Often humans live life without many apprehensions. Sure we worry about our bills and due dates but we pay pintsized attention to what is truly important. Within the thought provoking essay Walking, by Linda Hogan, Hogan sheds light into the dark areas in which humanity often disregard. Hogan conveys her overall theme of how things often grow selfish through the use of many rhetorical devices such as personification, chronological structure, and symbolism to explain the beauty of people’s creations throughout the years exemplifying how the previous ancestors are a big contribution to the development of any society. Being a part of society, everyone develops their personal world in which they only understand what they believe and remain ignorant …show more content…
When she walks, life continues forward. The whole walking aspect throughout the entire essay is to explain how she is moving on and how everything behind is nothing but a mere memory. She doesn’t realize the importance until she walked further, grew older. She understood that “the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky… Without written records, they knew every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them” (Hogan). The speaker begins to illuminate the power previous lives held. The word “immensity” promotes not just a great value but a value at its peak. The use of diction helps expand on the status of the predecessors. The speaker soon returns to “the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place,” in which she began her insight and discovery (Hogan). “It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together” (Hogan). The attention that is required to work is the knowledge that humans must obtain to benefit in any way possible. Elemental was used to distinguish separate groups however it proves that an element cannot live without another, a sense of helping each other. And lastly Hogan quotes “be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands” thanking the many of the past lives that brought the present to