In the story, The Man who Planted Trees, the author discusses one man's actions, based on the man's physical and moral resources, causing a harsh arid land to become a forest of trees through a daily devotion of planting seeds of trees day after day after day. Every day the man planted these seeds he was never sure if they would become trees. Still his daily faithful routine enabled many trees to grow and turn an arid wasteland into a beautiful paradise. When the local people saw the beauty of the trees, they came and they built five new houses, making a village of 28 people. The new houses were freshly painted and plastered, and were surrounded by gardens around the five houses. The vegetables and flowers, along with the trees, made this a village where a person saw the beauty and thus chose to live there.
The story reminds us that what we see is what we think is real. If we see it, then we act upon it or we pay attention to it. The result of this is that the things we don't see are not real, and we ignore them. All too often, the words we speak, the actions we do, and the knowledge we study are close at hand, and become a part of who we are. IN this, they identify patterns and habits that we have as a person in a culture. We recognize those patterns and habits, even if we don't see them, as we write.
A famous French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,said that people are bound to culture through association, who improvise their actions and patterns within the fixed boundaries of their culture. These boundaries are both seen and unseen, but the boundaries we see are those we call to mind, and in this way understand them. We see our culture, and we create who we are through the way we imitate the patterns and habits of our culture. The people we are is then the result of the culture in sight and in mind. How important is seeing the life we live? How important is it to see the culture that shapes our patterns and habits?
The characters of the various readings demonstrate an awareness of sight and mind through their responses to their worlds they are living in, their feelings of what is good and true, and which allows them to be a person according to the rules they see in their culture. Who is out of sight? Who is out of mind? Your argument should incorporate at least 4 of the readings to develop your claim of the topic out of sight, out of mind.
Please discuss what to be out of sight, out of mind means for the people of the various readings. Discuss the ways that people respond to their worlds whether through their actions, their vocabularies, or through the responses of other people in the readings. How do these characters connect to the man who planted trees, even when he did not see the trees before he planted them. Discuss the ways that habits and patterns of these people shape the way they see their worlds, and thus make it real in their minds. Consider the meaning of out of sight, out of mind for the characters.