, and yet despite all my cluttering thinking, I did and did wrong. In foods class, I misunderstood directions, and while berating myself in my mind for not questioning my teacher as to the procedure, I began to think so hard that I decided to do would be preferable. I was wrong. The result was my giving the wrong amount of egg to another group baking muffins, causing their product to be like a leather shoe. In a sense, my fruitlessly intense thinking, in complete disconnect with my mindless doing, sabotaged them.

I am a doer when I should not be, and a thinker when I should not be, all at the same time. I had a part-time job once at a cut-throat pizza shop. My initial reaction to a peeved customer would be to think: what should I do? Should I tell my boss? Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should just hang up. Maybe I should just run away... and through that whirlpool of thoughts would emerge a deed that was altogether stupid. I would tell the customer to please, wait a moment, and I would hand them some other customer's pizza. Oops.

Alas, I am a thinker and doer in the worst senses of the words. My memory with words and names is infallible; my fingers are dexterous; my test performance exceptional at times. But what I lack is that impossibly crucial, even lucrative, connection between my thoughts and my actions, leading me to oftentimes look like an utter bozo.

Break of Day: An Explication

Foremost, it is intriguing that the poem, written by John Donne, should be in the perspective of a woman. By taking on the persona of the opposite gender, the poet emphasizes his contemplation and comprehension of what a woman might suppose. 

Additionally, the poem is divided into three stanzas, each presenting a slightly different variation of a plea from the woman speaker that her partner stays. The first stanza is playfully entreating, while the second is more earnest, and the last results in an agitated resignation to defeat.

The jocular nature of the first stanza is apparent in the first line alone, as the speaker dismisses daytime lightly: “what though it be?” (1). The speaker also reasons with her lover here, with playful logic, asking why light should entail departure when it was not night that “brought us hither,” (5). The speaker also mentions love, without restraint, and that it should keep them together, and it is this freedom of emotional declaration accompanied by the toying with juxtapositions of light and day that indicates the speaker’s initial pleasant emotion as she asks her lover to remain with her.

The second stanza introduces an air of more urgency to the speaker’s tone: “And that I loved my heart and honor so, That I would not from him that had them go,” (11,12). The mention of honor intensifies the nature of her pleas. Furthermore, the relationship between the speaker and her lover is insinuated in line 8 to be scandalous, if not adulterous, when the speaker personifies the light so that it might “spy”, an action which could be conducted only if there was something unusual occurring to be spied upon.

The final stanza marks a transition in the speaker’s words, namely a shift between positive emotion and clearly negative emotion. In line 14, “Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,” parallels some of the diction in line 2 of the poem, where “Oh, wilt thou therefore rise from me?” first introduces “Oh”, serving to highlight the contrast between the emotions in the two stanzas, the first being cheer and the last being the opposite.

Also, line 15 lists several plights that might usually be considered unforgivable by a prospective lover, including “the poor, the foul, [and] the false.” The harshness of such characteristics, which are deemed to be acceptable by love, contrasts the apparent   of a “busied man,” and emphasizes the speaker’s deep contempt for the latter.

The last two lines of the poem serve as summation of the speaker (and author’s) predominant points and also as a revelation of the scandalous relationship between speaker and lover.  Line 17 shines light on the term “business” as meaning preoccupation, rather than laboring, which is told by the speaker to be foul in relation to making love. Line 18 compares the atrocity of business intertwined with love to an adulterous male, again foretelling that the relationship is adulterous and also demonstrating the speaker’s belief that full attention ought to be paid to a mistress, else the preoccupation be as sinful as the deed of cheating itself. 

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To College, or not to College?

To college, or not to college?  That is the question—

Whether it is braver to face a new life and all the barriers you will encounter,

Or to avoid the barriers by choosing the quick path, striking away higher education.

To be living and learning in the world—for that is what life without schooling is,

That is a worthwhile endeavor. To not attend, and to learn by living, and maybe to explore the world as innocents.

