The Infinite Essay @infiniteessay - Tumblr Blog

Seth Petrarca on Adam Hochschild

Teague Monahan on Rachel Carson's "Undersea"

An ocean pool: A response to Undersea by Rachel Carson. I chose to make this drawing that mixes the ocean with a competitive swimming pool because I wanted to show how the natural world that R.L. Carson talks about and how human sport I talk about within my essay can exist in the same space. Swimming has always been connected to water in its most natural form: oceans, lakes, rivers to a different type of form, the competition pool where we confine ourselves to its lanes, tiles, and strict boundaries. By combining the two, I wanted to explore what happens when those boundaries blur. The cliff on one side of the drawing represents the starting block area, but it also symbolizes risk and commitment. In a race, the start is the moment when athletes literally dive into uncertainty, trusting their training and momentum. A cliff captures that same feeling of launching into something bigger than yourself. It also adds a natural, rugged contrast to the controlled environment of a pool. On the opposite side of the cliff dive in-side is the bulkhead, the one I can vividly imagine the best because it is the one I see everyday. It is marked with the Stark logo because that bulkhead is the one Whitman chose to purchase and put in. It doesn’t have any correlation to Iron Man. The bulkhead is to add the fact that this drawing of the pool is a combination of the ocean and also the classic structure of a competitive pool. Instead of using normal lane lines structure in a pool, the “waves” act as the dividers. I also just implemented the lane lines to show where the waves would be. This choice shows how water itself becomes the structure. In the ocean, there are no perfectly straight lanes. Movement is unpredictable and alive. By turning waves into lane dividers, I wanted to point out that even in competition, swimmers are still at the hand of the natural forces of water. During a race you'll never know when water can splash into your face causing you to inhale it and then cough it out facing down in the pool and the fight against it. At the bottom of the drawing, the sand represents both a beach and the stands you’d see in a traditional pool. It serves as the viewer’s vantage point—a place where people gather to watch, support, and connect. The dual meaning reinforces the theme that the ocean and the pool overlap, turning a familiar competitive space into a shoreline. I drew the aquatic animals Rachel Carson talks about in her essay Undersea, and the humans in my essay as the combining feature of our essays. Both of these things swimmers and marine animals have the water as our home, just in different contexts. The marine life is actively living in it and the swimmers spend hours and at times whole days or weeks on a pool deck.

Ada Gao on Jamaica Kincaid

In A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid made the reader imagine that they are tourists visiting Antigua. She says that everything looks beautiful and exotic, like a perfect vacation spot, while at the same time pointing out that due to the historical reason, what seems like paradise to the tourist is actually a place of poverty, broken public buildings, and social inequality for the local people.

Kincaid's article made me think about the relationship between history and tourists. Will the history of a place really pass? Should we know the history of this place when traveling outside? Or just enjoy the scenery? After understanding the history, do we know more about this place, or do we lose our appreciation of the pure beauty of this place? The aesthetic experience is inseparable from the political and historical context. In Kincaid's essay, past events and realities do not influence the present in a linear sequence but are intertwined with personal experiences and collective memory

This is a city gate ten minutes' walk from my grandmother's house. I pass by every time I go back to my grandma’s house, because there is a bus stop next to it. When tourists pass by, they will feel spectacular and may want to take pictures.

Xuanwu Gate, built during the early Ming Dynasty when Emperor established Nanjing as the capital. (Roughly between 1367 and 1386) The gate was named after by a mythical creature symbolizing the north. Situated beside Xuanwu Lake, it served as a crucial northern passage from the imperial city and a route toward Zhongshan and Purple Mountain for military and ceremonial use.

On July 7, 1937, Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China, seeking to seize territory, expand its empire, and dominate East Asia through military force. Over the eight-year war of resistance, 20 to 30 million people lost their lives. From December 1937 to January 1938，Japanese troops killed more than 300,000 civilians within six weeks, people later called it the Nanjing Massacre. If these numbers sound too grand, roughly in this place, more than 1,300 people died.

Kincaid's article made me reflect, so I drew the appearance of the city gate. If you want to understand a piece of history, who was this city wall built to resist? How many years did it take to complete? How many people at the time devoted their efforts or gave their lives for it? What happened afterwards? ... After removing these events, is it still the building that people passing by would find beautiful and stunning?

Van Nguyen on Joan Didion

“But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not places at all but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”Joan Didion describes New York as “an infinitely romantic notion,” a city she knew long before she ever lived there, through symbols, stories, and the cultural imagination. This idea made me think about how much of our emotional relationship to a place could begin long before our physical one.

