Reading Assignment #2
Yost
9/2/13
Chapels from Portland Magazine by Pico Iyer
Summary: A journalist recounts the importance of chapels in his life. Rather than focus on chapels because they are the house of God, Iyer focuses on their immense silence. The essay describes the sanctity of silence and how we all need our own "chapels" or silent spaces from which to escape the modern world. He discusses the advancement of even the most serene places, including the Benedictine Monastery he has stayed in over 50 times with its addition of internet. Iyer reflects on the role of silence in world cultures, comparing the Japanese lifestyle to the American and British. Currently residing in Kyoto, Japan Iyer claims the culture to be surrounded around listening and speaking no offense when one does speak. He goes on to tell of how much fuller and happier he feels living his life this way than how he had before in America and England. Formerly a journalist for the TIMES magazine, Iyer moved to Japan after his home had burnt down. He now lives in a small home with two bedrooms with his two children and wife without a car, bike, TV, computer, internet, and has never owned a cell phone. He has spent over 20 years in a Monastery and goes to sleep on his couch in his living room every night at 8:30 and says it is the most luxurious, expansive thing in the world.
Credibility: Iyer was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and went on to pursue a career as a reporter, essayist, and novelist. Iyer has filed stories from all over the world, including Bhutan, Nepal, Ethiopia, Cuba, Argentina, and North Korea. Iyer considers himself a citizen of the world. Iyer works as a freelance journalist, and has contributed to publications such as Time Magazine, Harper's Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. In a Time article in the leadup to the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Iyer's exhaustive study of South Korea helped lift the veil on the quiet transformation of what many people remembered as an impoverished third-world country into the world's eleventh largest economy. Currently he lives and works much of the year in Japan.
Context: The style of the essay is very zen itself and flows beautifully. There are references to poetry by Emerson to the everyday occurrences of life and identifying with the reader. While reading it almost seemed like Iyer was speaking directly to me.
Purpose: I believe the purpose of this essay to be to spread the awareness of the importance of seperating ourselves from the digital world and enveloping ourselves in the real world around us. Iyer does a very good job of not preaching or stating that technology is bad and should be cut out of our lives completely. Rather, he instead shares his experiences with and without technology and how both situations effected him.
Audience: The message of this essay is so universal it can be shared with nearly anyone and impact them. It has the power to influence middle aged men and women who work 9-5 5 days a week as strongly as it does to a teenager living in the social media world. The audience most important is the people who's lives revolve around technology or have fallen out of touch with the peace of simply being.
Rhetorical Devices: Anecdotes are used throughout the essay to further the reader's understanding of the effects and influence of technology and silence. Iyer's personal life journey allows the reader to see the effect of silence from all angles because before submitting to a quieter more peaceful living, he lived in the world the reader lives in. The fast paced, media frenzied, technology enveloped world.
Opinion: The style of using personal anecdotes to allow readers to see all sides of the effect of silence was absolutely profound in this essay and allowed Iyer to accomplish his purpose.
Picture of Pico Iyer Courtesy of droppingknowledge.com
Source:
http://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/user/profilhttp://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/user/profile/6063.pagee/6063.page
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