“The Things They Carried” Short Writing Prompt

Prompt 3: Pick a favorite, or most significant, line or short passage of the text, and talk about why (what makes it so)

The passage I chose is: “Martha wrote that she had a found the peddle on the Jersey shoreline, precisely where the sand touches water at high tide, where things came together but also separate. It was this separate-but-togetherness quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the peddle and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her truest feelings for him.”

This passage is my favorite because of its feeling of completeness in expressing an experience. The imagery is compelling and its language is simple. This imagery and language function well together to express this idea of “separate-but-together. Separate-but-together-I think-is a very relevant idea to explore when discussing the things a body carries. The author prior to this passage had explored the forms of carrying which can exceed the space of an object. The body carries more than just physical objects, such as weapons, but also the visceral or emotional-which can become palpable in how the body carries them or reacts to them. This is all to say that the body is also this space of being separate-but-together. The body can feel either separate or connected to both objects or emotional-in intervals-and it is this relationship that constitutes memory. The body carries these memories that represent a moment that forms the togetherness of the body and mind through an experience and the disconnect the body has with the fact that the memory is held in the past in a sort of matrix or data cloud.