Maps to Anywhere

      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.