Maritime Newport

My family’s history includes we are descended from Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.  While confirming this claim’s truth has been difficult, if not impossible, this tradition has still influenced how my family views our history.  Calbraith, as his family called him, grew up in the Rhode Island town Newport.  This town bordering the ocean was the place that influenced Calbraith to seek a career in the navy, and it is his accomplishments as a naval officer that inspire the family stories.

            The American roots of the family can be traced back to 1639 when Edward Perry moved to the New World, and settled in Sandwich, Massachusetts.  However, as his family began to experience religious persecution for their Quaker views, the family relocated to Rhode Island, an area with greater tolerance. 

Calbraith’s father was Christopher Raymond Perry; this is the man who began the naval heritage of the family.  Born a Quaker in Kingston, Rhode Island in 1760, he displayed fighting spirit that had not been present in previous generations of the family.  In his mid-teens, he joined the Kingston Reds, a group of local militia.  With this group, Christopher killed a neighbor, Simeon Tucker, when the he refused to pay war taxes or provide “honor requisitions of food and blankets” (Morison, 8) for the fledgling Continental Army.  These actions forced him and his fellow fighters to flee the area and led Christopher to briefly join the Continental Army.  Historians are not entirely sure how to interpret the “mass of later statements, rumors, and family gossip” (Morison, 9) about Christopher’s time fighting in the Revolutionary War.  He claims to have been captured and imprisoned on four different occasions and to have escaped on all. 

Christopher was soon a privateer and worked on four different vessels.  An unknown vessel on which Christopher served was captured and Christopher was sent to prison not far from Belfast.  Surprisingly, the warden of the prison let him out on parole where Christopher came to know the locals and would hunt and drink with them.  During a drinking party, two young girls accidentally entered the room, and promptly left, but Christopher had caught sight of one and remarked, “There goes my future wife!” (Schroeder, 3).  Soon after, he broke his parole and managed to return to the United States.  When he returned, the war had ended, and he was able to carry out the promise he had made to himself: to marry Sarah Wallace Alexander, the girl he had seen back in Ireland.  He sailed to Ireland where he learned that Sarah had been orphaned and was going to the United States to live with relatives.  Christopher had six weeks in which to court Sarah during their journey to the United States.  Upon their arrival, they were notified that the couple that was to care for Sarah had died of yellow fever in an epidemic sweeping the city.  Christopher instantly proposed a solution.  He and Sarah were married immediately and left the infected city as soon as soon as they could. 

Christopher and Sarah went to South Kingston, Rhode Island and were welcomed by the family who had not seen Christopher since he fled after killing Tucker.  One year later, their first son, Oliver Hazard, was born.  Oliver, like many of his younger siblings to follow would join the navy; Oliver is best known for defeating the British at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. 

It is this area in Rhode Island that had a great impact on young Calbraith’s life, which in turn, would affect the stories my family tells about our history. 

In the early 1790s, the family moved to the Point section of Newport, where they built a house that was scarcely one block from the bay.  It is in this house that Calbraith was born in 1794.  He was named Matthew James Calbraith Perry after the man and his son who accompanied Sarah on her journey to America.  With occasional visits to the family’s Tower Hill farm, Calbraith spent all his childhood in the house his parents had built.  Along with his friends, he played along the shores, swam, and watched many different ships come and go across the waters of the bay.  When visiting downtown Newport, he would be surrounded by the hubbub and excitement of a teeming seaport.  All this action had a major impact on Calbraith’s lifelong love of the ocean and sea.

When his older brother Oliver joined the navy and served onboard Christopher Perry’s vessel in the navy, Calbraith received another link to the sea.  While on leave, his brother would regale the younger Perry children with tales, some true, some exaggerated, of his adventures at sea.  Through his own experiences with living in proximity to the ocean and the stories he would hear through his family members, Calbraith made the decision to join the navy, and enlisted at the age of fourteen. 

            The maritime environment in which Calbraith grew up undoubtedly had a lasting effect on him and influenced his career choice.  The sights, sounds, and experiences that Newport provided the young boy must have been a major influence on his decision to enlist in the navy.  Without this environment, my family may never have been able to count a famous naval commander as our ancestor, for Calbraith may have never been influenced to join the navy.

