12/26/2019 0 Comments Reckoning essay on Wechlers Vermeer in Bosnia Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 wordsReckoning on Wechlers Vermeer in Bosnia - Essay Example I did not know the people who died in the Moscow subway, yet my friend quite rationally assumed that it would touch me more, considering it happened in my home town. His rationality was built on the assumption that because I lived there, I was somehow closer to the mental concept of the tragedy. Perhaps I was, but I do not think I felt anything more exceptional than my friend did for those people. It seemed like something you ought to feel sad about, yet in the end we both went to get our afternoon coffee. I think about why we, as people, think that just because we belong to a certain geographical place, the events unfolding there should matter to us more. Perhaps the event would have mattered to me more if I had been in Moscow still. Just like Vermeer who was visibly affected by the war; the war resulted in the “devastation of the Dutch economy and Vermeer’s own … bankruptcy†(Weschler 15), which eventually may have even caused him to die at the young age of 42. Yet, in his paintings, one finds a sense of calm and peacefulness. This sense of calm is so apparent that Antonio Cassese, an Italian judge presiding over the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, confides to Weschler that his way of keeping his sanity in front of all the madness and chaos of the Yugoslav war, and listening to the vivid stories of the inhumanity of humans, is to go “to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers†(Weschler 14). The paintings of Vermeer in the Mauritshuis museum offer something akin to that to Weschler as well. He is sure, as are others who have had the chance to gaze upon the paintings and try to find a deeper meaning to them, that something like peace and tranquility is transmitted through these paintings. Albeit there are those (like Snow) who find a very different, and sexual, meaning to the paintings, however, Weschler feels that, surrounded by chaos, Vermeer was trying to
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12/16/2019 0 Comments Hawthorne :: essays research papers "A 'place in the mind', wherever or whatever it may be, can only ever be fictitious. In the act of its creation, the 'place' is formed by a process that necessitates an imaginative leap; it does not actually exist, and therefore its constituent elements have to be imagined, made up by the creator. For a place - in this case, America - to exist in the realms of the mind, it must be a place that exists outside of a corporeal, material reality. Fiction becomes the perfect arena to present this place, because its very nature allows imagined, idealised and remembered places to exist, a venue where the intangibility of these places can achieve a tangible realisation. Between the pages of a book, the place in the mind can become real, if only for a while; the America that exists between the pages of its nation's fiction is often an America of the mind, but an America that for a fleeting moment achieves a kind of actuality."
Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance", is the first person narration of a man bent upon joining a world that has no need of him by imposing an arbitrary order upon his reality. Blithedale, is a novel of polarities. Just as Coverdale imposes order on reality, Zenobia, the feminine voice of creation, understands reality as a fragmented thing that cannot have order forced upon it. We see in the novel oppositions in communities, in social order, and in place. But, Hawthorne also gives us a richly crafted story about what it is that defines community and the common spirit or communal soul. The romance, of this book, is not just that of man and woman, but of the romantic ideals of society and of order. Coverdale, who is the namesake of the primary translator of the King James bible, is a man bent upon making the world be what he wants it to be. Hawthorne's, The Blithedale Romance, provides the reader with a set of beliefs, ideals, and aspirations, that become ideologies that actually mask reality thus pitting the utopian hopes of Blithedale against actual human behaviors - which makes for a difficult conflict at best Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, into an old Puritan family. Hawthorne's own 17th-century ancestors, as he frankly admitted, had been among the real-life Puritan zealots. "Young Goodman Brown" is a story of initiation. Evil is the nature of mankind. Does Thatcherism mark a radical break in British Politics - Essay Example
The political system implemented a number of social and economic reforms that stabilized the British society on the pillars of constant economic growth and peaceful coexistence of the citizens. The political ideologies fostered by Thatcherism fostered a classical liberalism comparable to the Rogernomics in the United States of America, in New Zealand and the economic rationalism in Australia. The system promoted reduction in the inflation rates and a free market implemented via a tight control of the supply of money into the market. These economic policies resulted in extensive privatization of some of the previous government institutions to give the citizens more control of the economy; it also led to extensive labor reforms (Johnson, 1988). The labor reforms made working conditions better for most of the civil service, and the expansion of the private sector increased the sector’s ability to offer more employment to the population. All these efforts contributed to the development of a strong economy that was the dream of Margret Thatcher and, as research shows, other leaders that had come before her. Butler, Adonis & Travers, (1994) explain that Thatcherism as a system of politics introduced a unique system of governance that the previous regimes had not thought of before. After assuming office in 1979, Thatcher understood why numerous critics had previously referred the country to as ungovernable. Thatcher, on the contrary, sought to stamp her authority as the leader of the most famous political party and as the leader of the government. In most occasions, she bypassed a number of preexisting structures of governance such as parliamentary and cabinet commissions and portrayed a more personal leader of the government especially during crises. This form of administration proved fundamental in times of crises, Thatcher stamped her authority during the Falkland wars and the IRA bombs both in which she took over the management of the military and brought sanity and order once again (Adeney & Lloyd, 1988). With the wide success of the more personal form of administration, Thatcher managed to build a more prosperous society free from terror attacks despite the strong economic growth. The military expanded and developed more loyalty to the leader of the government. The country had previously yearned for this type of governance, and she developed a stable economy, the one in which law, order reigned, and the populace portrayed more spirit of patriotism towards their nation. Thatcher thus tried and tested the new form of governance and passed the mantle to other preceding regimes. To this day and through the elaborative form of David Cameron’s regime, it is evident that the prime minister is more involved with the populace and stamps his authority in the formulation and implementation of policies. Margret Thatcher made official the political system, but prior to her, a number of other political leaders had tried to introduce the radical economic reforms and give more economic power to the common person. The decades before Thatcherism, the country had a less favored system of politics referred to as the Buttskellite consensus. This was a purely capitalist system of leadership that made a few influential persons extremely wealthy while the rest of the population was left in abject poverty. Capitalist system of |