Monday, November 28, 2011

Elizabeth Gilbert's Tone From a Page in "Eat, Pray, Love"


“It ws in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul.  My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out of a police lineup.  But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt – this is not selfishness, buy obligation.  You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.” (115)

          This paragraph in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” book really explains how important happiness really is.  Without it your life is thrown into shambles, confusion, depression, hurtfulness and even pain.  Of course everyone experiences it differently and from this paragraph Elizabeth describes it being something so indispensable and vital to your life that you need to hold onto it and never let go in order to face the difficulties in life.  Her use of comparison to the difficulties and the use of pathos involving the explained relation to a police lineup, being dragged in the dirt and just being a human being all allow her to reach a certain level of understanding with her audience, the readers, and those having trouble with happiness.

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