After skimming through the first two sections of Maps to Anywhere, two essays stood out to me; "The Heralds" and "Capiche?".
There is a moment in “The Heralds”—it’s actually
the first sentence—where the author says that religion, to them, always seemed
to mean people (probably men) with hooded cloaks covering their heads mumbling
unrecognizable words in some ancient language. That really stuck with me
because I have always felt the same. To me, religion is an oppressive word.
I’ve always been told to cover myself and repeat after the priest and have
blind faith in a god who may or may not damn you to hell. The author goes on to
talk about exploring different literature on different religions, which I think
is a marvelous idea.
In “Capiche?” the author talks
about how their Italian teacher used to laugh at what noises the author said
the animals made. I remember when I took Spanish and we learned how to say the
animal’s names in Spanish, we also learned the noises they made. It completely
blew my mind that in English, a dog makes one noise, but in Spanish, it makes a
completely different noise. I don’t know if that is because the dialects and
accents are different so different groups of people pick up different sounds or
if it’s something else, but I find it fascinating.