...the world of the weasel for motivation to convey this message. Since our ability to think and reason makes us who we are as individuals, it is odd that Dillard marvels at the value of “mindlessness.” Yet, in Anne Dillard’s essay, “Living like Weasels” she uses her encounter with a weasel to demonstrate how we would obtain more out of life through living carefree and without a worry. This freedom translates to a beauty hard for many to see and we should remain grateful for our conscious ability and the fact that our presence provides this beauty to the world. Dillard evaluates the rodent’s way of life, which in reality is pure freedom. This weasel is free to do as it pleases and is not involved in taking on mental activity. Further, the weasel has no human responsibilities and approaches life with no thoughts other than survival. If we approached each day without being mindful, our actions would not be distorted by our biases or motives. Dillard observes, “I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical senses and the dignity of living without bias or motive” (91). When Dillard began her essay, she challenged the reader to consider, "Who knows what he thinks?"(88). Dillard is pondering if a weasel is mindless or if the weasel is able to make choices and live by consciousness. Dillard then shares the sleeping and eating habits of the weasel she does this to support the wildness of the weasel. She describes a weasel as wild because...
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...Not A Weasel Decision Stop. Pause. Breathe. We begin to evaluate our surroundings. Have you ever thought of doing something out of the ordinary to feel that adrenalin rush. You feel that fast flow of your blood passing through your veins. Your heart is beating three times the ordinary. Your thoughts go empty and a decision has to be made. Not thinking anything else but just left with a thought of what needs to be done. Instinct pursues you and you do it. Thrilling isn’t it? A taste of the wild creature’s freedom - a weasel’s perhaps. We are all creatures with the desire to move hastily using our first instinct. What makes human superior above all creatures is our ability to elect on conscientious decisions that is, human instinct. Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels’s” does not perceive it that way. Dillard’s essay is an exploration of how to live life. She suggests living life in simplicity without any complications or restrictions. She also stated that we can do whatever we want. “We can live any way we want.” (Dillard 101) She is a writer of nature and looks at it for inspiration. She introduced the scenery by the Hollins pond also called Murray’s Pond, as calm and inhibits a portrayal of open mind allowing deep observation and connection to nature. She comes across a weasel with analysis of its characteristics and behavior, she thought of evaluating her own life. “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.” (Dillard 100) She then suggests what we can learn from...
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...Whether or not it is necessary or just for show or wants, it's going to happen regardless. In Dillard’s essay: “The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons” (479). What is meant is that the weasel represents the other countries while in this quote Dillard stands for what Americans deep down believe in. Thus, truth being told Americans live their lives in ways that necessities aren't always put first or even prioritized at all. Dillard also states that: “We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience - even of silence - of choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse” (480). What the author mean with this is that it come show that one in America chooses their own unique way to live their life seeing as only one can choose the outcome...
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...Living life as we are meant to Life is much simpler that we make it. Life is easier than we are living it. All we need is our basic instincts to live a simple and happy life. Annie Dillard is saying in "Living Like Weasels" that things are easier when your choices are made with instinct and carried through rather than analyzed. We all know that life through an innocent, and simple mind is a wonderful thing. That might be why we remember childhood as an easier time. We grow up and things get complicated and we loose that innocence or mindlessness. “The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons.” (Dillard 100) Choice is something that we make day in and day out. I believe that Dillard is saying that the mindlessness of a weasel is simple to the core and it only making choices based on pure instinct rather than vanity or personal motive. It is a simple mind of a wild animal that uses necessity to make its choices. “People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience-even of silence-by choice.” (Dillard 101) We choose to ignore our basic natural instincts for personal gain that we hoard for our future needs, but we don’t ever have the time to enjoy all that we have acquired. So why do we move so fast to gain as much as possible to overlook that we don’t have the time to enjoy it. Dillard is arguing that life is moving by to fast and so much is happening right before our eyes. We are so busy with our day-to-day...
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...The tone in “Living Like Weasels” is contemplative, because she goes in deep thought and reflects on how her and the weasel live their lives differently. Dillard claims that weasels live by mindless necessity without being bias. While people live by choices and hating essentiality. In the first paragraph, Dillard says “ I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. I come to hollins pond not so much to learn how to live as, frankly, to forget about.”Both of these quotes shows how even she is still pondering on how to live her life. She explains how sometimes it's not about learning how to live it's about forgetting how to live in general so we can learn from our instinct and create the purest form of living. This quote proves the tone because...