Schroeder, John H.  Matthew Calbraith Perry.  Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2001. Print.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.  “Old Bruin” Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry.  Canada: Atlantic Little, Brown, 1967. Print.  

Family History in Albania

I am Albanian. Therefore, for my project I will focus on the small Eastern-European third-world country itself, rather than a specific city. My family moved to America when I was a young boy due to Albania’s economic and governmental state. Albania Today: A Portrait of Post-Communist Turbulence, a book by Clarissa de Waal describes Albania’s history and how its instability still affects life today. To portray how Albania is “moving but not advancing” the author calls the situation “agitated stagnancy.”

The standard of living in Albania is so bad, that people cheer when they have electricity or running water, because this is rarely the case. There are no such things as basic necessities provided to the people by their own government. There is no law or order. Most of the population views the government as useless and powerless because laws are seldom enforced. This leaves the country to be run by political opportunists and mob rule. Bribery is a main form of persuasion in Albania’s weak government that continues to lead the country down a corrupt path. The rich gain power by influencing government officials. Not only does this keep the government from doing their job, but it also stifles the rest of the country’s population by keeping them down. Once the rich control the government officials, they only have their interests in mind, leaving the poor to suffer.

This ineffective form of government is rooted in Albania’s former ties to communism. In the mid 20th century, Albania had a dictator that wanted to make the country communist. After he died, a revolution occurred, resulting in the current government. However, communism had deeply crippled the society and it would take years to catch up to the rest of the world. Along with this, the formation of a new government brought make fights for power. This caused the country to remain stagnant as power periodically changed hands and nothing could get accomplished.

Albania’s corrupt and unstable state has led many people to call for reform, but with little success. Things are not looking good for the future and it seems like they will remain as they are for a long time. This is why families like mine choose to leave and improve their own situations rather than stay and try to make it a better place.

http://books.google.com/books?id=V3KAqH9jkZ4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false

Food, Family, and Friends

As she munches on an Asian Tofu Wrap from 1.5.0., a food vendor selling fresh, local, organic meals, and drinks water from a reusable CamelBak, Cara Coppola talks about the food that has had a tremendous influence on her relationships with her family and friends.  She discusses how traditions have shaped her and how some of her best memories center around meals.  It is obvious that in both familial and friendly settings food has played a pivotal role in helping Cara establish not only relationships, but an identity as well. 

            Family is the most notable example of how food, in both preparation and consumption have influenced Cara.  She comes from a large family, with fifteen family members on her mother’s side and over thirty on her father’s.  While the two families prepare and serve different types of food and have different traditions surrounding the food, both extended families use food as a means of connecting with one another, sharing stories, and maintaining relationships.  Her maternal extended family is Irish and will commonly prepare traditional Irish foods such as mashed, baked, or scalloped potatoes; corn beef and cabbage; and Irish stew.  Meals are often followed by family members breaking into Irish dancing.  On her father’s side, the family is Italian, another culture which highly values food.  This family will prepare foods such as lasagna, fettuccine, octopus, salmon, or something as simple as bowls of olives.  While the two families have different traditions and dishes, both use food and meals as a time to gather and connect.

            After growing up in families which placed such an emphasis on food, Cara continued to use food as a way of connecting with people.  During her freshman year of college at the University of Delaware, Cara lived on a floor that had weekly gatherings they called “Sunday Cooking”.  At these gatherings, the girls from the hall would cook meals with one another and invite people from outside the community to join them.  This experience was a great way to bond with people, and for Cara it created strong friendships and bonds amongst hallmates.  These weekly gatherings were especially important since the hall where Cara lived was composed entirely of single rooms, so the food was an important factor in creating bonds.

The dining hall was another great way for Cara to meet and socialize with people.   Often, she and her friends would remain in the dining hall for an hour after the meal was finished, talking, joking, and discussing various topics.  A fond memory of her freshman year was one evening when Cara and her friend Katie went to the dining hall together and ended up eating three meals: soup, salad, and cereal.  Each mini-meal was eaten with a different group of people as the dining hall patrons came and went throughout the evening. 

