A Coney Island Life Draft

We are only content with a life of self fulfillment. In life, whenever we set out on a task, we usually want to complete it ourselves and achieve self fulfillment as well as the goal of the task we set out to complete. The reason behind self fulfillment is that it carries one’s deepest wishes or worthiest capacities and therefore they are content with the task they have completed. Therefore, we are fully satisfied with what we have, but that satisfaction only lasts a moment, for we want the feeling of achieving our worthiest capacities again because it unfolds what’s strongest or best about ourselves, when we can’t do that, we feel self defeat and unworthy which releases external forces on someone. In “A Coney Island Life”, the author compares life through the eyes of an amusement park and how we live on a roller coaster of ups and downs and always striving for the brass-ring-sun. “A Coney Island Life” by James L Weil expressed that although we have hopes and dreams, you will only be content if you accomplish them on your own and even then, we are never satisfied with the things we have.

We search and search for the things that make us happiest in life and that usually comes by finding those things by ourselves. “Helium hopes break skyward without me” this excerpt for the poem describes how we can’t accomplish all our hopes and dreams in life that we hoped we would so we just let them break skyward like helium balloons. This excerpt from the poem explains how we let some of hope go in order to complete other achievements in life and although the glossy material might be pretty, we have to let it go in order to fulfill other things.  Even still, the things we do accomplish, we collect like trophies or dolls that we “threw so much for” that we have achieved all by our self and we can walk away with our “arms filled with dolls”. These few lines from the poem, describes that just like a carnival game, you have to play by yourself to win and many people will only play if they can win by themselves, therefore, people are only content with self fulfillment. All in all, Weil directly tells us through a decepticating way on how we only want “arms with dolls” if we have threw for them on our own and have found self fulfillment in those dolls knowing we’ve worked hard to win them.

However, after a while, the dolls get old and tattered and lose their qualities and we are no longer satisfied with them and instantly want something else. No matter how old we get in life, we always strive for more than we had before and go fishing for some more “dolls” or sometimes the dolls bore us and we want the big prize. “I take my last ride on this planet-carousel and ask how many more time round I have to catch the brass-ring-sun”. No matter how many dolls we have, we want the big prize (brass ring) and we ride the carousel how ever many times it takes in order to get it even with the fear of running out of time. We believe achieving more will make us feel young or give us more time or makes us feel like kings and queens of the world and so we fight for the ring, unaware of the price. This line especially in the poem describes how we are never satisfied with what we have, even though we had more dolls than we could carry, something caught our eye and all the dolls feel weightless and worthless in our arms.

Weil’s poem endeavors to tell us that we desire self fulfillment in order to acquire worthy feelings and our greatest capacities. However, those feelings become addictive and we never stop trying to relive them, which us as humans very unsatisfied and sometimes ungrateful for the life we have been given altogether. Weil pushes us to be happy with what we have and sometimes searching for more isn’t always finding more, therefore this poem expresses that we are only content with self fulfillment and never satisfied with the things we have. Even still, we can’t always be ceased from grand feelings and more tokens of victory so we live our Coney Island lives on a roller coaster of ups and downs trying to obtain everything we desire “before the game is up”.