Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Admission Essay Submission

Admission Essay Submission The views of my society are rather one dimensional towards being different. When reflecting that becoming part of this society would lead me to self-hatred, I have come to see Master as an example. The hardship he undergoes and the courage he portrays afterwards have inspired me to embrace who I am. He has always encouraged me to have my own personal outlook and opinion. I think he believes that conformity undermines intellectual potentialâ€"an opinion I now strongly agree with. They weigh so heavily on each other that it is impossible for them to existence independently. There is no way to read Lolita and believe one has at last found the truth of Dolores and Humbert’s story. It is a book of perpetual discussion, conversation, and questioning. My initial impression was that the truth of Lolita, its ugliness, was hidden behind its beautiful prose. It uses flowery words of love and affection to trick the reader into believing in some kind of horrid love story. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. So, must all beauty be false and can truth only come ugly? Then, how does one interpret morality in relation to beauty? This book is foundational to me because of its portrayal of divine creatures and the exhibition of basic human desires and imperfections. I was trapped in a classroom where my peers could only see one truth, one dimension of a book because they hadn’t read it. I can already see itâ€"myself, sitting in classrooms where everyone wants to be thereâ€"where I am not being measured, rated, scored, and I can learn through communicating, not testing. Most distinctly I remember running to the bathroom, chapter after chapter, to throw up. It was all at once a beautiful and harrowing experience. Much like an individual doesn’t realize how hungry she is until she takes a bite of food, my intellectual hunger rose and demanded that I feast. I had thought that my job as the reader was to peel back the layers of beautiful imagery to reveal the novel’s and Humbert’s grotesque center. I wanted to brush off the proselike dust off an old book. I had thought that the truth was beneath this, like a mystery waiting to be solved. Maybe there was someone who had successfully revealed the “truth” of Lolita in all it’s ugliness, someone who had pushed past all Lolita ’s beauty and emerged with a final knowledge of it. Moreover, he has taught me to stand my ground and be perceptive. The critical viewpoint I have grown into has trained me not to take things for granted and to be inquisitive. So, in a way, The Master and Margarita has helped me to understand my father and appreciate him as an outsider, an individualist. I have also become an individualist who tries to defy the conformism around him. I live in a newly independent society that still has remnants of the old, Soviet conformism, and, instead of freeing itself, it has begun to bury itself in it. And perhaps because it was my decision to read this epic, my reaction to it was stronger than it otherwise would have been. Until then, being Polish meant little more to me than having a second passport, wearing a traditional dress on holidays, and having a passel of cousins across the ocean. Being Polish was a part of me, but not something I paid much attention to. Self-confidence is something I have struggled very long and hard with. I used to worry that I would stand outâ€"especially in school. While arguments with my brother could never be described as divine, our struggles often reminded me of the fights between Apollo and Artemis, siblings who squabbled but ultimately loved each other. The story of Orpheus, the musician who looked back at the last second to ensure his beloved was following him, remains a non-example in matters of perseverance. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside. I sat in an armchair in front of a wood fire with a cup of tea and read. I read for hours until my skin stung, my neck stiffened and my head ached. At night, I would draw myself a bath and lay in it until the water went cold and read. I began to question the ideas behind my everyday actions regardless of whether other people thought this was a relevant line of inquiry or not. Out of this confusion and curiosity, my AP Research paper on the nature of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue in epistemology emerged. Readers at the time of the book’s publication would have remembered these, their imaginations leaving Paris for the Polish countryside. The poem’s lyrical Alexandrines transported me back to Poland, especially when the words were softly murmured, huddled underneath blankets, the pages illuminated with a flickering flashlight. I first began reading Pan Tadeusz when I was thirteen.

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