At the conclusion of her freshman year of college, something about the University of Delaware was not right for Cara.  She felt that her classes were not challenging enough to provide her with the education she needs.  At Thanksgiving break, when she saw her friends from high school, they were all excited about their college experience, yet Cara did not have anything good to say about her college when talking to them.  Despite friends and a good major, Cara decided to transfer to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Although she is having to start over and endure the confusion of an disoriented freshman once more, she is very happy with the decision she has made to transfer schools.

At Chapel Hill, food has not facilitated meeting new people and keeping in touch with old friends in exactly the same way it did in Delaware.  This year Cara does not have a meal plan, so going to the dining hall is a rarity for her.  She will go to the dining hall occasionally, approximately once every two weeks.  When she does go, she goes with a group of people for the purpose of socializing.  Food still does play a role in creating and maintaining friendships in Cara’s life, but there are not as many opportunities for food to impact her life at Chapel Hill as there were in Delaware. 

Moving from Connecticut and Delaware to North Carolina has introduced major changes in the foods that surround Cara. This change in latitude has produced foods that she loves such as sweet tea, BBQ, and biscuits, even though she recognizes that these foods are not healthy and tries to eat them only occasionally.  Compared to the people from the North, Cara has found that Southerners are more amiable, she says “I can definitely notice the warmth in people as they open doors for you, strike up a conversation on the way to the bus stop, or just smile and wave”.  She has noticed that this warmth also applies to the food; she describes southern food as “very comforting and warm”.  She has noticed that Southerners have a great deal of pride in their food, that it serves as an identity and source of self-worth for them. 

For twelve years, Cara has attempted to confront the dilemma of eating meat.  She first became conscious of the issue at the age of seven.  Her favorite character from a television show was Lambchop and she clearly remembers crying at dinner one night when served lamb chops.  However, the discomfort was short lived, her family’s comfort and persistence soon reconciled her to eating meat.  Yet, the discomfort never completely died.  In high school, Cara took an environmental class which reignited her past discomfort with meat consumption.  Through an environmental perspective, Cara had facts to back up her emotional troubles with eating meat.  At Chapel Hill, Cara is working towards a  sustainability minor and this coursework has also influenced her feelings about meat.  It has forced her to be more conscious about the foods she chooses to eat.

When Cara told her family about her desire to become vegetarian, neither of her parents were happy with her decision, yet they had differing degrees of disapproval.  Her mother’s reaction was one of offense; she told Cara that she could not understand why her daughter would choose a vegetarian lifestyle when good food was prepared for her.  Her father was slightly more sympathetic, yet not supportive.  Cara and her father had once watched Food Inc. together, so he understood some of Cara’s discomfort. 

Cara is who she is today due to the combined influence of family and her friends, and a majority of that influence was possible only through the way Cara and the people near to her interacted through food.  Now that she is at college, food, family, and friends will continue to shape Cara as she completes her undergraduate education. 

Feeder 2.1

Ever considered going vegetarian but had trouble sticking to it? As young adults thrust into the college lifestyle, the overwhelming food options may make becoming a vegetarian seem challenging at first. However, as Demi Canoutas, a steadfast vegetarian for seven years explains, college makes abstaining from meat increasingly easy, with many schools raising awareness of American Agricultural issues, and providing more vegetarian meals. Growing up in a period of growing acceptance for vegetarianism, her current ease with not eating meat stems from a variety of factors ranging from strong beliefs about the environment and animals, to the support she receives in school, to the peer support she receives at home. Looking at Demi demonstrates how effectively environmental and peer support help sustain big life decisions such as vegetarianism.

Perhaps the strongest source of Demi’s will, her disgust with eating animals, began at a young age. At age eleven Demi had a life changing revelation that triggered her vegetarian lifestyle when she discovered that by eating meat, one consumes muscle tissue. This notion repulsed her and she decided from that point on, to give up meat. Despite growing up eating meat and loving her aunt’s pot roast, Demi found that the idea of using another life for consumption overshadowed her desire for certain foods. Also, owning two cats made her develop a deep compassion for animals. These strong beliefs made her into a vegetarian but as a college student, she says she has discovered new reasons that keep her a vegetarian.

