Remember Your World

Authors note- We just read the book Fahrenheit 451, and this is a response to it. I tried to work on using words from the class moodle list, and I tried to use more text evidence. For this response I think I just had more quotes not necessarily more text evidence. When I was writing this, I found that one of the themes for me is remembrance, and leaving your mark on the world.

"It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered." page 4

You can't remember back to the beginning. You weren't there. Even if you were there, you wouldn’t remember it exactly right. You would see something different from another person. Together you would talk about it, and a whole new scene would be created, this would be the knew scene. You pass this story on, and you forget one little detail, and add a new one, maybe to make yourself seem better. That detail is now lost forever, and new story is created. You can't go back now. You aren't the only one holding onto it, so you cant get it back, because you don’t have it all anymore.

Your past is how it is remembered to be. If you are remembered you will live forever. Sometimes something just touches you and you realize that you should go live, like your living forever and then you will. If you make something happen than the world will be touched forever by you.

" He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like gray animals peering from electric caves, faces with gray colorless eyes, gray tongues, and gray thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face." page 139 He finally made something happen instead of just regular routine. The world watching him, but not actually seeing all of him. He made the city actually feel something, fear. He was a menace in everyone's minds; even the news had to feign the end of the chase. Everyone knew his name, his story, now he couldn’t go back and change it. His old life was gone even before the bombs blew it up. As he left, he set off bombs of his own to go off behind him.

You touch the world, as you are part of it. No one can completely cover up what you have touched. Montag and the firemen have touched many people, but with a touch that burned not healed. They left their mark on the world, and a mark that dark cant be covered up. "The Hound did not touch the world. It carried its silence with it, so you could feel the silence building up a pressure behind you all across town." page 137 When you don’t leave something behind you have to carry it with you, all throughout your life. The hound isn't a person though, and doesn’t feel the weight that it was carrying. The people from here couldn’t feel that weight either. They were numb. "A numbness in a numbness hollowed into a numbness." Page 120. In the end Montag made a new mark, that was clean, and good.


"We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walks around and talks, the way it really looks." page 161. A long time ago Montag might have remembered what the world really looks like, how it talks and walks, but that would have been a long time ago. Things might have been blocking his view, like the walls, which will forget you if you don’t return. You will be remembered other places, places that matter, people that matter. Clarisse was remembered by Montag because he mattered, and he cared enough to listen to her talk, see how she really looks and watch her walk away, following her footprints that touched the world, and were left behind for him to follow in.

It Matters

Authors Note- For the Veteran's Essay this year the prompt was "Does Patriotism Still Matter?" I was going for the idea of, all of the privileges we have from it, and that even if we can't repay someone their life, we can honor the others that are still here. This is my essay response to it.


The flag waving hello back to you. Flying high in the sky, snapping loudly sometimes, to remind us again it’s still there. Looking up at it before a sporting event, always in the spot light, never in the dark, knowing we are safe to fight through our game, while someone else fights in theirs. Seeing through the white stars of purity, to the blue sometimes said to stand for patriotism. The national anthem is played before every game, what if one game it wasn’t? It wouldn’t be right. The game might still go on, but everyone would know that something was wrong.

Before every sporting event, we play the national anthem, look up to the flag waving in the sky and put our hand over our heart in honor. This honor is patriotism. At the beginning of every school day, we say the pledge of allegiance in respect. This respect is patriotism. While we are at school, or at a game, there are people off fighting for us. We need to appreciate this more, our freedoms. The least we can do is honor them, and show respect for them.

Patriotism, can come in different ways. The way we honor it, can also come in different ways. Everyone always wants to be thanked for what they did. When something is sacrificed, it shouldn’t go unnoticed. If someone does you a favor, you thank them or repay them. We can’t repay the people that have lost their lives for us, or what they have gone through, but we can help, by at least thanking them.

Imagine a world without love for our country. Imagine a world without heroes saving our country. Imagine a world without loyalty towards our country. Now imagine where we would live if this was true. Without, we would all be separate, there would be no united in The United States of America. It is one of the most important principles of a country. If patriotism didn’t matter, what would?

