Close Reading Practice #1
. . . I once received an unexpected
lesson from a spider. It happened far away on a rainy morning in the West. I
had come up a long gulch looking for fossils, and there, just at eye level,
lurked a huge yellow-and-black orb spider, whose web was moored to the tall
spears of buffalo grass at the edge of the arroyo. It was her universe, and her
senses did not extend beyond the lines and spokes of the great wheel she
inhabited. Her extended claws could feel every vibration throughout that
delicate structure. She knew the tug of wind, the fall of a raindrop, the
flutter of a trapped moth's wing. Down one spoke of the web ran a stout ribbon
of gossamer on which she could hurry out to investigate her prey.
Curious, I took a pencil from my
pocket and touched a strand of the web. Immediately there was a response. The
web, plucked by its menacing occupant, began to vibrate until it was a blur.
Anything that had brushed claw or wing against that amazing snare would be
thoroughly entrapped. As the vibrations slowed, I could see the owner fingering
her guidelines for signs of struggle. A pencil point was an intrusion into this
universe for which no precedent existed. Spider was circumscribed by spider
ideas; its universe was spider universe. All outside was irrational,
extraneous, at best raw material for spider. As I proceeded on my way along the
gully, like a vast impossible shadow, I realized that in the world of spider I
did not exist.
Excerpt from anthropologist and naturalist Loren Eiseley's essay, "The Hidden Teacher"
Patricia Kain offers the following help guide for a close reading using this Eiseley excerpt.
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/documents/CloseReading.html
TERMS
- close reading
- annotation
- writer
- speaker
- reader
- audience
- tone
- attitude
- rhetoric
- structure
Effect...WHAT? Tools...HOW? Purpose...WHY?