Once Demi enrolled in school, her vegetarianism took full force as she began to learn more about the environmental impacts of eating meat. In fact, her first assignment at the University of North Carolinal was to read the novel Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. This novel/expose reveals the downsides of eating meat, including its impacts on the environment, economy, health, and animal welfare. Demi says, “Now that I know how much factory farming impacts the environment, it’s something that keeps me a vegetarian but it didn’t make me one. Eating meat is so resource intensive.” College not only made her better informed about eating meat, it also offered her more opportunities to be vegetarian. From the vegetarian meal options in the dining hall, to the freedom to eat what she chooses and not what is cooked for her, college has eased her life of vegetarianism.

Another critical source of her determination is rooted in the familial and friendship support that she receives. Raised by her mother since she was seven, her mother has been very accommodating to her vegetarianism. Ever since Demi chose to stop eating meat, her mother stopped cooking meat at home completely. Her mom also never ate meat regularly in the first place, and stopped eating red meat altogether. Her friend’s have also been very supportive with her choice, “My friends always try to go to vegetarian-friendly restaurants when we go out.” It is this kind of open support and encouragement that has kept Demi strong in her resolve since she started her vegetarian life.

Of the choices Demi has made in her life, she says the easiest one is becoming a vegetarian. As time goes on, vegetarianism is getting easier and easier, with more vegetarian options offered at restaurants, and more emphasis put on the environment politically. Not only has college strengthened her beliefs by making her more aware of the resource intensive nature of eating meat, but it has also been helpful in providing her with lots of tasty yet vegetarian options. Furthermore, having the support of the people she loves she says, has made the biggest impact. For those whom wish to try out vegetarianism, Demi’s advice is to research the main issues surrounding the meat industry, and  then come up with a plan for how you will get vegetarian meals on a day to day basis. In observing Demi’s ease with such a life altering decision it becomes clear that the best place to get support is from your friends and family as well as your environment; whether at home, in school, or at work.

Food Processing

Undisputed, eating is a universal experience. However, the human species has separated itself in that it is accustomed to eating for its sensual capability in addition to survival. As humans, we cook, spice, prepare and taste food similar to an art form and hold food in our hearts as a symbol of love. Food is gatherings, it is family, it is culture, it is memory and mostly it is who we are. Gary Cela, one of our very own college foodies here at Chapel Hill, is no exception. If we look into his life history, we can string along his memories encompassing the overall argument; food doesn’t satisfy unless you appreciate the processes involved in enjoying food. Aside from the biological function, sharing the processes of food indulgence has shaped Gary’s identity, value and personality traits.

When looking back on family dinners, you can’t remember the exact taste of the food on your tongue. Instead you remember the taste in context to what you may have been saying or doing at the time. We really only remember food tasting good if we remember exclaiming out loud “this food is delicious” because in that moment in time the circumstances make it so. Since we remember mostly what we value, it is clear that the mere enjoyment of food but the encompassing surroundings that are connected to it. This idea holds true for Gary Cela. He describes one of his fondest family memories as being surrounded by his large family in Albania. He was born and raised there until he was eight. Although Gary has lived longer in North Carolina and identifies more as an American, he misses Albania and family there. Gary visited two years ago and plans to reunite again this coming year. He is excited to return again, not just looking forward to the delicious food indigenous to the region, but as a time to share with family around the table. Tavë kosi never tasted as good as when Gary is catching up, listening to family stories or just sharing laughs at mealtime. Since Gary doesn’t get much time to spend with his family abroad, these meals shared with them are especially significant in they are a permanent fixture in his memory. These meals may seem trivial on a day to day basis, but they are highly valued pieces of cultural identity, beliefs, and traditions being passed on to Gary so that he may preserve these mannerisms and attributes to the next generation of Celas.

