Photo Edits 11/27/13

Click to view larger. All editing done at PicMonkey.com

"Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."

-Ernest Hemingway

Photo taken by my lovely sister Terese.

Houghton Falls, Washburn, WI. Photo taken by my grandmother.

Orvietto, Italy. Photo taken by Dawn V. 

Oh she could've been mine

but we ran out of summertime.

Out of Summertime - Scotty McCreary

The perfect words

never crossed my mind

'cause there was nothing in there

but you

Signal Fire - Snow Patrol

Photo taken by my sister Meg

when you were naive

you were so invincible

Soldier - Goo Goo Dolls

your skin

oh yeah

your skin and bones

turn in 

to something beautiful

Yellow - Coldplay

Photo taken by Terese

among my frivolous thoughts

i believe 

there are beautiful things

seen by the astronauts

Angels - Owl City

Photo taken by Meg

Composition Pondering: Can Language Convey Reality & Hemingway vs. Joyce

Just some fast thoughts I typed out prompted by my Composition assignments of the past couple weeks. I was imitating Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce and was asked which I preferred, and also whether or not I feel language can successfully convey reality. Nothing formal, so this is what I came up with Enjoy!

Can language ever do reality justice? Is it better to be Hemingway, the clear, the concise, or Joyce, the flowery, the metaphorical? I think language shapes reality; what we do and say, think and feel, all work together to make up reality, and language is how we retell reality. Can language always convey reality, capture it, reproduce it? 
No, of course not. Most of the time language fails miserable to do what we ask of it. Most of the time language is nothing but words, words, words, and they fall into place all wrong so that when we mean to say something meaningful, it comes out being funny, or vice versa. 
If I say that today I went shopping at Wal-Mart and bought seven things for under $35, does that convey reality? Yes, but it doesn’t convey anything but some of the facts. 
Reality is multifaceted, and the thing that makes language so magical, yet so maddeningly limited, is that it is not as multifaceted as life is. It takes us more time to describe a flower than it did for us to see the flower, smell the flower, touch the flower, smile at the flower, pick the flower, and put the flower in a vase. 
Language is limited, but that is where human beings come in. We all choose what is most important to us and use the language we have to express that importance. 
One person might simply say ‘the flower was a lily’, and another might have no idea what kind of flower it is and slowly and accurately describe a lily, and so well that anyone who has seen a lily before thinks, “Oh, it’s a lily!” 
So, back to that one question: Whose style captures ‘reality’, better: Hemingway’s or Joyce’s? Personally, I think the best way to capture reality is to use a mixture of both the stark fact of Hemingway and the romantic depth and confusion of Joyce. One alone lacks something that we experience in reality; the multifaceted beauty and experience within life itself.