Short Story Selections

By Asa Montreaux Over the years we all need ways to relieve our stress and feel happier. We all need to exercise to maintain our health, especially as we age. Running is an excellent form of cardiovascular exercise, and is proven to have many positive effects on our lives. It can even prevent cognitive decline. Running works our bodies hard, releasing endorphins that create feelings of accomplishment and euphoria, which contribute to our overall feelings of happiness. The serotonin released on a run increases brain function, and lifts our mood. It is an effective relief for depression and anxiety, leaving our minds much clearer, and our bodies more relaxed. It has been proven to help with high blood pressure, diabetes and arthritis. Running can even grow fresh grey matter in our brains, as much as thousands of new brain cells over the course of a few days. These new cells improve the ability of the runners to recall memories without becoming relaxed. And while it can be a g...

By Asa Montreaux A.C. Bradley writes that in Macbeth, “Shakespeare’s final style appears for the first time completely formed, and the transition to this style is much more decidedly visible in Macbeth than in King Lear.” Thus we can consider this play to be a consummate one of his style that is so probing into the inner workings of our minds. The genius of Shakespeare, as Leavis notes, is ‘awe-inspiring’ because of the ‘inwardness and completeness of its humanity.’ (p. ) Macbeth allows us something experientially that we absolutely need. One might say that good books are good “because they guide, nurture, and nourish, and create a space for portentous existential questions.’ In particular Macbeth allows us to probe the very ‘broad literary humanist question of how to live in a ‘groundless world.’” (p. ..). Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth, navigate a social world of constructed values, without being given clear ethical instructions. It is up to them to construct an ethics by which they c...

By Asa Montreaux Depictions of benevolent Uncle Tom and Sweet little Eva very soundly encapsulate the novel’s argument that blacks are not in fact violent and wanton, but actually meek and loveable and in some very real way noble. And yet they are still portrayed as inferior to whites; to the extent that we see little Eva veritably as Tom’s friend, but ultimately his master. Our understanding of any novel must involve its significance to the culture that receives it. For the novel to mean anything it has to have an audience and as that audience changes, its reception changes and it is interpreted differently; the novel was a tremendous and historic force that swerved the tide toward the end of slavery immensely and yet only a few years later the voices that considered it as hurtful to the South’s traditions or its heroic culture rose significantly in volume. Through the lenses of the various receptions that the novel has received, and particularly through the illustrations of the no...

“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain." "A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"