Author Archives: Gavin

I’ve already have experience making a digital essay for the class and other classes through my high school classes. The only problem I’d expect to have is picking a poem. I for one, despise poems and I haven’t deliberately aimed to read poems for a while now. I like the idea of making a poem into visuals, into something people can see my interpretation. As for my choice of what type of video I want to make, I’m leaning towards a straight out shooting of video, no animations or anything. Honestly, I look forward to this project once again, but again, picking a poem with be my problem.

We’re almost half way through with the semester in our “happiness” themed English class, but there is still so much more to learn. We have developed vague ideas of happiness. We developed ways of achieving happiness and basically answer the question, what is happiness, yet there are always new readings in which our ideas are challenged when we feel we have grasped it. Obviously, I have now come to a conclusion that happiness just happens because everyone is different; our frames of reference are so unique that happiness cannot be defined, like the idea of perfection in The Birthmark, by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Happiness in The Birthmark developed around the idea of perfection. Aylmer simply couldn’t resist talking about the birthmark that was on his beloved wife’s face, calling it a “defect”. I don’t believe that a birthmark makes a woman any less desirable than one without a birthmark. Aylmer might have achieved his happiness for a brief moment, when the birthmark was finally off of his wife, but she died in the process. Was it worth it? He lost his beloved wife in the process for a brief, less than a second, moment of happiness seeing his wife only look perfect. From Aylmer’s frame of reference perfection seemed to his idea of happiness but from his assistant’s frame of reference, it is implied that he looks beyond the birthmark and would keep Georgiana the way she is if she were his wife. His way of happiness did not involve accepting the fact that he, Aylmer himself, had to develop personally and not force it upon others.

In the Cathedral by Raymond Carver, I concluded that that happiness comes from relaxing. The narrator at the end seems to have found an indescribable feeling that he has come upon through closing his eyes and following the flow of drawing a cathedral. He felt free and weightless, exposed in a sense. Despite the fact that the effect might have came from the “dope” that they were smoking, the feeling of happiness could be interpreted as a breakthrough in a new way of seeing life or just three people smoking a dope for temporary happiness. The way it was written makes and calls upon so many different interpretations. For example, the blind man once claims that he’s up for new experiences and maybe that is why is seems so free and knowledge. He listens a lot because he cannot see. He is immune from the idea of perfection on a human being and accepts people for who they are through personalities.

Come to think of it, these short stories are so unalike yet not. They both tackle on the idea of happiness but the one strictly bases happiness off of visuals and the other does not. In The Birthmark the “Crimson Hand” is the defect, the flaw in Aylmer’s perfect wife and it must be removed for the two to be a happy couple. In the Cathedral, the narrator begins on judging the blind man, the way he interacts with the narrator’s wife, the way he looks without his sunglasses, and the way he eats but in the end, when the eyes are closed, he feels the happiness. I honestly don’t know what to think anymore on the simple idea of happiness.

Foreshadowing in The Birthmark

Aylmer’s dream of removing his wife’s birthmark leads to him taking out her heart in the process because the mark goes so deep. Georgiana has a notion that something fatal will happen if the birthmark is removed yet she still suggests that he either removes the mark or take her life. This foreshadows that the worst will come upon during the experiment. Another example of foreshadowing is when Georgiana reads the scientific journal. She learns that his experiments were successful yet failures at the same time. It might show that even if her mark were to be cured, there would be a defect or consequence to come with.

Perfection can only exist in nature in that the human ideas of perfection are indirect opposition to nature and the two cannot co-exist. Eventually you will destroy yourself trying to achieve it. We saw that since she was born with the birthmark, if it is removed it’s like removing her in a sense. Much like the flower that was presented, Aylmer says, “…pluck it, and inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments, and leave nothing save its brown seed-vessels…” (267-268) This foreshadows the events that will come. Georgian perishes in the end as she does live for a moment after the birthmark is removed. It is a reference to the brief perfume of the flower. Aylmer just had to learn how to appreciate his wife and accept her flaws.

In both readings, Daniel Gilbert and Sigmund Freud talk about memories. They both believe that memories trigger the sense of pleasure principle or happiness. I saw Freud referred to pleasure as overcoming pain. For example, Freud writes, “Now in the traumatic neuroses the dream life has the peculiarity: it continually takes the patient back to the situation of his disaster, from which he awakens in renewed terror (pg. 9).” These nightmares, or exaggerated memories, are repeated again in the patient’s mind so they can perfect the situation to the point where it does not affect the patient anymore, to which they can find pleasure from the painful memory. This relates to the “reality principle” where they postpone pleasure while they endure pain (pg 5).

Gilbert would have agreed to this to some degree. Gilbert believes that happiness lays in comparing and relating current experiences with past experiences, but the past is vague and never perfect in the memory. Both these philosophers acknowledge the importance of the past and the differences between people’s feeling but they built off it differently. Gilbert would disagree with Freud on how happiness is obtained. Gilbert states, “Once we have an experience, we are thereafter unable to see the world as we did before. (pg 57).” This counter’s Freud’s term because Freud implies that to get pleasured, we must overcome out pain while Gilbert upholds the idea that pleasure comes from referring back to past events. Gilbert would argue that with new experiences, comes new pleasures. It is pointless to go back to old memories and ponder about them until you have overcome them through perfection. Gilbert also states, “..but the likelihood is depressingly slim that we can resurrect our experience and then evaluate it as we should have back then (pg. 57)”. Holding on to the past is never accurate.

I would agree with Gilbert because holding bad experience and dwelling in it takes a lot more time to achieve the so called pleasure we strive for in our lives. Gilbert’s clarity on the subject that there are different experiences between people is key. Since we are different people, I believe that there will be different levels of happiness that people are in and they will always experience new things that will help them achieve happiness or pleasure. This is the fastest way people achieve it and if they were to be Freud’s concept of pleasure, patients will take a lot longer to get over the pain/depression state they are in. I also believe in Gilbert’s thought because genuinely, people seem happy most of the time and not really try to perfect a situation.