Wednesday, December 3, 2014

excerpts from a narrative

I'm coming up on the end of my Advanced Composition class at FSU, and our final project is to write a long report.   The whole semester we've focused on building an idea for a business, and mine was a bookstore/art gallery in Carlisle, England.  One of the options for our long report was a business plan, but seeing as I've done one of those for another (business) class, I decided to skip that and go with a traditional research paper.  However, we are not allowed to write a 100% research paper; it has to be at least 50% our own thoughts and ideas.  I'm just about halfway done with my paper, which is about Carlisle and other places in the UK, and I'm having a lot of fun with it.  I love being given freedom by professors to do basically what I want.  I thought I'd share a couple excerpts from what I have thus far:




"Growing up, I was always intrigued by the unknown and attracted to the spontaneity of travel.  I longed to go to Africa and India; to see the pyramids in Cairo and the elephants in Jaipur.  I dreamt of Belize and other tropical paradises.  Never, however, except for when watching the 1993 film version of The Secret Garden, did I imagine going to England.
When I reflect on it, it is unclear to me as to why the desire was never stronger.  Countless brilliant literary figures have come from the United Kingdom, namely William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, the Brontës, T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde . . . I could go on.  The grass there is greener than any place I’ve ever been.  The roads are quainter than ours and the air holds a faint trace of sea.  You can walk anywhere you want in a reasonable amount of time.  The buildings are chockfull of stories and centuries of history echo through the lands.  It is so unlike America, where everything has only been in existence for a couple hundred years, if that.


. . .

            At this point you may find yourself asking, “Why in the world does she have an entire section of this report devoted to pubs?”  Well, the answer is simple, you see.  I knew from the instant I walked into my first real English pub that they are amongst the most magnificent places on earth, and that alone is reason enough.  They’re dark and dingy and smell of beer and pork crackling.  The clinking of glasses and rumbling of laughter can be heard above the low hum of the jukebox.  Dark wood tables and fireplaces are the norm.  People who’ve grown up going to these pubs would likely say I’m off my rocker for speaking so highly of them, but I think they’re full of things that make the soul come alive."

Maybe if I'm feeling really out there, I'll post the whole thing when it's done...
-teddy x