ipl-logo

Time Tornado

729 Words3 Pages

Time Tornado Humans have existed, as far as we know, for only a fraction of the time the Earth has been around. Smaller still, compared to the existence of galaxy, or even the universe. Our mark on history is tiny and faint, yet in our minds every hundred of years is more important than the last. The invention of the internet. t trumps the discovery of electricity, though one, however, could not exist without the other. “The Shape of History,” by Charles Harper Webb expresses the vastness of History through a cone shaped text, counting down the years, and highlighting that humans are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Webb begins by detailing some of the newest events of the past few years. It’s 1995 and there are “pages and pages …show more content…

As we go back in time past “mammals in Cenozoic, Dinosaurs in Mesozoic, Forests in Paleozoic, Protozoans in the preCambrian,” the lines grow even shorter. Six words turns to three, to two, then to one. Webb refers to time as a “twisting gyre’ and a “cornucopia,” referencing the shape of his poem. As the lines become shorter, the pace of the poem speeds up. Fewer words bring us closer to the end. The end, or the beginning, “what Christians call Creation, astrophysicists call The Big Bang. Then for trillions of years, nothing at all.” This “nothing” is the most long stretching period of all of time, and it is represented by the shortest line, the word all. Webb endeavors to show the reader that the vastness of time cannot truly be measured. Humans are insignificant, hardly brushing the tip of the iceberg that is time. In his poem, “The Shape of History,” Charles Harper Webb demonstrates the vastness of History, and the tiny peice Humans make up, by using a reverse shape. In the poem the time that Humans take up is a much longer section, whereas the much longer periods of time toward the end are much shorter, going to down to even a few words, or one. Through this form, the reader is able to grasp just how unimportant Humans are to the Universe. Our kings, wars, and inventions mean so much to us, but to time they are hardly a speck of dust. It is important not to think ourselves tall, or to overstep our

Show More
Related

Character Analysis Of Charles Halloway In Something Wicked This Way Comes

377 Words | 2 Pages

Somewhere we let go of hot gorilla’s paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore’s teeth and started chewing blades of grass…we are the creatures that know and know too much. ’”(Bradbury 196) , “filled with summer flesh...a woman… He wanted to go away from here. ”(26)and, “ The crescent moon I have marked on the bullet is not a crescent moon.

Read More

Diction And Imagery In Robert Penn Warren's Evening Hawk

600 Words | 3 Pages

In his pom entitled “Evening Hawk”, Robert Penn Warren characterizes human nature by a transition between the flight of the hawk during the day and that of the bat, or the “Evening Hawk” during the night. The hawk, as it soars in daylight, portrays how humans appear in clear light of their peers, while the bat, cruising the night sky, symbolizes what humans hide within themselves. Warren effectively expresses the meaning of this poem and its serious mood by the use of diction and imagery to appeal to the reader’s perception of sight and sound. Throughout the first part of the poem, Warren describes the journey of the hawk in the daytime to symbolize how one’s character may seem to other beings.

Read More

Summary Of Is Google Making USupid By Nicholas Carr

1562 Words | 7 Pages

Instead of now looking at the sun to predict the time, anyone can look at a clock and instantly find out the correct time. Although Carr recognizes that the clock is a useful invention, he quotes Joseph Weizenbaum, the late computer scientist from MIT stating, “[the clock] remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality” (Carr 6). People no longer have to go outside and look in the sky to see the sun. Now they look at the clock and accept it for what it is. Carr illustrates that new advances and intellectual technologies often show how we can explain ever changing metaphors.

Read More

Rhetorical Analysis Of The Sixth Extinction

1211 Words | 5 Pages

It is often difficult to convince people that there is an issue present which requires their attention. Infinitely more difficult is convincing them that they are to blame for the issue or problem at hand. Nevertheless, this was the task that faced Elizabth Kolbert as she wrote The Sixth Extinction. In cases like this, writers often have to use various rhetorical strategies and techniques just to reach their audience. Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction is a perfect example of just how writers use powerful tools to connect with their readers.

Read More

How Did Harry Truman Impact The World?

603 Words | 3 Pages

Throughout the course of history, important events litter the ground as such common knowledge that the true power of such events becomes masked. So many years deemed crucial to the development of mankind have been written about to the point of deterioration of the stature of the events contained within said years. The unsung heroes, however, are brushed aside as a moot point in the history of the world. 1949 carries one such tune, with events that not only altered history at that point in time, but continue to impact the world today. Harry Truman and the policies he introduced in 1949 continue to shape our social and political worlds.

