Vivid Passage

To me vivid means very detailed, giving an image that you can almost see from the words.

In Unspoken Hunger by Terry Tempest Williams, and Lights by Stuart Dybeck, the authors vividly describe experiences. Both of these passages are very short so the entire thing is a vivid passage. In an Unspoken Hunger the author describes how the knife changes purposes. At the beginning it is used to cut the avocado in half, then remove the wooden pit, and finally used to slice the avocado into "planks" as the author puts it. At the end the knives are used to put the salsa and chile covered avocado planks onto their tongues. The way the author changes throughout the essay is that at the beginning the unspoken hunger is the excitement of preparing the avocados and wanting to eat them. At the end there is the satisfaction of actually eating the snack even with the risk of cutting their tongues with every bite.

In Lights by Stuart Dybeck the author vividly describes a neighborhood on a summer evening as they watch the cars drive through. It is vivid because the author describes the line of lights from the cars that is broken when one of the cars doesn't have their lights on. They yell Lights until the driver flashes the lights followed by a wave or a honk to say thanks. At the end Dybek describes the cars who despite the yelling or waving from the people on the street never turn on the lights. The author changes in the essay because at the beginning the description was more of a sense of satisfaction that they got the drivers to turn on the lights where at the end it was the disappointment that they could not get everybody to do it.