Vocabulary Essay (Or, Short Brief): "On Bereft"

A very short brief on the word "bereft".
bereft (adj.) \buh-reft\
A state of loss, deprived. Often used with "of".

The face of a boy with a bereft look.

"Bereft" is a poetic word for it connotes loss without the slippery slope of s’s doubled in "loss".

The strong consonant sounds in bereft leads to a charge, tapering to a whisper, to a closure of the mouth, a word of leftover things, forgotten things, bereft things, a swallow of breath, exhaled, then exeunt.

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Setting Up The Scene: A Fight

Misè-en-scene of a too comfortable relationship:

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At Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library, beneath the colored dome, we fought; because we were tired and travel-weary, more comfortable with our ordinary looks and automobiles, than here, in this constant going and coming.

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Flash Fiction: Laundry

When you appeared to me one night as a heap of laundry ...

Looking up from underwater . . . 

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Once, I woke up in the middle of the night, warm beneath the covering, and I thought you were there, on my bedroom floor, your face resting on my naked foot. So, I called out your name but you didn’t reply. "Hey," I said again. But, nothing. Remained. And then I realized, after a moment, no one was in the room. I was alone. You were only an apparition. Like when I visited Georgette in her calloused age, I washed her tired calloused feet with hard, soapy water and she thought I was George, her son. The pain for me is more acute, because I know I am alone. More alive. But alone. I drift back to sleep. In the morning I see the laundry haphazardly arranged at the edge of my bed. And I realize it was the heap of clothes that I thought was you, come to comfort me.

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image source: ohaytv

Quote on Empathy

On Walking in Someone Else's Shoes:

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"There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths) and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it."

J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
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Quotation: Walker Percy on Bourbon Drinking

Bourbon, Neat

Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth — all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic.

Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, "Bourbon", 1991

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Lesson Plan: World's Most Valuable Thing

See the end of this post for a
printable version of the World's Most Value Thing.

It's very simple to use this game designed by the folks at The Philosopher's Magazine. A few years back they did an issue devoted to children and philosophy. The issue has a game a teacher can organize with their students called "The World's Most Valuable Thing."
    I provided a scanned image of the handout above you can use, or if you are feeling creative you can use your own handout with your own world's most valuable things.
The rules are simple (click the link to read more):

Lesson Plan: An Example of Teaching Poetic Tone in the Classroom (with William Blake's "London" and "Jerusalem")

Class objective:  To continue the theme of Poetic tone by using examples from film and the poetry of William Blake.

The following class can be tailored to fit a high school language arts course or a college Introduction to Literature, or British Literature section.