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...persuade us. For this reason, your first essay in WRTG 2010 asks you to develop an interpretation of one of the following essays: * Benjamin Franklin’s “Arriving at Perfection” * Annie Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels” - Zora Neale Hurston’s “Colored Like Me” As DiYanni explains in the Introduction to 50 Great Essays, an interpretation is not a summary; in fact, interpreting what an essay means can only happen once the reader has not only an accurate grasp of the content but has also gone further to observe details, connect those details, and make inferences about the author’s argument based on those details. Your interpretation, then, will not be a summary of your selected essay; instead, it will be your argument as to a primary meaning and persuasive purpose of the essay. As with any piece of writing, an essay can have multiple interpretations; thus, your interpretation should be arguable, debatable, forcing you to support it with enough analysis of the text to reveal to your own readers the validity of your interpretation. You should move beyond simply “what” the author is saying to “how.” Why, for example, does Dillard choose the weasel as our model wild animal? Or how do Franklin’s charts further develop his argument? As all of your essays in WRTG 2010, your essay will need a clear focus (a...
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...“Living Like Weasels.” Annie Dillard is an American author from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who is known to write about nature in an attitude similar to Naturalists of the 1880s to 1930s literary era; she is also compared to several Modernist writers such as Emily Dickinson and Ernest Hemingway. Dillard published an essay called “Living Like Weasels” in 1982 in which she contemplated the idea of humans living instinctively as animals do, as a result of an accidental run in with a wild weasel. This essay contains several...
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...“Living like Weasel” is a narrative essay written by Annie Dillar in which she tells the readers about her first encounter with a weasel in a forest. When Dillar first looks at the weasel, she freezes and gives us an insight of her racing mind. First of all, Annie makes practical and effective use of the structure to illustrate the positivity of her arguments. She begins her essay by clearly stating what a weasel is, how his nature is like and where he lives. In the first paragraph she states “He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving.” After Dillar tells the readers about the weasel she begins describing the nature around her. Her detailed and clear descriptions...
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...Dillard’s “Living Like Weasels”, it seems my perception of what she was focused on was not the same as what the instructor was trying to get me to see. These readings are not black and white so you have to use some creative thinking to understand them and it is apparent my creative thinking is out in left field. This has shown me that I really need to work on this area, I can write all I want but if I can’t understand what someone else has wrote that is going to hinder me not only in this class but future classes and outside of school. Development plays into the above, for example; as the writer changes from describing a weasel to using the weasel as an object to try and get an underlying message across the reader has to be able to analyze this in order to develop their own opinion of what the writer is trying to convey. It is the writer’s ability to persuade the reader to believe in their thesis....
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...over to the small woodland creatures that were making up the jury. “Fellow woodland creatures, I would like to submit to you a plethora of overwhelming evidence along with several testimonies of surviving victims, that will unequivocally prove to you that not only the defended Timothy Barren is not only evil but guilty of crimes against Mother Nature.” “He good.” said the weasel to Timothy. “Never lost a case” Timothy shrugged and wiped away tears from his face. “If it pleases the court, I would like to submit to you exhibit A, a snare young Timothy Barren here used to capture a poor unsuspecting skunk, and do you know what Timothy did to that skunk...
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...Living Life by Your Own Moral Compass Annie Dillard's essay entitled "Living Like Weasels" is a journey into the way human beings might live contrasted with the thoughts of how weasels live. In this beautifully written essay, Dillard describes her chance encounter with an ordinary weasel and how it helped her receive understanding into the difference between the way human beings live their lives and the way wild animals go about theirs. She does this by offering up vivid descriptions and images concerning her quick, but thought provoking run in with the reclusive weasel. Dillard is attempting to show us that we can discover a lot about the true way to live by observing nature's other creations. Yet, at the same time telling us that the way we live is totally up to us, which leads me to my personal interpretation. One could argue humans that lived during the Neanderthal period were similar to that of a weasel. Throughout time the mental capacity of the human has grown to be far more complex and sophisticated than earlier times. With that being said the weasel as we know acts off of pure instinct, whereas the human mind needs to process and articulate each move we make. People often search a definite answer on how to live their lives, as if there is a road map or instructions that will lead you to resolution. Actually, the truth is we, humans, are blessed with an ability that separates us from any other creature; the capacity to intelligently choose to live as we please...
