Eleanor's Polished Essay #19

Eleanor Hilton
English 9
Mr. Salsich
May 24th 2009

To Touch and To See;
An essay comparing a quote to a garden stone, and my life

Touch and sight are two very important human senses. We do not realize how much they really affect our world. In balance touch and sight will, efficiently and easily, stabilize our environment (Appositive and Alliteration). If hands are used more than necessary they can destroy the world. If eyes are used more than necessary they can destroy us.

Hands are overrated. A famous poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, discusses in his passage that everyday we use them to ‘grasp’ and reach out for everything. He says that touching can be helpful, but the longer we hold on to something, the more we damage it. If we pick a flower from a field and hold it and feel it through your hands we damage it. Yes, it is nice to hold, but now there is one less flower in the field, and if everyone picks one flower we will have an empty, arid (FAST) field. This is not the same with eyes. With eyes you can watch the world and ‘acquire [great] wealth’ and wisdom that will stay with you forever. With eyes you can pass along a story of the field full of flowers, instead of passing around a bent flower that no longer has any value. You have picked it, and now it is worth nothing. Rilkes’ passage really speaks about seeing and touching, especially on a line to do with nature.

Standing with pride, there is a garden stone on one of our English class tables (Participle as an opener and personification). It has been cut by human hands with some care and is supposed to be part of the path from our walkway to the classroom. Like a lot of things in the world, stones are handled, felt, and in the case of our garden stone, tested for quality. Like hands, humans are deleterious (FAST) to the things we ‘grasp’. This stone was selected, cut and smoothed, then sent of to a store where it would be purchased by our school. I am sure the rock would have been perfectly fine just sitting wherever it was; if it could talk it probably wouldn’t want to be what it is right now, a pathway. Now there is one less stone, or one less boulder in a forest for an animal to scurry over. It is too late to just to look; human hands have already started tearing the world apart.

From birth we are taught to reach out and grab the world. We are taught to not just look at something, but if we can, to try it out play around with it in your hands; Rilke’s passage is saying just the opposite. I personally find that you can ‘acquire wealth’, by feeling it. If you are scooping sea water into your hands, you can feel sand, seaweed, shells and the water itself, flying through them. (Tetracolon climax) You can feel what the temperature is, and after the water has flowed through the gaps in your hands, you feel a sticky sensation as some of the salt remains. By just looking at the water, at the great ocean, you can’t tell any of this. Yes, it’s understood that if we hold something too long it can be damaged, I know that, but if we just grasp it for a moment, a second, we can learn a lot more.

Touching and seeing both have their pros and cons. We are all capable of keeping the two in balance, but sometimes we are not. (Antithesis)