Besides eating surroundings, the process of cooking also presents itself as a major factor in the enjoyment of food. Gary cooks at home with his mom for holiday celebrations with family friends. This differs from the large family setting in that it is more direct and intimate process. He describes the foods that he and his mom prepare together as typically traditional; turkey for Thanksgiving, ham for Christmas. They always experiment while cooking, throwing recipe constraints to the wind and joking around the kitchen while chopping carrots or stuffing turkeys. This warm and fun procedure indicates and emphasizes the importance of personalizing dishes to Gary and his mom. A guest knows that the dish made is their interpretation of dinner and was made with lots of love. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how the food tastes, what matters is how it got on the table. This easy going and loving sentiment seen in the cooking process is prevalent in Gary’s nature. He seems to always have a smile and is very calm in dealing with what could be high stress situations.

We can also look at bonding as a process of enjoying food specifically in his home town in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This area is known as a tourist hotspot for its beauty and variety. The Outer Banks website boasts Kill Devil Hills’ has it all; with an array of from fast food and fine dining, eateries range from Italian to Thai. Gary attests to this claim and even points out one of the best being a Mexican Grill, Fogata. He goes here often with friends to hang out and grab a bite to eat without having to spend a fortune. They spend a lot of time talking on just about anything and everything outside of studies, developing a strong bond that food seems to ease into. It is evident that his friends from home really miss meeting up with him outside of school as equally as he misses them. Gary has strong friendships that will last and are sure to meet up again at Fogata for bean burrito hang outs. His bonding experiences here have created his own tradition with friends as a different approach to enjoying food.

As a first year student Gary is also presented to a vast freedom of choices to define himself. Just in looking at the kind of food choices he makes, we can tell a lot about Gary’s personality. He recalls the best food he ever ate was a banana pudding milkshake and cheesy fries from his Cookout experience with his friend Shane. This experience not only displays the freedom to experiment beyond conventional borders also tells us something about Gary’s willingness to take risks. Gary is a guy of many thoughts and is not intimidated by challenge as displayed through his favorite books and movies. Ayn Rand and Inception don’t reflect conventional thinking by any means and require a bright minded audience to achieve full appreciation. Also, this experience with food displays Gary’s bold nature and willingness to take risks. As he always says, “You gotta risk it to get the biscuit.” Not too far off from the courageous food guru himself, Anthony Bourdain who says, “I have long believed that good food, good eating is all about risk. Whether we’re talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime ‘associates,’ food, for me, has always been an adventure.”

Gary’s experiences of the different processes attributed to food enjoyment reflect a lot about him. Looking at his memory, traditions and experiences with food, all point back to the start that food plays a larger role than nourishment and in Gary’s case more about the encompassing value food brings and shapes in him.

Different Views of Food as a College Student

Sarah Costine, a student from Green Creek, North Carolina, studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Similar to all of us, food plays a major role in her life. Sarah has chosen to take the Vegetarian path in life when it comes to her diet. However, facing a problem that many vegetarians cope with, Sarah’s vegetarianism caused her to develop health problems, and as a result she resorts to eating some lean meats, such as chicken in order to maintain her health. Nevertheless, she does not let her diet affect her enjoying family get-togethers on special occasions that require special meals such as Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Being a vegetarian in college can be difficult because there aren’t that many choices in the campus dining halls. Sarah struggles daily to find different foods so that she wont get bored with eating the same things day in and day out. Every few days, she has to eat chicken in order to make sure that she is getting the protein that her body needs. Although she does not necessarily enjoy this, because it is out of necessity rather than desire, it still deviates from the monotony of her meals on normal days.

When Sarah is at home, it is significantly easier for her to comply with her vegetarian diet. Dinner at her house is usually on the run and everyone cooks their own meals, unless it is a special occasion, in which case they have a family sit down dinner. Sarah’s family life works in her favor because although her siblings may not all be vegetarians, it doesn’t affect her since she makes her own meals the majority of the time. This also allows her to change up what she eats everyday, unlike her dining experience in college .

Despite being vegetarian, Sarah is still able to enjoy holidays like Thanksgiving in which meat is the highlight of the meal. She loves getting together with her extended family and enjoying their company. Her grandparents both live really close to her, so she gets to see them often, but this gives her a chance to see he aunts, uncles, and cousins that live far away. In this case, food, although experienced differently by her and some her omnivorous relatives, still brings everyone together in celebration.

