Things now gone and things still here: a collection of essays

Abstract

Included in this collection of essays are four works: "Bare Ground," "The Hawk," "The Car Crash," and "The Terrible Sublime." Two of the pieces--"Bare Ground," and "The Hawk," depict my life growing up on an apple orchard/farm in Southeastern Minnesota. "The Hawk," is a piece in which the narrator, myself, tries to come to terms with the fact that his father, as well as himself, are only human, and focuses on a traumatic incident in the narrator's life in which his father was forced to shoot a beautiful creature, a hawk, and the meanings the narrator attached to this creature. "Bare Ground," on the other hand, is a piece which chronicles the history of my family's apple orchard and is an exercise in conciseness which attempts to capture the family dynamics of a rural family. "The Car Crash" is a work that does not deal with my life growing up on the farm. Instead, it depicts a moment in which a narrator observed a rather horrifying head on collision and in its presence did nothing. The piece revolves around sketching out the moral consequences that arise from a life of fear and inaction in the aftermath of not only one tragedy that the narrator could have intervened in, but many. The last piece, "The Terrible Sublime," revolves around the narrator's continued dependence on sleeping medication as well as his continued struggled with manic-depression. It's mainly about coming to terms with an affliction and finding a way to go on in spite of crushing disappointment.