The unexpected journey essay

I am still trying to get an ending for the ghost story. I eventually moved back in with her, so that I could be near her as much as possible. One day she tumbled over her own feet, and now she uses a wheel-chair. When I came home from work one night, a few days after Thanksgiving, she was staring at the paintings on the dining-room walls.

Support Aeon Donate now Every time you set foot in a Whole Foods store, you are stepping into one of the most carefully designed consumer experiences on the planet. Produce is stacked into black bins in order to accentuate its colour and freshness.

You would have been forced to wrap your head around the idea of mail-order purchases. Before Gilman, pre-industrial consumption was largely the unscripted consequence of localised, small-scale patterns of production. Through the course of that journey, retailing would discover its natural psychological purpose: Gilman anticipated, by some 30 years, the fundamental contours of industrial-age selling.

Down at the faux-farmers market. Theirs is a calling I could not make up if I tried: It is a world as counterintuitive as shopping at Whole Foods is intuitive.

The massive datacentres that have recently retreated into the heartland of the US are merely the latest additions to this orchestra of scaled technologies. Together, these systems constitute a single, intricately interconnected entity, woven from a thousand particular technologies that have made the long journey from garage to grid.

I had come to Omaha to explore the American cloud, having succumbed to the Tocquevillean conceit, peculiar to the foreign-born, that one can read America by travelling through it. And so, here I was, discussing continent-spanning infrastructure with hyper-specialised geeks, in a region we romantically associate with the homesteading generalists of historic small-town America.

At least in Omaha, such incongruities are readily apparent. In coastal America, where schoolchildren sometimes botch math problems about milk production because they assume a five-day week for cows, the incongruities are masked by the theatre of the shopping experience.

The second was the technological doctrine of precision manufacturing based on interchangeable parts, which emerged around Springfield and Harpers Ferry national armouries. But it would take another century, and the development of the internet, for the American cloud to retreat almost entirely from view.

By the s, the two American systems had given rise to a virtuous cycle of accelerating development, with emerging corporations and developing national infrastructure feeding off each other.

The result was the first large-scale industrial base: The most consequential political activity retreated into complex new governance institutions that few ordinary citizens understood, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the War Industries Board.

Politics began to acquire its surreal modern focus on broadly comprehensible sideshows. The visible signs of the makeover — I call them Hamiltonian cathedrals — are unprepossessing. Viewed from planes or interstate highways, grain silos, power plants, mines, landfills and railroad yards cannot compete visually with big sky and vast prairie.

Nevertheless, the Hamiltonian makeover emptied out and transformed the interior of America into a technology-dominated space that still deserves the name heartland. Except that now the heart is an artificial one. This theatre, which forms the backdrop of consumer lifestyles, can be found today inside every Whole Foods, Starbucks and mall in America.

I call it the Jeffersonian bazaar.

The hobbit an unexpected journey essay

Structurally then, the American cloud is an assemblage of interconnected Hamiltonian cathedrals, artfully concealed behind a Jeffersonian bazaar. The spatial structure of this American edifice is surprisingly simple: In this world, the bazaars are the interiors of cities, forming a user-interface layer over the complex tangle of pipes, cables, dumpsters and loading docks that engineers call the last mile — the part that actually reaches the customer.

The cities themselves are cathedrals crafted for human habitation out of steel and concrete. The bazaar is merely a thin fiction lining it.

Between the two worlds there is a veil of manufactured normalcy — a studiously maintained aura of the small-town Jeffersonian ideal. To walk into Whole Foods is to recognise that the Jeffersonian bazaar exists in the interstices of the cloud rather than outside of it. Particular clouds might have insides and outsides — smartphone apps live outside, datacentres live inside; gas stations live outside, oil supertankers live inside — but the cloud as a whole has no meaningful human-inhabited outside.

It subsumes bicoastal America rather than being book-ended by it. Between the first supermarket chains that replaced small-town grocers, and Whole Foods, the special effects have improved but what we inhabit is still recognisably a simulacrum of a Jeffersonian past, not the real thing.

To pierce the veil, all you need to do is wander around to the loading docks. The Jeffersonian bazaar is no seamless matrix. The modern megacity is arguably the most impressive Hamiltonian cathedral of all, not just because of its scale and complexity, but because it manages to fool us into thinking it is merely a scaled-up small town.

We are only now beginning to appreciate just how qualitatively different the modern metropolis is from the village, town or small city. For bicoastal Americans, these megacities are the only Hamiltonian cathedrals they ever see up close, during landings and take-offs.W.

hen I phone Amaglan in Mongolia, the first thing I want to tell her is that it’s snowing here in the U.S.. But I can’t find the words for it. This shocks me. I sit there, holding the phone, watching the snow falling onto a triangle of lawn at my parents’ house in suburban New Jersey.

The hobbit an unexpected leadership journey essay. Posted on Oct 3, in The hobbit an unexpected leadership journey essay.

An Unexpected Journey | Teen Ink

Soul essay Mandate of heaven analysis essay Aicp application essays for nursing. Hobbits are a fictional, diminutive, humanoid race who inhabit the lands of Middle-earth in J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction. They are also referred to as Halflings..

Hobbits first appeared in the novel The Hobbit, whose titular hobbit is the protagonist Bilbo caninariojana.com novel The Lord of the Rings includes as major characters the hobbits Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc. In the movie, The hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Campbell’s Monymyth is represented by the main character.

The story unfolds according to each step of Monomyth. ‘The call to adventure’ is the first stage of the hero’s journey. Good Essays words | ( pages) | Preview The Unsuspecting Hero of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit - The Unsuspecting Hero of The Hobbit Our tendency .

Unexpected Journey to Logistic Companies Essay An Unexpected Journey in SUBIC Bay Freeport Zone Have you watched the movie “Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey ”, this is a hit movie of where a hobbit had an unexpected visitor from Gandalf and he was forced to join to a group of dwarves to conquer the old Castle of the Dwarves.