Sarah’s life and her experiences with food show us how even when people have different ideas and practices regarding nutrition, food plays an enormous part in all of our lives. It is universal in that we all experience it differently in a way that we can relate to one another for doing so. It is also relatable for college students who are vegetarians who struggle daily to find variety in a world where the priority is given to the majority of the people, more specifically those who include meats in their diet.

Walking with Twain

As one of the greatest American writers, “Twain may have had a bellyful of the ‘damned human race’ but he still might caution humankind to be on the lookout for the untoward event or encourage them to hang tight and muddle through (Quirk 237).” Considering the words of Tom Quirk, Twain was great because he was transitional.  Twain did not allow any era labels bind him as a writer. He wrote in such a way that did not allow others to consider his work Romantic nor a naturalistic, a critical or a sympathetic. Rather he established himself as a humorist and a moralist taking the world as he saw it. ‘My first lie, and how I got out of it’ and ‘At the Appetite Cure,’ two of Twain’s lesser loved short stories, serve as catalysts to the understanding of his works and the time period. Not only do they effectively communicate Mark Twain’s outlook, they also universally extend into our lives today through the mechanisms that allowed for escape from society’s conventional thinking.

With an onslaught on the previous era of Romanticism and the conditions of his era conditions, Twain developed an authoritative tone in his humor that can easily be detected in almost all of his works.  His humorous commentaries and analyses tend to focus on controversial issues and prove effective in his established perception of absurdity (Quirk 237). If we zoom out to the world around Mark Twain, his inspiration becomes clear. Since he lived and wrote in the tumultuous time of the late 1800’s to early 1900’s when America was struggling with the drastic social, political, and economic impacts caused by the end of the Civil War, Slavery and the effects of the Industrial Revolution (Academic American History). In his lifetime, he had fought in the Civil War, witnessed the attitudes stretching across the country and the world through travels, lost loved ones and even had dabbled in a short lived newspaper business (The Gale Group). He had experienced it all by the close of his career when he wrote ‘At the Appetite Cure’ and ‘My first Lie and How I got out of it’ in 1898 and 1899 (The Gale Group). Twain was a wise and experienced American and by now, knew it. He had gathered credibility as a writer and had developed his ‘social conscience’ to misanthropically criticize America’s politics, religion and society (Mark Twain Biography). “The truth of his novel is not circumstance; it is the direct result of Twain's dedication to honesty and his integrity as an author, as an observer of the American and other cultures, and as a human being. This is what made and still makes Twain great (Mark Twain Biography).” Twain was an open rebel of truth. He dared to poke fun at everyday occurrences with an authority knowing that they would reveal the scandal of human nature. This use of humor in displaying the absurd is found in both ‘At the Appetite Cure’ and ‘My first Lie and How I got out of it’.

Looking at these short stories in particular, we can see what makes Twain so transitional in his experiential appeal of reality to the reader, when Romantics would have never dared to speak so obviously (Carl). In ‘My first lie and how I got out of it, he jests “join the universal conspiracy and keep so still that he shall deceive his fellow-conspirators into imagining that he doesn't know that the law exists. It is what we all do--we that know.” Here he points to the ignorance or rather choice of ignorance as a perpetual loop to keep order. The notion is almost a paradox in that keeping this loop a secret benefits you but really, lying just hurts us all, placing us in a unpredictable fake world. In At the Appetite Cure he similarly states, “the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.” Again, he develops a paradox in that the connectivity with other humans is what we may define to be part of our existence. However, we depend on society so much all else becomes irrational, impairing our survival. In reading Twain, you laugh because the paradoxes are so cynically true and therefore, affirm his statement to be true (Carl). He sets issues to be so painfully wrong, that it takes on the assumption of authority enough to be able to crack a joke rather than be contemplative in detail, like previous writers.