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...of this fear, of such a simple yet powerful aspect of our natural lives, people try to fend it off, not even seeing that it is an inevitable act. They try to believe that there is a way to fend off the ‘enemy’ and go against the tide of nature. However ever in the middle of death there is true beauty even in the unlikely of creatures. In two essays the most unsuspecting characters take on death in a different perspective from the way we as group sees it. In the story "The Death of the Moth" by Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels” both touch on such insignificant creatures and the dynamic between life and death. While we cower at the face of death the moth and the weasel face death in a more valiant way. Both of these creatures that we do not even give a second thought in our day to day lives, live and die with more appreciation, and it is admirable. In “The Death of the Moth” and “Living Like Weasels” the speakers show the smallest of creatures living with strength even as they face death and how they reflect life in their small presence. It is comparable that we as a group lives with the same vigor as the moth, but once being on the brink of death is thrown into the mix we pale in comparison. Despite the moth’s insignificance to the day to day life, Woolf describes his energetic zeal and he zips around the small space with fascination “one could not help watching him.” Although Woolf watches with fascination in this little creature, she also...
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...selling a product Old Spice tries to make the costumer think that if they get their product it will change them. Can think of a company that uses weasel words more than Old Spice does with their advertisement? Old Spice tries to make it seem as if, by purchasing their product, you will all of a sudden have a much more glorious life. Old Spice is notorious for misleading an audience into buying their product. They have multiple commercials where they use doublespeak to try and make their product sound better. Old Spice also frequently uses weasel words as well as doublespeak to get people more interested in their product. Lutz said this about weasel words, “Weasel words appear to say one thing when in fact they say the opposite or nothing at all.” (Lutz 310) Lutz describes doublespeak as, “It is a language which makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant to seem attractive, or at least tolerable. “ (Lutz 304) Old spice has multiple commercials making false claims of how you can be changed by their product. As a consumer of any product you must be aware of what ads trying to sell you. Old Spice Champion is trying to get people to “Believe in your smellf.” Many consumers buy Old Spice Champion for misleading reasons, but no consumer should ever buy Old Spice Champion because of the lack of knowledge of weasel words. The Old Spice commercial with NFL wide receiver Greg Jennings is very misleading because of what he tells the audience in the commercial....
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...ptarmigans. However, mom-ptarmigan came back immediately, and started using her wings to beat the gray cub. Unfortunately, the gray cub had to give up for the food, and he left. He was walking beside a river, and then he decided to go to another side of the river. However, during his middle way of crossing the river, he was washed away by the strong flow. He could not do anything in river, but finally the water sent him to a shore side. After feeling better, he started walking again. He went through a jungle, and then found a small weasel. He beat the small weasel by using his claws, but when he wanted to try second time, the mom weasel jumped over and sticks her laws into the gray cub’s neck. In the first place, the gray cub wanted to fight back, but he could not. His roar turned out to become crying. He was in the edge of death, but finally his mother, the she wolf, showed up. The she-wolf had a big fight with the mom-weasel, but finally the mom-weasel...
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...bears ability to efficiently absorb heat energy from the sun. (Tributsch et al, 1990) Comparison: Now that I have introduced the four species that have similar and interesting plans of thermoregulation, it is time to show how closely these animals relate even though they each have chosen a different path in order to meet their goal of body heat equilibrium. Starting with my first comparison the arctic least weasel and the emperor penguin, both animals that employ poor insulative qualities but make up for it by using strategy. The arctic weasel’s strategy is beyond simply being less insulated thereby increasing its movement to ensure a higher predation rate. The weasel will track its prey back to its burrow in order to not only kill and eat its prey, but to also steal its burrow in order to protect itself from the environment. The weasel is also efficient in what it collects from its prey not only does it take the meat from it to convert it to energy to raise its BMR, but it also uses its fur in order to insulate the burrow, thus decreasing the amount of heat the weasel loses to its environment. The emperor penguin uses a similar tactic in order to create an external insulation except the penguin uses other penguins. Whilst incubating eggs, the emperor penguins gather into a group of several thousand in order to collectively regulate their body temperatures as a giant group. Each penguin in the group is using their fat reserves in order to continuously shiver in order to convert...
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