Jhocelyn Diaz
Serna
English 4
10 October 2011
Essay #1 According to Ian Frazier’s “In Praise of Margins” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows”, margins are portrayed as ways in a person’s life that create space free of judgment through nature. The world can be a judgmental place, but margins in nature let people meditate and act the way they uniquely act behind closed doors in seclusion. As time changes, marginal activities, places, and thoughts change as the environment and thought process ages. Regardless of the change, margins never leave a person's life, no matter how big or small. Although some marginal activities are shunned by the world because they are not of the usual norm, nature does not judge and accepts the awkward aspects of a person. Margins through nature are necessary to let people be themselves and for their ideas and acts to develop, nurture, and grow free of judgment. In “In Praise of Margins”, Frazier writes of margins in nature as his childhood escape where he and his friends could go to get away from the world. Although he did not clearly have purpose for this escape, he realized, later on as an adult, that the experience gained from nothing was valuable. For instance, he and his friends would go “explore” the woods all day, a time during which, they would be in privacy. They were in a marginal place free of people who would criticize their acts. Growing up without people telling them what to do during their private time was important in letting them learn on their own to distinguish right from wrong and adulthood from childhood. As time changed, their experience of how they portrayed the world changed. As a child in the woods he thought more of the “now” and less of the future. As an adult, however, he realized it was important for him to reflect changes that occurred in his life and to think about why and what he got out of his frequent