Ah, but that’s the issue. Innocence and ignorance are siblings, crab bodies without shells in the ocean, and who knows how to survive defenseless? Certainly, that’s cause for concern. That fear is why we scrape clean our pockets to pay for college.

After all, who would stand for all the bitterness of going to college—the competition, the lofty tuition, the terrifying transition, the lack of air conditioning in the freshman dormitories—when you could simply opt to survive, maybe thrive, on only a high school diploma? Who would choose the awful fears and sacrifices of college, unless they were afraid of what would happen without, the limitless world with its limitless facets, intricate and unknown, which we wonder about without receiving answers from and which makes us cling to the traditions we know rather than initiate ones of our own? Fear of the unknown makes us all cowards, and our bravery is weakened by our over speculation. Choices that should be made quickly are over-processed, ground until they are the dust that floats away with the air. 

Hamlet Act I Scenes iv-v: Hamlet’s Transformation

Hamlet is introduced in the play as a man who appears to be genial and considerate, at least at an average level. He, unlike his mother and uncle, mourns appropriately for his father. Says Claudius of Hamlet’s sorrow, “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father,” (I.ii.90-91). Hamlet is gentle towards his friends in his words as well: “I am glad to see you well…Sir, my good friend,” (I.ii.166, 169).

Hamlet begins to stray away from consideration of his friends by his “toys of desperation,” in scene 4, upon seeing his father’s ghost. He explains that his “fate cries out,” (I.iv.91) and resultingly does not heed the pleas of his friends for him to stay. Here, too, is the first sign that Hamlet’s disposition is being affected by his pursuit of what he perceives is his fate, when he threatens to “make a ghost of him that lets me!” Horatio’s following remarks foreshadow the metamorphosis that Hamlet will undergo, marking that “he waxes desperate with imagination” (I.iv.97). The prince imagines that his destiny lies with the ghost, as indeed it does, only he will become desperate with the knowledge he will acquire.

Upon Hamlet’s revelation of his father’s murder, he insinuates at the drastic change ahead, telling the ghost that he will surrender his previous beliefs and memories, clinging to nothing but what he has been told. Hamlet is releasing his beliefs and with them his disposition in a full embrace of revenge. His demeanor and tone towards Horatio and Marcellus become those of sarcasm, mocking their concern for him. When Horatio appropriately asks what news has been brought, Hamlet jabs, “O, wonderful!” (I.v.128). He also mistrusts his friends, demanding repeatedly and forcefully that they swear on his sword to be silent. Hamlet’s development upon his encounter with his dead father begins the course that he will follow for the remainder of the play. 

Kitchenette Building: An Explication

The first noteworthy feature of Kitchenette Building is the banality of the title, which mirrors the commonness of the life in which the speaker is revealed to be living. Furthermore, “Kitchenette Building” is a somewhat contradictory grouping of words, seeing as kitchenette is merely a small kitchen while a building would presumably encompass much more than that. This reveals that the speaker may see the kitchenette as a building unto itself due to its prominence or importance in her life.

Furthermore, the structure of the poem follows the flowing thought process of the speaker. The first stanza introduces the life of the speaker as the speaker would typically describe it, and she mentions the fact that the word “Dream” cannot accompany her life. The second stanza follows her thoughts, which migrate to a contemplation of whether or not a dream could even make an appearance, and, if so, could it be kept and examined, the latter piece which is explored in the third, questioning stanza. The fourth stanza is an abrupt departure from the ponderous flow of thought of the speaker when she returns to the current conditions and surrenders all considerations of dreams.

In the first line of the poem, the speaker expresses very much about herself and about her acquaintances in few words by referring to them as “things”, describing their hours as “dry” and therefore dull and wrung lifeless, and terming their “plan” as involuntary, all of which paints a dreary picture of the speaker’s monotonous, forced life. The second line continues this thought with “Grayed in”, an allusion to the dreary entrapment of the speaker within her own life. It also introduces the concept of “Dream” in connection to her existence as something frivolous, since the speaker deems it to be “giddy” and juxtaposes the arbitrariness of Dreams with the necessity of grimmer, imposing words, like “rent” and “feeding a wife”. These lines demonstrate clearly that the priorities of the speaker lie in her daily life duties rather than in dreams.