In my illustration, I drew a kind of crossword puzzle. The symbols in my pink squares are the familiar symbols that are associated with New York: the red apple, the Statue of Liberty, the pretzel, the yellow taxi, the skyscrapers, and the Wall Street bull. I learned the city first through abstractions rather than experience. When Didion writes that “to think of ‘living’ there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane,” it made me think about how differently I formed my sense of HCMC. My relationship to my hometown didn’t begin with symbols but with experience itself. So, the yellow squares reflect the intimate, everyday details that shaped me: the plastic slippers, the conical hat, the incense that burns quietly inside homes, the bamboo fan. The green squares are the overlap, the parts of both cities that feel similar: crowds, high- rises, coffee shops, street wind, homelessness, the comfort of noodle soup, shopping malls. By placing NYC and HCMC in the same grid, I was interested in how memory and perception could blur across cities.

Small Rooms In Time A hand-drawn interpretation and personal connection to Ted Kooser’s essay By: Aidan Okano

Small Rooms In Time, by Ted Kooser, is a personal essay where the author reflects on the murder of a fifteen-year-old boy that took place in his old apartment. This brought back vivid memories for him, as his old apartment was his former safe space and a place where lots of memories were created. These memories that he made there will always be a part of him, and he will always be connected to that space. Towards the end of his essays, he suggests that a ghost of his former self will always live in his old apartment because of everything he experienced there. Themes of memory, the passage of time, and safety are prevalent throughout this essay. In my essay, I connected my personal experience of living in my old apartment. I discussed my memories, how time has passed since I moved out, and how I felt safe there. Like Kooser, I wrote about how a part of me, or my ghost, still lives there. That’s what I tried to represent in my drawing. The background is what I remember of my living room, and the figure is my former self floating around as my ghost.

Grace Galanes on E. J. Levy's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

E. J. Levy’s "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is a personal essay describing the ways in which her childhood and development was influenced by her mother’s fascination with French cuisine. We get a detailed look into how her parent’s actions are internalized and make Levy into the person she is today. “I do not misremember this. It remains with me like a recipe” (Levy 296). The way you’re raised, the ways in which family interact, all intertwine themselves into your own life as you grow up. Childhood experiences that have been repeated so often, emotionally and psychologically, become fixed. A recipe endures through practice; meals are replicated and steps followed consistently until they are memorized. Levy’s memory operates the same way: repetitive patterns of longing, waiting, and striving for emotional nourishment from her family have been rehearsed so persistently that they solidify into something permanent, and impacts the way in which she loves. The piece I have created is a photo collage on a recipe card of the way I was raised and the people surrounding me, making me into who I am today.

Ben Schubach on Rachel Carson's "Undersea"

Rachel Carson’s Undersea invites readers to abandon an anthropocentric worldview and instead experience the ocean (and the genre of creative nonfiction itself) with humility, patience, and openness. Through lyrical, rhythmic prose that merges scientific accuracy with poetic reverence, Carson dissolves the boundaries between fact and feeling, guiding readers into an underwater world where human perspectives hold no privilege. Her tone and imagery encourage a surrender of ego, revealing the sea as both nurturing and indifferent, a vast system that exists entirely beyond human relevance. By asking us to imagine life sensed without human eyes, lungs, or gravity, Carson reframes understanding as an act of deep attention and empathy. The paper reflects on how this shift mirrors experiences like fly fishing, where nature’s indifference becomes a lesson in humility, reminding us that we are participants, not centers, in the larger living world.

An Illustration for Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to all That” By Ziggy Fox

Upon moving to NYC, Didion describes how she’s living this fantasy life where she can see the Brooklyn Bridge from outside her window and everything is possible. As she grows in NYC, she learns. She learns that not everything is possible and that her actions carry weight, and she learns that the bridge outside her window is actually the Triborough Bridge. Then finally at the end of her essay she describes the goodbye she tells to NYC, a very real place where she had led a very real life. But in that reality she learned she had to leave for Los Angeles. In my illustration, part drawing, part collage, I show the transfer from youthful ignorance and imagination to what is real. Each section carries a quote of Didion’s reflections on each section of her time in NYC. The left side of the bridge is all collage of flowers and other greenery. It’s beautiful but not quite real, as Didion’s youth in NYC was. In the middle is where the collage meets the drawing. This represents the middle part of her life, the growing into what is real. The right side is all drawing, a drawing of the Triborough bridge. Didion learns what NYC really is for her, she learns that it’s not her place. With that learning, she must say goodbye. Her goodbye is to a part imaginative New York, part real. But the New York she leaves, she sees clearly. And with that reality, she starts over into a new life in Los Angeles.