"What doesn't kill, me makes me stronger." Nietzche

 Author's Note: Our class today, we had to write a response to the book Fahrenheit 451. The ideas that we responded to were:  

"What doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger." Nietzche How would you say that this quote could be applicable to the actors from the most recent part of the novel for Montag? or

Discuss the death of Beatty. Explain how it was undertaken, and the significance of the event including the connection to any of the subthemes of the novel. I combined the two ideas, because they were really connected ideas to me. I think that this book, has some sub themes, of goodness can turn bad and end up burning you, like fire, and that you are, and become different people that, you really aren't. This is my response to these prompts.

A fire burning on the surface, burning away your skin, watching the flame grow, spreading across you. Underneath, blood now boiling below. Hot blood traveling through your veins, connecting, your body, as one. Its burnt. Now dead, although still traveling through your body, making you stronger, making your veins tougher, to tolerate this dead blood. Its still yours, expired, but a necessity for you to live.

"His throat tasted of bloody iron and there was rusted steel in his feet." Page 126. It travels through your body. Reaching your head, reaching your fingertips, reaching your feet. "Montag did not hear, he was far away, he was running with his mind, he was gone, leaving this dead soot-covered body to sway in front of another raving fool." page 118 Your head, with your hands and feet get all mixed up, you cant control your hands with your feet. Your feet keep you walking, walking away from Beatty to leave for someone else. Just like at any other fire, turning your back, as you walk away, the wind might pick up those ashes and drop them back on you, unknown to you that your carrying that extra weight, because you didn’t take the time to look back at the sun rising.

When you are little, you are always afraid of the dark, that it would hurt you somehow. As you keep going into it, a little bit further, and further, you get used to it. Now the dark doesn’t seem as bad, it just seems silly that you used to be afraid of it, but you still are a little bit. Everything is better in the light, except fire. It is a light of its own, but it burns so it turns to darkness. We all start out as a flame and we grow older, we find new space to expand into. The books gave Montag new space, and his flame was huge, hot and hard to control. He couldn’t control it so he burnt down everything in his path, including Beatty. After you burn something, it doesn’t grow back, it dies into darkness, also where you are when your flame goes out.

"God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show?" page 39

When you make something, it is easier to see what you are doing under the sunlight. In the darkness, you can't see what it actually looks like, you can just imagine, searching into the shadows but not finding an answer. We always have to put different faces on, and enjoy the show. At first Montag cant feel and doesn’t know what is real. He gets burnt down throughout his life, but he doesn’t feel the pain, it just keeps burning his skin away. Now a tough black layer, protecting him. His blood is still burnt, and traveling through him, but he learned to use this blood, and be as strong as he can. When that blood got to his head though, it was dead, so death was inside of him, and becomes Beatty. "That's the good part of dying; when you've nothing to lose, you run any risk you want." page 85. His body is already dead, so there is a whole new darkness for him to explore.

A White Paper

(Response to Animal Farm)

A dream. A song. An idea. A leader to take down to put out of power so you can be in charge, of your life, help those lives that cant be taken for their own, until you are that ruler that no one wants anymore. The image you want to make, to create can’t happen when you don’t have the right colors of the rainbow to color it in with.

Sometimes you just know. You just know that something bad will happen, or you just have a feeling, something big is going to happen. Major knew that he was dieing, this is one of those times. He did something about the future. A new dream for all of the animals to believe in, a new picture to start coloring in, until there is a mural covering the entire page.

A word against a thought. A thought won’t win anyone over, its just a thought stuck in your head. A word spoken will. Someone will hear it, and if you scream it into them they will swallow it whole. Now a part of them, a small part but still part. If you feed the same information to them again and again, everywhere, it will now be their veracity. There is nothing else to believe in, to think, to speak. Truth. You never know what it is. Sometimes you know when it is written down, it is the truth, but that can be written over or erased, or on a piece of paper that floated away lost.

Trying to find that paper, but you can’t. You search and search and search, but its nowhere. You follow someone who tells you they can help you recover it. They lead you down a winding path, but at the end it is a gray piece of paper, not your white one. You now realize they never knew where to ever find your paper, but they wanted you along for the ride. Now the way home is lost, and you have nothing to come from, nowhere to go. All of the animals followed Napoleon and the pigs down this road, but only Clover, Boxer, and Benjamin got to the complete end. The complete end of realization, of betrayal of helplessness.

