Monday, August 17, 2020

College Admission Essay Writing

College Admission Essay Writing I dove into Aristotle and Thucydides while my dog investigated the nearby smells. Every evening, I ticked off the days on the calendar, counting down to the day I would fly from Michigan to Santa Fe. As a result, my grades suffered and I’ve spent most of my time in math class frustrated, confused, and upset. My teachers, although they tried, were unable to explain things to me and I, to be fair, was not great at listening to their explanations. The only time I loved math was sophomore year when we did proofs. The end of the book, and thus the Narnia series, is death. Just death, of everyone and everything, as Aslan, the Jesus-like lion and creator of Narnia, leads the dead spirits of all Narnians, including most of the main characters, to…Narnia. Where, as the characters describe, the world was exactly the same as Narnia…but Truer. He said winning without fighting is the greatest victory. I think we can’t resolve conflicts, avoid wars, or maintain stability without understanding ourselves and our neighbors. It is a simple parable that reminds of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where one man emerges from a lifetime of staring at shadows dancing on a cave wall to a real and vibrant and three-dimensional world. I had read Plato’s Republic, his Allegory of the Cave, and various dialogues in my sophomore year; I was surprisingly only finishing the Narnia series in my junior year. My family bought three copies so my mom, my dad and I could all read it immediately. Rowling’s stories about a boy growing up, having misadventures and facing his destiny enraptured me, but the real witchcraft was in her words. Eventually the couple is able to guide themselves into ever more elaborate notations as they attempt to build proofs to solidify these connected ideas about numbers. The book goes surprisingly far into defining numbers, including advanced concepts such as infinitesimals and the different levels of infinity. The Last Battle was the spark that gave me hope, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave gave me strength, and Plato’s Republic is what gave me the intellectual confidence in the presence of the ideal and the universal. His ability to so perfectly enunciate why we must never lose hope, and always struggle towards the ideal. I, all artists, and those seeking some sort of universal truth, must try to achieve that purest, most visceral understanding. That idea, presented in Plato’s work, had not yet become clear to me, until I finished reading The Last Battle. This helped me to better understand what numbers are and that I had not appreciated all of the work that had gone into defining them for our use today. In this way they were Socrates-- and I was the student who ended up understanding more than I anticipated, or was expected to, because of the way I was carefully led by the author and his characters. There are no other works that best exemplify that power of words and ideas have had on my life and my outlook on it. C.S. Lewis himself was a big fan of Plato; his works were the key that allowed me to decipher the meaning encoded in the Plato that I had read. They were puzzles and fascinating in a way that other math wasn’t. He said only understanding yourself and your enemy guarantees victory. I think understanding is more important than ever, because people of almost any culture can be found in almost every country. Some of our neighbors have F1 visas and sit next to us in school. Some of our neighbors become citizens of our country and permanently change and enrich our national identity. Western military personnel and aid workers are side-by-side with tribal fighters and indigenous community leaders, combating terrorism, lawlessness, and poverty. We are becoming a rich gumbo, not a homogenous puree. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was published, I was in third grade. It was as if the world finally came to terms with your mind. Like waking up from a dream to realize a truer, better world, the Narnians were led to the truest and most awoken state.

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