Recollections of the Past:
From Pioneer Naturalist to Mountaineer Buddhist
(Thoreau and Kerouac)
An old adage says "never let the truth get in the way of a good story". However, where is the line drawn between embellishment and fabrication? Artistic privilege is just as it sounds; a liberty to manipulate and coerce verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and other parts of speech and sentence structure to yield a far more pleasing narrative. As with any privilege there comes responsibility, in this case, a responsibility to not change the original intent of the story or the context in which it took place.
In "Walden, Or Life in the Woods" (1995), by Henry David Thoreau, he takes a very analytical approach to his recollections of the past. Through the use of colorful descriptions, he paints a vivid account of his surrounding scenery with no detectable embellishment while providing an extremely accurate report of his experience. "But while we are confined to books, though the......
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Approximate Word Count: 1844
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |