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Essays

Old school essays.

One Programmer’s Ideal Language

This essay is also available in PDF format in my portfolio. It was originally written for my graduate-level programming languages class. Introduction …

Thomas More, with Respect to Utopia: Wistful Daydreamer or Whimsical Writer of Fiction?

Alistair Fox considers Utopia to be Thomas More’s playground for fleshing out ideas that would not have come to fruition in his life. This proposed purpose of Utopia is evident in how More describes the Utopians, their religion, and their way of life, which all reflect aspects of More’s life. Fox observes that More injects into the Utopian people these similarities with himself: interests in gardening and music and a dislike of material wealth. The Utopian religion resembles More’s own Christianity, and the apparent secret to happiness in Utopia lies in furthering your education, which fits with More’s scholastic nature.

Tom Stoppard’s After Magritte: Artistry in the Use of Bad Puns

Another source of humor in After Magritte comes from the reader imagining how the play must look actually being performed. One scene involves Harris hastily trying to balance the aforementioned fruit basket counterweight: he removes the bulb from the light fixture, causing the basket to descend as the light ascends, so he removes an apple from the basket, but this is too much weight and so the basket begins to ascend, causing Harris to quickly take a bite from the apple and replace it. This small piece of missing apple is enough to offset the weight of the missing bulb, thus evening out the delicate balance of the light fixture and the basket. This is such a comical scene to imagine, mostly because of how silly it seems to be balancing a light with a fruit basket in the first place. The description of Harris balancing the whole arrangement reads like a Rube Goldberg contraption on a smaller scale.

Discomfort through Visual and Audible Cues: A Cinematic Analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy

The Alfred Hitchcock film selected for review was Frenzy, released in 1972. This was the first Hitchcock-directed film to be given an R rating. It showcases very tense, uncomfortable scenes involving the rape and strangulation of women. Topics examined will include: the camera’s focal point, how the tightness of the frame correlated to intensity of action, and how the musical score contributed to the mood.

K. Earns the Favor of a Villager

Gerstäcker, who until now had been sitting quietly in a chair across the room, had evidently heard enough of K. speaking in such a harsh manner to his mother, and spoke up. “See here now! It is little wonder you caused such an uproar this morning at the Gentleman’s Inn, if that is the way you go about speaking to people you have only just met! Indeed, it is becoming very clear to me now why it is talk of you has been rampant within the various social circles I must frequent, considering your treatment of your assistants, the school teacher, and, yes, even the landladies at our two inns. What is the meaning in this, sir, that you should so unjustly and without grounds attack my mother, especially in her own home?”

“You have made time itself…”

This quotation is from Augustine’s Confessions and specifically from chapter 11, pp. 229. Augustine’s idea is that time is an illusion because past and future do not ever really exist. They are nothing tangible and we can do nothing with them. There is only the never-ending present through which we flow, although that is slightly incorrect as well as it seems to imply that that present is coming from somewhere on its way to somewhere else, which it is not, as it only exists for a moment before it becomes what we call the past, which, according to Augustine, does not exist.

“We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth…”

The author of this quotation is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and this was taken from his Oration on the Dignity of Man. Pico’s work surrounded the idea that man is God’s greatest creation and should rightly be celebrated. His ideas seem very radical because they are so different from what Augustine and others believed. The whole feeling of Pico’s work is much more optimistic about the state of the individual man, especially in relation with that man’s trek toward God.