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No one can think in terms of millions of years. Humans weren’t around to see the islands of Hawaii as they developed. In his chapter entitled, “From the Boundless Deep,” James Machinery puts our minds in a perspective of nearly forty million years to create a vision of the Hawaiian islands as they were forming. With a very timely, patient process, the Hawaiian islands slowly started from the bottom of the ocean floor and made their way to the surface through a series of many volcanic eruptions. He repeats this process throughout his chapter to make this clear to his readers.
Sometimes a thousand, or even ten thousand years, as he explains, would “silently pass” (4) between any volcanic activity. He even describes how rock broke down to form soil, making it possible for a habitable environment to be obtained. This also leads Machinery to describe the possible ways that life may have discovered the newly formed islands. Through its slow accumulation, Machinery describes every detail that may have taken place for Hawaii to gain its “rightful place in the center of the ocean” (6).
Machinery makes it possible for his readers to imagine the events that are appending. To do so, he uses lots personification to give shape to each idea. He gives objects and events human characteristics to engage his readers in a suspenseful, but yet intrigued mindset by creating a sense of emotion that puts terms into action. For example, he describes the waves of the ocean as Molten,” or the islands as “lonely. ” By building a connection between humans and nature, being able to actually envision these phenomenon becomes easier.
He makes it possible for his readers to perceive everything that is happening without the need to ask where, what, or why. His readers can build a picture in their heads as if they were there to see it and actually watch the islands forming. To help his readers understand the events they are imagining, he repeats the processes of the islands forming many times throughout the chapter. The Hawaiian islands did not simply appear after one volcanic eruption. Instead, they were established through a series of many, perhaps thousands of eruptions.
Machinery elaborates this by repeating it many times within the chapter. He engages us with constant progression as things keep happening over ND over again, and it builds up a complete understanding to his readers of the timely process that it took the island to form. Although he gives so much detail to everything that he describes, he empowers his readers to associate the information to multiple connotations, rather than Just strict, hard facts. Often, Machinery would repeat the process of volcanic eruptions as they formed the islands in many different ways.
He gets in depth on such topics that may seem so simple and gives it a purpose, which really gets his readers to think and understand that an island is dating to be created. Since the islands formed after a series of many eruptions, life was also obtained on the islands through a series of many different events. Knowing that this process happened in a time frame of millions of years, no one was actually around to watch the islands develop into habitable land. No one actually witnessed the first animal to arrive on the island or the first plant to sprout from its pure soil.
Machinery does, however, gives his readers ideas on what may be the first life to cover the islands, or how plant life may have been brought to the islands accidentally. He careless now a Dollar may nave lane tenure on an “exploratory mission in search for food” (7), or seeds and insects “accompanied by hurricanes” (8) may have landed on the islands. By doing so, Machinery gives his readers a perspective to envision the islands developed with life even though this process may have happened over millions of years.
Reflecting upon Machinery’s text, the story is clear and in chronological order that makes sense of the islands developing. However, I would often feel lost throughout the chapter while reading. The descriptiveness of the sentences he used would sometimes be too much for my mind to process fluently, and I would have to re-read several times Just to be able to interpret a sentence properly. Machinery’s intentions for this chapter is to lead his readers to a complete understanding of Hawaii and its accumulation. Since this was a process of millions of years, it is very difficult to imagine a timeshare of such large scale.
Putting such a huge span of time in one perspective is required to truly empowered how Machinery describes the development of the Hawaiian islands. Although the writing style he uses is very descriptive with personification and has multiple connotations, he makes his readers aware about the very slow process it took Hawaii to form. Someone who reads this chapter once may have a completely different imagination of Hawaii if he or she reads it a second time. Overall, he makes it possible for his readers to actually envision the events that take place and understand the process that was involved to create the islands of Hawaii.