Onboard Note

The passage in question is the opening stanza of "The Waste Land," so the words themselves serve as a kind of "April," an indication (a warning?) of what the poem will do to the mind of the reader. April is cruel by contrast to the winter, which “covered us in forgetful snow” and “kept us warm,” because April is the return of action and feeling—"memory and desire"—to a land which has been “dead” and therefore at peace. April is a time of awakenings, stirring from hibernation, hunger after a long winter. It is the time of year when work must begin again. The speaker of the poem dreads this awakening and the work that it heralds; he dreads the relentlessness of nature, which forces the land out of stasis and back into life. He is not ready to return to life, here in his "Unreal City." In the following stanzas, he describes being jostled by crowds of people on London Bridge and feeling lost among them. Nobody acknowledges anyone else, and when the s...

Your answer is in the image... And also it is solved by me... We have to find the sum of 1+2+3+. . . +100. Here n=100 We have a formula to calculate the sum of n numbers as: Sum=(n(n+1))/2  So we have:  Sum=(100(100+1))/2=5050 Hence the sum is 5050. There is a story behind this problem.  It is said that a famous mathematician by the name of Carl Gauss was punished for poor behavior in class, so he was told to stay after school.  As punishment, the teacher told Carl to add the numbers from 1 to 100, thinking it was going to take him a long time to do.  Gauss completed the problem rather quickly and, thus, got to leave detention early.The way he did it was he recognized that 1+100 was 101, 2+99 was 101, and 3+98 was 101.  This would occur all the way up to 50+51.  As a result, there were 50 pairs of numbers that added to 101. Accordingly, Gauss multiplied 50 by 101 in order to get 5050.

"Sounds like the Arabian Nights," said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper. "Don't you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?" This is Mrs. White's somewhat flippant response to the monkey's paw. At this stage in the story, it's all just a bit of a game, a spot of harmless fun. But Mrs. White's reference to the Arabian Nights foreshadows the disturbing events that take place later on in the story. There are a number of tales in the Arabian Nights, but the one to which Mrs. White appears to allude is that of Aladdin. In the story of Aladdin, he famously makes three wishes which don't quite turn out the way he expects or wants. And the same is true in the case of "The Monkey's Paw." "Well, why don't you have three, sir?" said Herbert White, cleverly. The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth. "I have," he said, quietly, and his blo...

Jack London actually wrote two versions of "To Build a Fire," and it is arguable that the prominent theme depends on which version one is considering. The original story from 1902 is the lesser known of the two. In this first draft, the protagonist has a name, Tom Vincent, and he is not accompanied by a dog on his trek. The weather is cold, but not as extreme as in the later draft. Tom Vincent is able to successfully build a fire to save himself though he does fall victim to frostbite. Though this story does allude to the power of nature, it is more thematically concerned with Tom Vincent's survival and ultimate consequent respect for nature. In the second, 1908 draft, the protagonist has no name, and he is accompanied by a dog who relies on its instinct to survive. The protagonist is arrogant and dismisses the advice offered by an old-timer who understands the danger of what the protagonist intends to undertake: a solo day's travel in subzero weather through barren c...

The Agrarians were fiercely opposed to industrialization, especially in the South, but really just about anywhere. They considered it a grave sin against both man and God to take human beings away from their "natural" stewardship of the land as farmers and make them work in factories and live in cities. They thought that industrialization would destroy arts and culture and reduce human beings to little more than machines, preoccupied with efficiency in production above all else. They viewed industrialization as degrading, dehumanizing, and destructive, and they hearkened back to a "simpler" way of life where people lived off the land.Of course, this peaceful agrarian past they wanted to go "back" to was largely imaginary, or else limited to a very small portion of the population. The only reason the upper class could live so comfortably in an agrarian economy in the South was the fact that farms were largely operated by millions of workers who made very lo...

At one time, Mr. Lapham had been a fine and talented silversmith. He had created a silver tea set for John Hancock's uncle. When he first viewed the pitcher from the set, Johnny Tremain had never seen anything "so intricate and beautiful as the woman with folded wings whose body formed the handle" (Johnny Tremain, page 16). He wondered who had made it. He thought that the delicate and detailed pitcher "must have been the work of one of the great smiths of forty or fifty years ago." Mr. Hancock pointed out the mark, which indicated that Mr. Lapham had indeed created it. Now, Mr. Lapham's hands were not what they once were. The older man gazed "down at his own gnarled fingers" (page 15). In addition to Mr. Lapham's physical limitations as a silversmith, he also failed to listen closely to the orders of his customers and wrote down the specifications of their orders incorrectly. This caused him to make items differently than his customers had inte...

Walter Mitty's wife does not play any role in any of his fantasies. This is suggestive. Apparently his fantasies are, among other things, a means of escape from his hectoring wife. He has a "secret life" because his fantasies are kept a secret mainly from her. It is also suggestive that there is no apparent misogyny in his fantasies. If he hated his wife and wanted to get rid of her, these feelings might be detectable in his fantasies. But he seems to be dependent on her because he is absent-minded, incompetent and introverted. She takes care of all the practical matters of both their lives. He might be lost without her. He fantasizes about being a man of action, but he must know he really isn't. There is only one fantasy in which he appears to be fantasizing about being romantically involved with a another woman. That is the one in which he is testifying in a murder trial. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mi...