Sammy Holmer on Lia Purpura’s “Autopsy Report”

“Autopsy Report” by Lia Purpura addresses a disturbing topic, one of death and dismemberment, with a nuanced way to lessen the discomfort. Through her use of metaphor, discovering a deeper purpose, and illustrating her shifting point of view, the author took my discomfort and turned it into intrigue. I wanted to demonstrate this sort of reinvention of death in my portrayal, so I decided to break the body up into different parts, as is done in autopsies. Although its simplicity is almost childlike and innocent, this helps to distract from the gruesomeness within. I illustrated a heart, flesh on the arms (as Purpura describes it peeling off the bone), a swirling mass of brains, and legs with veins running through them. These are all clinging onto the body with staples, a nod to the surgical and cold feelings often associated with death. Purposefully, the only object not stapled onto the figure is a golden circle of light, radiating not only from within the body, but also around. This golden light contrasting with the realistic representations of body parts in my mind was a reference to the “opening” that Purpura addresses in her description of autopsies. I took this not only in the literal sense, of carving open a person, but as I talked about in my essay, the metaphorical sense as well. Death isn’t only about the bloody, gruesome parts; it’s also about finding a new perspective, appreciating what we’ve experienced, and opening our minds beyond the world we know. Purpura helped me find this change of heart within myself in regard to death, and I show that through my understanding that death can be more than something physically triggering. What I used to view as a topic to avoid, I now understand in a more expansive and appreciative way.

A response to “Undersea” by Rachel Carson

by Calliope Duford

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#submission

Carved Out: A Response to Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place

by Clara Hastings

Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place details the way that her home country of Antigua is perceived and trampled upon by tourists. She takes a hypothetical “you” through the airport, the car rides, the hotels, the beaches and the food of Antigua. The whole time sneering with discontent at the way that her home is trampled upon, and snarkily redefining the way that tourists view the places they travel.

Throughout my reading of Kincaid’s essay, I couldn’t help but relate her critiques of the tourists in Antigua with my own discontent with the tourists that trample upon my home in New Mexico. In Santa Fe, tourism has been destructive. Extractions of turquoise and oil have carved into the land, and rich culture and history has been manipulated and twisted into a show for passersby to admire. It would not be the place it is today without the cultural appropriation that seeps in under cowboy-boot-laden feet. For both Kincaid and I, tourism is somewhat inevitable. “For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere” (264). Those with the privilege to travel will always venture out, and natives, particularly those who do not have access to travel, will always resent visitors.

I represented the extractive and inevitable nature of tourism through a linoprint of New Mexico. The clear image on the left represents the way that it is perceived and simplified from the perspective of the tourist. The exposed block on the left shows the extraction that was necessary to create that sanitized image. In the act of creating the picture on the left, the original block was changed permanently, for better or for worse.

#submission

A Dance

A response to Diane Glancy’s “Sun Dance” Yasmin Sanchez Rojas

Admiring dancers from afar is something I had never thought about before until I read Diane Glancie’s Sun Dance. Through her story she retells the steps and routine that the dancers have to go through before, during, and after their performance. She is looking at the dancers so intently because she wanted to find some parts of herself in them. In some way she was admiring something she questioned she could ever be a part of. The feeling of being torn between where you belong is hard to describe within itself. This made me reflect on my own identity but also my own experiences with the different dances in my own culture. My parents come from a different area of the world that doesn’t shy away from dancing. There are many different dances and not everything is danced the same way.

Looking back I think that I was always observing my parents when they danced even if I was seated far away from them. My eyes would stick to them because in those moments they seemed so completely different than who I knew them to be. Their confidence shined so brightly, especially when they were dancing cumbia. I would say that my family specializes in cumbia which is why they make it look so effortless. However, it is a very intricate dance to learn which is why I have struggled to learn it over the years. Seeing my parents dance with confidence and trust is something that I think I should have within myself. My own identity sometimes tears me into two which makes me feel as Glancy has described it, “Jump-start an image of my broken self” (206). I try to find that confidence in myself to figure out who I am but at times I feel lost.

When I feel lost or unsure I think about the side of me that makes me the most comfortable and confident which tends to be the one that my parents come from. I look back at all the memories, festivities, and dances because those moments help me piece together who I am supposed to be. I might not fully understand how to dance cumbia just yet but whenever I am out on the dance floor dancing other dances that are culturally significant to me I know who I am at that moment. I can clearly tell that even though I don’t dance exactly like my parents, my dancing makes me just who I am supposed to be and that’s enough for me.

- Yasmin

A response to Rachel Carson’s “Undersea” by Jack McManus

Gray Area

A response to T Kira Madden’s The Greeter

T Kira Madden’s The Greeter made me think deeply about the relationship between Madden and her mother. The mirrored black-and-white butterflies I drew are representative of T Kira Madden and her mother. The black-and-white thinking when it comes to mental illness is notable throughout the piece in how each person is portrayed. Madden’s butterfly has the white background with the black dots, her mother’s is the black background with white dots.

The white background is an image of purity, masking the dark reality of her behaviors. By Madden attempting so desperately to appear pure and perfect as the storefront greeter, she was masking the truth of who she was and what she did to have a perfect exterior.

The black background is an image of darkness and the pain of the mother’s drug addiction. The stigma of addiction is dark and negative, and it can be the first thing that people see. The white butterfly is the glimmer of hope and personality within Madden’s mother that was obscured by her illness.