A book. Animal Farm, written by George Orwell. A history. Russian Revolution, written by our ancestors before. A life. To live, written by me, until my paper and pen are taken away, and they start to draw. They write out my life, that I haven’t lived yet. My thoughts that I haven’t thought of yet. My picture that I didn’t get to color in. Colored in not with the shades in my mind, but with the shades in theirs. When the page is covered, a picture is there. It may be more exact or perfect. Except it wouldn’t be exactly perfect for me.

Live Today Because Tomorrow Is Not Guaranteed

(ideas based on the book My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult)


Live today because tomorrow is not guaranteed.


This book is really getting me to think about life more. Like that my problems really aren’t that important. Some people just want to live to the next day, and they wont know what will happen. I basically know the basics of what will happen in my tomorrow. Some people say they want to be able to see the future, but I don’t. I don’t want to no what will happen. If I am supposed to die tomorrow, I don’t exactly want to know that. I would be all sad today and wouldn’t go live my normal, life. But on the other hand I may not get to say goodbye to people I love, and set everything right.

This book also shows from different points that people can definitely overreact and they may not always be acting like their usual self. There might be something going on that you don’t know about, and you cant expect them to tell you everything. They might not no how to tell you, or don’t want you to find out your truth. There are some things we do because we convince ourselves it would be better for everyone involved. We tell ourselves that its the right thing to do, the altruistic thing to do. Its far easier than telling ourselves the truth. Anna and her father moved out, to the fire station. They claimed to be just breathing and sometimes you need a breath in the fresh air, but in the truth none of them could handle the situation. The fire starts with a heat and grows in space and feeds off the air.

Actions speak louder than words, and some of the most truthful actions come from little kids. When we are little we don’t care what people think of us, and there’s not much hate in our lives, or we can’t understand that its hate. We do everything because we want to, because we can. When we grow up, we have to meet all of these expectations and qualifications, and we now understand the hate. The hate, is taken into our lives, and we don’t have that carefree idea about life. We have to be equal to, or better than everyone in our lives. We have to compete, but sometimes, someone lets you win your game, and you realize a whole truth and it is really good. It brings us back to how it was when we were little. When everything was really good. When I was little my mom made this book of a whole bunch of funny things that I did. She kept it. I found out something that happened a long time ago, but it brought me back to that, and I saw how other people saw me, and who I was before.


Everyone always compares us too our worst selves. Everyone always looks at your faults, not your positives. We always take one look at something, and say yeah, ummm no. But then we take it back after. We regret it. People that have seen some of the worst don’t say that because they get are treated differently, and may not live to the next day and if it was their last moment, they wouldn’t want to regret it. I am so grateful that I don’t have cancer, or seen war or things like that, but sometimes I think to see how they live would be good. To have a mind that would keep me in a positive attitude, and a mind that was open and lived for that moment.
Live today because tomorrow is not guaranteed.

A Fence

Response To- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

A Saturday morning is meant to let you live, to let you breathe, to let you subsist and wander into your thoughts your world, not to whitewash a fence. With the sun shining down, and your friends coming out, expecting a new escapade to happen with you, not to have you whitewash a fence. For Tom Sawyer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, his punishment seemed loathsome, to take away his one day of freedom, the most important thing in his life at that time. Although the next Saturday all would be forgotten except that he would have a new entity to trade, to get something fresh to surpass his old fondness.

This fence, the boards of Saturdays will get covered up and forgotten by painting over it, until it chips away and you can see the faint glimpse of preceding happenings and memories. A fence will once be new, as it soon gets old. It will have a backside, along with its good side facing out towards the world. It will get knocked down, get dirty, and have some weak boards, conversely it can get cleaned, it can get rebuilt back up and it will have strong boards that holds it together. It will have a gate that opens as well as closes, and it will need a coat of whitewash occasionally.

Whitewashing a fence, could mean to just gloss over, to just cover up, to just disguise, and become something that its not; a new clean fence. The idea of whitewashing something can be seen throughout the whole book if you really just look at that. The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer starts out with Tom eating the jam in the closet and making a mess all over his face, which would be the stained fence of this scene. To whitewash this fence, and to get out of trouble he says, “My Aunt look behind you!” To complete the new clean fence and to dry it off, she starts laughing as he absconds the episode again. As well when they run off to go pirating, their return was just looked over, as a happy event. It was an ecstatic experience that they all “came back from the dead” but really none of it would have happened if they didn’t go off pirating or would have just told someone. Everyone always says just tell us where your going and you can go, but that’s not true. If they did tell someone they wanted to go and try pirating, try living a life with no regrets, they would have been forbidden to go. You cant win this fight in the real world but it’s the world of minds eye so they did win the fight victoriously.


