Waste Essay
JUST under the wire, I produce an entry for Waste's essay contest:
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For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time. Mostly, man has tried to figure out how long it was, by the use of sundials, hourglasses, and Swatch watches. Sometimes it was long, sometimes it was short; it pretty much depended on how man felt about it and whether or not the sun was out.
But man has also tried to figure out time's density. Hence, Dickens' great masterpiece, Hard Times. In Hard Times, Dickens examines just how hard time can be if you have to live in one of those houses that has no flowers on the wallpaper, since they lack verisimilitude, and so the furnishings are all pretty boring, which is like Hard Times.
We can see, on our first reading of Hard Times, that some parts of it are harder than others. The labor union scene, for instance, is very hard indeed, and actually I did not finish it. On the other hand, the part about Stephen's drunken wife wasn't hard at all. Ironically, for Stephen, it was one of the hardest parts, maybe the hardest except for that part when he fell in the well. This shows us, once again, that time is relative.
More irony can be seen when poor Sissy Jupe has to leave the circus. Once again, a character is having a hard time, but I was enjoying myself. What a colorful bunch of friends she had! I liked that part. Soft times would be when the characters and the readers were both enjoying themselves, like in a lot of the parts of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix, but those times didn't happen in Hard Times. Oh, and another piece of irony is that Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix has more pages than Hard Times, but Hard Times took longer to get through.
No, Hard Times, Dickens' great masterpiece, is mostly pretty hard. And that is why we know it is also very long, though not in pages, but in how much of my life I had to spend on it. And this teaches us also that time, when it is measured in density and found to be hard, is probably also long. And that is what man has been trying to figure out for millennia.
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Thank yew! Thank yew!
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For many millennia, man has tried to create ways to measure time. Mostly, man has tried to figure out how long it was, by the use of sundials, hourglasses, and Swatch watches. Sometimes it was long, sometimes it was short; it pretty much depended on how man felt about it and whether or not the sun was out.
But man has also tried to figure out time's density. Hence, Dickens' great masterpiece, Hard Times. In Hard Times, Dickens examines just how hard time can be if you have to live in one of those houses that has no flowers on the wallpaper, since they lack verisimilitude, and so the furnishings are all pretty boring, which is like Hard Times.
We can see, on our first reading of Hard Times, that some parts of it are harder than others. The labor union scene, for instance, is very hard indeed, and actually I did not finish it. On the other hand, the part about Stephen's drunken wife wasn't hard at all. Ironically, for Stephen, it was one of the hardest parts, maybe the hardest except for that part when he fell in the well. This shows us, once again, that time is relative.
More irony can be seen when poor Sissy Jupe has to leave the circus. Once again, a character is having a hard time, but I was enjoying myself. What a colorful bunch of friends she had! I liked that part. Soft times would be when the characters and the readers were both enjoying themselves, like in a lot of the parts of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix, but those times didn't happen in Hard Times. Oh, and another piece of irony is that Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix has more pages than Hard Times, but Hard Times took longer to get through.
No, Hard Times, Dickens' great masterpiece, is mostly pretty hard. And that is why we know it is also very long, though not in pages, but in how much of my life I had to spend on it. And this teaches us also that time, when it is measured in density and found to be hard, is probably also long. And that is what man has been trying to figure out for millennia.
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Thank yew! Thank yew!
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