Today in class, I assigned the College Essay. It's due in two days, and I am not giving you any time in class to work on it. You will need to complete the College Essay on your own. I have also told you that if you are not familiar with writing college essays, you can watch video tutorials online. (I was nice enough to provide a list of links.) Needless to say, you (and your peers) are a little annoyed about this whole situation. After reflecting on everything at home, you decide to email your CCR instructor about it.

i decided to stay late in the laboratory to continue my experiment with the lightbulb. at midnight, thomas edison opened the door and saw all the stuff he was working on. the lightbulb, film and the transmitter. as he walks in an idea hits him on how the lightbulb would work. he would have to change a few wires around to get it to light up. when he did change the wires around it worked so he decided to write a telegraph to his friend to tell him about his success.   as he was packing up he grabbed the telegraph and walked to his home. he told his wife about the success and the next morning mailed the telegraph.

what are the identies

when connie willis was 12 years old, her mother died. in january of 2003, willis was interviewed for locus magazine. she recognized that death is a major issue in her writing, specially because the vacuous and appalling things that people tend to say in order to support you when someone you loved dies. what really saved willis was reading. books, literature, are not false. poetry tells the truth (as dickinson said: "tell al the truth but tell it slant"). it's not a escape from reality, but a nigromantic experience where whe can talk to people that exist no more. that's the definition that connie willis gives in her novel "passage": «(literature) it's the people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death! ». enrique vila-matas has figured out the esence of literary experience when he said in a lecture that he intends to have his revenge against life (and death), because to write (and to read) is a form of living and a way to remember. i like in that sense the idea of not leting anything human to get lost. i feel fiction and poetry as the shapes of an ancient anger. like in the poem from dylan thomas: «do not go gentle into that good night / rage, rage against the dying of the light».

but there is another aspect that i have learned from connie willis's quote. in his famous work "danubio", the italian writer claudio magris describes literature as house removals. some messages reach us, other messages get lost in the labyrinth. those messages which are our inheritance teach us how to live and how to die, how to love and how to hate, how to laugh and how to cry. i think that tales really shape us if we listen to them. maybe through the stories we read we learn how to emphatize with others, knowing that the bells tolls for every each of us.