Honors ApplicationHere it is, the treasured application buried under crumpled countless lab reports and math homework– the rosetta stone to all the confusion and strife over picking a major and searching for the right path.
Join me in a short coffee date with an unconventional duo. |
Baby Face can "cha-ange the world," but could I? My thoughts were bothersome, so I gave in to the temptation of solitude and sat outside under the morning sun.
A booming voice entered my thoughts, "I celebrate myself. And I sing myself! Cummings, you should do the same!" "My dear Walt, always about yourself aren't you? Haven't you heard of anyone who lived in a pretty how town and one day anyone died?" "What? Oh, my dear, sorry to keep you waiting- I'm debating my friendship with cummings here. I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, hoping to cease not til death, and here, he's talking about anyone." I found both Mr. e e cummings and Mr. Walt Whitman unrestricted artists, highest in the profession of overwhelming the expected. Their passion and selfness confounded me, yet that is what I hoped to comprehend. I began as they reclined in their metal chairs, "How do you two manage the bravery to put your identity out there without hesitation?" "There's no bravery to it! If you done it, it ain't bragging! One must sing what belongs to him or her and to none else. Life exists and identity, that powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse," Mr. Whitman sang to me. "You must resist conformity," Mr. cummings leaned in, "'To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting,' because 'once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.'" I sat there, still unconvinced, "I want to motivate people, but I am nothing in the end. What good is my being to humanity if I touch no soul?" The two men scowled, "What if a much of a which of a wind," "O me! O life! Of the questions recurring..." "You think much too much: emotion over reason! 'Man is not measured by his quote eye cue unquote.'" "But what if I come to dying and find that 'I had not lived?'" "Thoreau didn't mean for you to miss life dwelling on that! 'Death i think is no parenthesis' '[existing's tricky: but to live's a gift].' " The two poets went on reciting, explaining how to go about life. Their gregariousness and use of phrases melted the aesthetic shell that had hidden their works' intentions before. I finally understood the inspiration that just the being of their poems provoke. I had over thought when I should've experienced. I visualized now what Whitman meant by not merely hearing the learn'd astronomer, but experiencing the stars himself. My realization of the works that had brought them to me allowed them to depart- leaving me with a new outlook and their books as guides. "Mr. Whitman, history is too small for even me; for me and you, exceedingly too small." |