Short Stories & Tall Stacks of Pancakes

It’s interesting how, in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” Baldwin uses quintessential scenes to illustrate his points. We talked about this in class today, especially with the scene of the narrator and Harriet on the Pont Royal bridge with the “golden statue of Joan of Arc, her sword uplifted” and “the sun [falling] over everything” (Baldwin 157-8). Baldwin uses this moment, the stereotypical, beautiful scene overlooking the water with the sun shining in Paris, to emphasize the beauty and importance of the narrator’s epiphany at that moment. The narrator realizes, standing there and arguing with Harriet, that he could feel alone with this woman: “there were millions of people all around us, but I was alone with Harriet” (Baldwin 158). He didn’t have to feel self-conscious about what people might think when they seem him, a black man, with this white woman. He was alone with Harriet and didn’t have to “carry the menacing, the hostile, killing world, with [him] everywhere” anymore...

When I first read “Teddy,” I was reminded of that one scene in Harry Potter: the Half-Blood Prince where Dumbledore first meets young Tom Riddle/Voldemort at his orphanage. It seems kind of random, but Teddy reminds me a lot of Tom Riddle’s character, so I’m just going to list a bunch of similarities I see between the two. Just hear me out friends. Okay first, Teddy and Tom Riddle both come from pretty broken families. Tom comes from a very ancient Wizarding family noted for a vein of instability and violence that flourished through the generations due to their habit of marrying their own cousins. Lack of sense coupled with a great liking for grandeur meant that the family gold was squandered several generations before [he] was born. (Rowling 212) Long story short, his mother, who was abused by his grandfather, uses a love potion to make his father fall in love with her, so they marry, but then the father finds out about the love potion and leaves the mother, so Tom grows ...