The two short stories also use realist logic to take the concept of human impulse-like features such as appetite and lying and prove them both to be nothing more than conditioning. As John Dewey explains in Quirk’s Book “The opportunities the infant has to give these ‘native qualities expression invariably requires interacting with a ‘mature social medium (Quirk 193-194).’” Here he is talking about the human development of instinct and natural instinct. There is no need for a baby to cry, but from being exposed to world they have learned that crying amounts to attention, food, and change, it becomes necessary. This ‘impulse’ goes for the amount of meals per day and motives/methods for lying can equally be manipulated and thus reflect the society born into. ‘At the Appetite Cure’ establishes this notion in saying, “My system disguised--covert starvation. Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud- cure--it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work--the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation.” Here, multiple meals in one day are not necessary, but in the societal convention of family, capitalism and ‘health’ the thought of losing appetite becomes a crisis. Therefore, methods of repair are developed easily, but in deceit of the victim. Similarly the notion is clearly seen in ‘My first Lie and how I got out of it,’ points to the same societal twist “There is a prejudice against the spoken lie, but none against any other, and by examination and mathematical computation I find that the proportion of the spoken lie to the other varieties is as 1 to 22,894. Therefore the spoken lie is of no consequence, and it is not worthwhile to go around fussing about it and trying to make believe that it is an important matter.” Again, he is proclaiming spoken lie immoral is unnecessary in the midst of the more convincing and powerful unspoken lie. However, in getting along with society, gaping loopholes have been created to prove otherwise. In each of these short stories, Twain swiftly tackles simple human impulses with logic (Quirk 194). He flips them so that the reader questions what is, in fact, reality. This is why reasoning Mark Twain’s concepts seem to be primitive, but once applied to everyday life, they become indefinitely more complex due to the societal barriers put in place, whether realized or not. He was truly skilled in the art of observing, transitioning beyond scientific fact and pure imagination.

Twain may not have always explicitly arrived at a conclusion in his works; however, he clearly gave the reader a versatile seed of contemplation. We can think of his experiential authority and paradox humor as tools to reason out Slavery is wrong and Capitalism is a detrimental lie, but he doesn’t specifically state his stance (Mark Twain Biography). He just simply states the root of the ‘problem’ with human morality. Because Twain derives from the root, his pieces can specifically be applied to issues of today. For example, we can apply these short stories to issues we face today whether really specific our broad. Why do we continue to enhance the deterioration of the environment when we know it has a direct effect on our food security? Why does Shell continue to wastefully burn Natural Gas when it is killing off villages and could positively be used to power them? These seem to be quite simple issues that have simple solutions, but we fail to follow through because the nature of being human stands in the way. Lying, deceit and greed all have a clear negative moral connotation but society has found its loopholes into making them seem more acceptable. At this point in time, our generation is on the brink of transition just as Twain’s was. We have the choice to remain accepting the societal perception of ‘business as usual’ or the choice to transition into an era of change, assaulting the failing state of our world today both individually and as a global society. ‘At the Appetite Cure’, we can see that crisis allows for manipulation and business allows for deceit. We can see in ‘My first lie and how I got out of it’ that societal perception allows unspoken lies to be accepted. Human Nature is to cover up our faults in manipulating reality (The Gale Group). We must break these imposed impulses of society today in confronting issues related to climate change just as Twain encouraged over two decades ago on the issue of slavery. There is no doubt that Twain was transitional. He confronted the root of human’s paradox reality with a humorously critical eye, enabling his works to withstand the test of time.

Bibliography

Academic American History. "The Gilded Age, 1865-1900." 22 July 2011. Web. 07 Oct. 2011.<http://www.academicamerican.com/recongildedage/index.html>.

Carl, Eric. "The War of 1893; Or, Realism and Idealism in the Late Nineteenth Century." Academic Search Premier. Web.

"Mark Twain Biography." Essortment Articles: Free Online Articles on Health, Science, Education & More. Demand Media. Web. 07 Oct. 2011. <http://www.essortment.com/mark-twain-biography-20396.html>.

Quirk, Tom. Mark Twain and Human Nature. Columbia: University of Missouri, 2007. Print.

The Gale Group, Contemporary Author’s Online. "Mark Twain Biography." UNet Users' Home Pages. Brandeis. Web. 09 Oct. 2011. <http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/twainbio.html>.