The second stanza contemplates dreams more fully while incorporating images of the life lead by the speaker, constructing a bleak image for the reader. She mentions dreams sending through “onion fumes” their “white and violet” in lines one and two, highlighting the juxtaposition between the unpleasantness of onion fumes with white and violet colors used to describe dreams, which evoke more of a flowery image. The third line mentions garbage, yet another attribution to the unpleasantness of the speaker’s existence, and the fourth serves as its opposite, with words used to describe dreams like “flutter” and “sing an aria”, all terms of musicality and sweetness.

The third stanza displays the speaker’s contemplation of the possibility of dreams; she seems to be considering their relevance, if only for three short lines, as this stanza is in the form of an incompletely formed question.  It mimics a thought or question that is continuous yet has not completed.

The fourth stanza begins with a brief sentence which illuminates the overarching theme in the poem: “We wonder.” Then, the wondering, which was called “giddy” in the first stanza, is quickly cast aside with “But not well! Not for a minute!” as “Number 5”, perhaps an acquaintance with so little significance in the world such as not to merit a name, appears. Then, in the last line of the poem, the speaker returns to a dismal image, capturing the reality of lukewarm water and finally, in the word “hope” that is used, the bleakness of hope and the desire to dream which has been stifled by reality. 

Hamlet, Act 1, Scenes i-iii
Initial Impressions of King Claudius, Hamlet, and Queen Gertrude

             It is clear that King Claudius accepts fully his position as Dane and embraces his rights as such. He says to Laertes, in a manner of arrogance befitting a natural king, “You cannot speak of reason to the Dane / And lose your voice” (I.ii.44-45). Claudius also appears to be recognizing the necessity of mourning for the late King when addressing his audience (1.ii.1-7), however he contradicts this by justifying his brother’s death in an explanation to Hamlet that it is only natural for him to have died in a way that lacks in compassion and mourning (I.ii.93-94).

             It is a combination of what is mentioned above—a nearly arrogant acceptance of his royalty, his chastising Hamlet for his continued mourning after just one month, and his basic justification for the sudden death of the late king—that lead me to believe that Claudius does not mourn for the death of his brother and instead chooses to enjoy and expect his kingly privileges. This implies at wrongdoing in the death of the late king in relation to his abnormally unwavering brother. 

 Hamlet initially appears to be a good man, honest in his convictions and kind to his friends. He mourns for his father, whom he admires greatly, comparing him to a Hyperion while Claudius is a satyr (I.ii.144). He suspects that something may be amiss, commenting on the fact that his mother mourned for such a short time, yet coming to the conclusion that he must hold his own tongue (I.ii.155-164). He also treats his friend Horatio (and the guards Marcellus and Barnardo) with respect or at least friendliness, promising that he will “requite their loves” in return for their silence (I.ii.272). At the very least, Hamlet appears by no means cruel.

However, these positive perceptions of Hamlet are tarnished by Laerte’s and Polonius’ warnings to Ophelia. Polonius forbids his daughter from seeing Hamlet despite his proclamations of love, comparing them to be “springes to catch woodcocks” (I.iii.124). Laertes advises his sister in a similar fashion, saying that “best safety lies in fear” and that Hamlet’s love is trickery. Given this, Hamlet’s virtue is doubtful.

Lastly, Queen Gertrude leaves little impression other than that she is not saddened by the death of her husband. She calls upon Hamlet to stop his lamentation: “Do not forever with thy vailèd lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust” (I.ii.72-73), which, given that her husband has been dead only a month, is lacking in sadness. She then asks Hamlet of his father’s death, “Why seems it so peculiar with thee?” (I.ii.78), demonstrating that she does not find the death of the king peculiar herself. This raises yet another red signal that something is amiss in the death given the queen’s mild acceptance of it and her incomprehension of her son’s adequate mourning.