True, what is a white fence outside for, if you don’t expect it to get dirty. The whole book was like a big white fence. It was so easy to imagine what will happen next, and that everything will go back bleach white, and nothing would show up on it. There would be no mark left to show that it happened, because it all happened for no point except to enjoy. There was only one incident in the whole book that didn’t fit. At the beginning tom was getting scolded to not take sugar, the sugar bowl then fell and crashed to the floor, but not because of Tom, but because of Sid. Aunt Polly was very bias, along with that maybe sometimes it isn’t how it always has been before. Sometimes the side fence needs a coat too, not just the front.


Another point might be to go around to the other side of the fence and see what is there. People negatively looked upon Tom, Huck, Jim and Joe, and it was ambiguous to everyone, that they actually were good people. The community excluded them. One board on the fence can’t be eccentric while the rest are ordinary. When one of the communities boards collapses, a hole is left and the lost board was evoked, and honored, because while it was standing it wasn’t revered enough for blocking the winds, and the rains from damaging the heart.


The reasons to whitewash a fence; to try to erase some marks, to have it look good for the world to see, or maybe to use your Saturday morning. Tom just did things not really for a purpose that’s why his reason to whitewash a fence was to use your Saturday morning. Aunt Polly’s reason to get the fence whitewashed was for all the other reasons. She wanted it to look good, to try to erase marks, to try to forget what happened, to cover up the past. She doesn’t want to take responsibility for yesterdays happenings so she tries to cover it up. If she did take responsibility for yesterday Tom would be a perfect child, and nothing would go wrong. But sometimes, you have to forget to move on. They moved on after his mother’s death. That would probably be a big tough stain to get out, but after three coats of other peoples work, and all the “treasures” Tom could want, it seems to fade. It was only motioned once so it may have had lots of rains in between to lighten it up. So it can be good to get a new coat, and gloss over, cover up, disguise, and be something that you aren’t, but you’ll always go back to at least a cloudy fence in the end.

Listen To Your Heart!

response to The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer has a lot of ideas that all are basically about the same thing. Tom shows hope for everyone else in the way that you can live by listening to your heart not your head. It helps that plays the part of the adventurous, troublesome brother pretty well, although he also took on different roles, like the hero and lover. Tom’s life has a little too much of the perfect balance though. Connected to this is also that people have the ability to, and do change.


Sometimes things don’t equal out, sometimes things don’t make sense within themselves, and sometimes people can just get out of doing things a lot. Everything is always changing, so that changes us. In Tom’s case if he tried to be good, everyone would always remember in the back of his or her head how he used to be. The scene where Sid broke the sugar bowl and then Tom got lashed for it is a really good example of how you cant really expect what someone is going to do next. A person can do whatever he/she wishes when they listen to their heart, but their head is what messes them up. Everything can be almost perfect when this is true.

You cant be both the perfect little angle son and the perfect adventurous friend, but you can try out different takes on both of these roles. When they saw the doctor get murdered there isn’t a way to keep everyone happy, and it was too confusing for them then to do anything so they didn’t they just let it be. When they figured out what was going on he explained it and everything went back, kind of, to how it was. You cant make the doctor come back from the dead because that already happened, but they were able to change Muff Potter’s life. Usually you don’t have that much of an impact on someone, as saving their life, but you usually have some on someone’s.

The only downfall of listening to your heart not your head is that you wont remember anything and you’ll do the same thing over and over again. His whole life is a game. He doesn’t take anything seriously. His Aunt Polly talks a little bit about his mother, and he just forgets her. What he says even if he doesn’t try to be funny, is just silly. For instance he said to Huck “Any time you see something in the night, just skip around and meow.” p 200. In the end though he did change and he changed Huck too. They had a reason to try to be good, and they were. They got something out of it, because Tom and Huck wanted most, at the time, to be robbers. Aunt Polly's hoped that Tom would try to be good and he showed that he had hope in that aspect of his life too.