World Glitterature

The idea of an old man with wings is ridiculous, and it's even more so when he's muddy all over, and his wings are scraggly. His appearance doesn't really show the divinity or awe we might expect from a winged person or perhaps an angel. Before we know it, we notice ourselves, along with the villagers, assuming the old man to be some kind of a fallen divine figure. But why do we believe he's an angel in the first place? Can humans with wings be qualified as angels just for their appearance? I guess we want to fit this strange combination of humanness and celestialness into something we know. There's actually nothing so special about a man who has wings -- he's just as unique as a person with webbed feet or an unusually long neck. His wings are just a part of his body that might be no more familiar to him than his hands. But these wings, they have quite a special meaning in our world (at least, in parts where Christian beliefs are known) and a winged man is qui...

It's often hard to really know someone. You might know people who seem cheerful and energetic all the time. Now and then you also see organized and hardworking people. When you describe them to someone else, you'd probably try to shove the whole person into a few adjectives and wedge them into a sentence. It might not be wrong to do so, but it gets people quite often misunderstood and misrepresented. The process is simple. We repeatedly get a certain impression from a group of people and expect someone from that group to be that way. Intended or not, we get used to fitting certain people into the supposed frames. Welcome to the world of prejudice! For those who are seen through the biased lens, prejudice is oppression. Simply being who you are becomes a painful task. In The Rug  by Edna O'Brien and Prue by Alice Munro, we meet two main characters. The narrator's mother in The Rug  is a hardworking person; visitors are often surprised by how the interior of her house ...