Read More

High Tide In Tucson Summary

1583 Words | 7 Pages

1. In "High Tide in Tucson" Kingsolver pressures on the thought that things never go to arrange however they never quit changing and with this consistent change one must adjust to the earth around us. We must adjust to the adjustment in tide and simply float along with those tides. 2. In "Creation Stories" the author raises the prospect that a few individuals are shyer than others and they like to live like a recluse crab inside their home. Life is intriguing however not when one stays home throughout the day, one must go out to get the chance to experience life and all its renown.

Read More

Technology In Brett Harte's The Outcasts Of Poker Flat

743 Words | 3 Pages

Harvard’s Professor of Business Administration, Shoshana Zuboff, has remarked, “Technology makes the world a new place.” This statement not only applies to our ever-changing technology, but also for older technology. “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”, a short story set in olden times where technology was not abundant; technology in the sense that we think of it today had yet to be developed during the time of this story. Today, we categorize modern technology as smartphones, computers, the internet, and other objects that require electricity. However, in the times of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” the modern technology consisted of the telegraph and the repeating rifle.

Read More

The Power Shift In 1984 By George Orwell

614 Words | 3 Pages

All throughout time, many peoples and civilizations have taken note of a strange phenomenon. History always seems to repeat itself. Time and time again, events unfold in the same ways as they have in the past. It is a strange occurrence, but also seems to have a primordial nature. It is almost as if time has always been designed to intertwine, and act in a cyclical nature.

Read More

Tayo In Ceremony

1478 Words | 6 Pages

He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time” (Silko 229). The stories that Tayo has been told, the stories that Silko tells, they all

Read More

Distractions In Fahrenheit 451

1606 Words | 7 Pages

This book was also written during a time of great technological innovation,

Read More

Annotated Bibliography

1422 Words | 6 Pages

Technology and culture, 51(4), 938-960. This source states that the history of technology is important to helping in modern day life. The appeal being used is logic because there are so many history facts throughout the article that it appears to seem accurate and credible. Plumm talks about knowing the importance of past data that helps explain the gender gap and Divall talks about the importance of knowing past technology history in order to advance, both want to help educate the importance of the past.

Read More

Carl Sagan Rhetorical Analysis

836 Words | 4 Pages

It is after two paragraphs exploring notions of man’s cosmic connection that Sagan asserts his first claim in the essay, “plainly there is no way back… we are stuck with science” (1). The compassionate tone persists even in assertions, as seen through the use of first person. More compassionate is the gentle acknowledgement of the pseudoscience appeal. “Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda… or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future” (1). This series of sentences ends the introduction.

Read More

Literary Analysis Of Good Times By Lucille Clifton

1381 Words | 6 Pages

By nature, shorter poems are more densely packed with cues and devices because authors cannot express their intended message over the sweeping length of a poem but rather they must be more concise and creative. A poet may write a shorter poem to juxtapose a simple surface message to a more meaningful deeper message. Thus, complexity and artistic value are unrelated to length, but rather, they are developed through masterful writing. “Good Times” by Lucille Clifton embodies the double-edged sword of complex storytelling within a short poem, as she identifies the speaker 's occasional good memories to develop an image of the speaker’s typical abject life. The short poem is crafted with patterns of repetition, for there are so few lines to fit meaningful insight into.

Read More

Fahrenheit 451 Research Paper

969 Words | 4 Pages

Furthermore, the technologies that we are using have a great impact on the society. Technology has changed the way people live. This phenomenon was started from the time industrial revolution happened, where technology finally could be produced massively.

Read More

Degeneration In H. G. Wells's The Time Machine

1501 Words | 7 Pages

Ray Lankester’s Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) puts forward the theory of evolutionary degeneration, a theory which H.G. Wells expanded on in his own novel, The Time Machine (1895). Wells’ presentation of mankind’s degeneration, the Eloi, reveals the cultural anxiety of how mankind, having prospered beyond the drive of necessity, could adapt into a more vulnerable state. Many critics have focused on Wells’ overt allegorical warning to humanity not to degenerate into the Eloi, however, I argue there is a much more immediate anxiety that runs throughout the text in the presentation of the Time Traveller himself. The Traveller is an experiment of Lankester’s theory, in that he finds himself ousted from a condition of security. The

Read More

More about Time Tornado

Related Topics

Open Document