Dreaming of Skunks

"Skunk Dreams", by Louise Erdrich is an intimate writing showing the comfort and love that is felt from routine and past.  It starts with a story of the main character getting stuck sleeping next to a skunk at age fourteen.  She explains the anxiety and terror that she had sleeping next to the skunk.  The vicious animal left its scent on her body.  She then starts to analyze her thoughts about dreams and death starting with the skunk.  She thinks about what skunks dream about , and then human dreaming and death.   One line I found very interesting was, " I want something of the self on who I have worked so hard to survive the loss of the body." This caught my attention because it always seems we want more. Why can't she just accept the long and lovely life she was to live. It seems as if we always want to get more and more, the more we have the more we want. As the essay continues, she then explains her moving to New Hampshire and how unsatisfying it was. She dreamed of home and it seemed as if she was trapped in a world that wasn't hers. Nature was her natural high and she wanted to feel that high more and more as she was away from it longer. It truely prooved that "home is where the heart is". No matter how much a person says they want to leave home and never come back, there is always a point when one must return home. It has a comfort indescribable. No matter how hard she tried to get the same feeling from home, she was never fully satisfied. I feel as if that is what life is made of. We always want to be satisfied and love the life we live. Without that satisfaction, we aren't even "truly" living.

Updike and Sontag

"Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards." A quote by writer Susan Sontag should be continously looked at as completly rude and a stab for what America in my opinion should stand for. When a person enters into your home with a bomb attached to their hip that would be the definintion of cowardly.  Sure, throwing a bomb into my house is wrong and disrespectful, but when the person has the bomb attached to his or herself that cuts a totally different throat.  That is saying, hey I love myself so much that I would risk my ten cent life just to get rid of yours that you say is worth living.  Susan seems to be saying that we in someway deserved what we got and that what they did is not any worse than the things that we have done by bombing Japan. To say that what we did in Japan was wrong is at least an obvious thought process, but to say that the people of the United States needed a wake up call like that is unexcusable. I am not aware of exactly who was in the World Trade Center, but I am certain that no one in that building deserved to die because of a mistake ( in some opinons) that was made when we bombed Japan or attacked any other countries.  
John Updike in his piece seemed to have a more classical opinion on the whole situation. From the over-used stories to the picture in my head of the falling towers; his opinion seemed dull and not fully thought out. His vocab choices were fabulous, but the words only seemed to make the picture in my head go from black and white to the colors of the tears falling and the fading blue of the East River. "  The other side has the abstractins; we have only the mundane duties of survivors-- to pick up the pieces, to bury the dead, to take more precautions, to go on living."  Although I have harsh critism of Updike and his writing this quote is pure beauty. Truthful yet mysterious making my eyes open wider to his opinions and thoughts.