Three Essays From Short Takes

["Disclaimer," "Moon Snail," and "The Khan Men of Agra."]

Although, on the surface, each of these stories seems to be about something different, not related in any particular way other than the book that binds them together, but they're all written in a specific style that I admire. They all focus on on moment in time, describing it, talking about this one time in their life. They elaborate, and then they extend it to mean something else. Every one of these stories seem like they're just going to be a simple narrative about a past event, and then grow bigger and bigger. For example, in "The Khan Men of Agra," she says, "I like to think it was a sweet kind of victory for us both," referring to her opening up and trusting another human being, and the reward that she got out of it, as well as what he got out of showing someone the truth of his city. She's implying a sort of wonder that you can only get out of opening up and letting another human lead you blindly.

And in "Disclaimer," although he is more overtly making a point throughout the entirety of the piece, he is still defining a moment in time. He's also defining a feeling, a sense of immortality and timelessness. But at the same time, that's not all he's talking about. He's looking back on a time in his life, but also inflating it to mean something else, to expand on the notion to show that people in books are inevitably about people that we know, that even when we're writing fiction, we write about people that we know. "Write what you know," they say, but J.K. Rowling never went to wizarding school. But inevitably, whether we know it or not, everything comes from something that we know, and that is inevitably what he is trying to point out.

"Moon Snail" is less about a moment, and more a focus on the one being that is the point of fascination in the piece, the moon snail. It supplements itself with information that was researched and descriptions of imagination and what the snail looks like. But by the time she ends the story, she hasn't said anything explicitly, but there is a suggestion of a bigger idea. She's set out to disprove this idea that something that's small can't be beautiful, and ends with an almost grotesque image of snails and their viscera. The entire time, she discusses the idea of a painting of the snail, because painters bring beauty to things that we don't think of as beautiful in our day to day lives.

And that's what these stories are doing. They bring beauty and grandeur to small moments and small things that go unnoticed, that fade away in the memory or fall to the sides of peripherals. It's bringing to life the idea that you can bring joy and life to things by focusing on the small things. They focus on the small to bring meaning to the whole picture, rather than just experiencing life and trying to take it as a whole. Because sometimes the beauty is in the small things.