awr121rr2

Anna M. Walker
Cottrell
WR 121
10 April, 2015
Reading Responses In Charles Simic’s “A Reunion with Boredom,” Simic talks about the need for “a quiet place to sit and think.” (Simic 374). In my house, I have a few quiet places to sit and think. But my most favorite and most used place is my basement. I have a beat-up, old, plush couch and loveseat set to lounge on, with pillows. There are blankets for when I’m cold, and when it’s hot, the basement is the coolest place in the house so either way, I’m comfortable. I can play music, create white noise with the washer or dryer, or simply sit in silence. But my favorite thing about the basement is that it’s downstairs so I can sit in peace without my dogs crawling all over me or whining and scratching. Anything I could need to chill out, sit and think is in the basement. In Virginia Woolf’s “What if Shakespeare Had a Sister,” the puzzle that Woolf attempts to solve in her essay, is written in the second paragraph. It states: “It is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.” (Woolf 466). She is basically wondering why women didn’t seem to write “…in the time of Elizabeth” (Woolf 466). She solves her puzzle by researching the history of women and what the conditions were like for the women that lived during that time. Using the information she finds in her research, she forms a hypothetical situation to describe the probability of reasons why in fact, women did not write during that time. In Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau seems to be concentrating his emotions towards two separate, but equally important issues. One is slavery. The other is the Mexican-American War. He refers to both of these issues on page 429, when he says “This people must cease to hold slaves and to make was on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as people.”