Essay

Essay The next morning, when I woke up, I walked out onto the balcony of the second floor of the Murchison dormitory. I sat down at the plastic picnic table and breathed in the crisp morning air. I watched the sienna hills tinged with gold in the east as the sun slowly revealed itself. I was never able to portray the view quite as I saw it. Once I’d calmed down a little, I decided to prioritize the readings required for the class. Depression, like a dream, is only a facsimile of a better existence. 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. It was as if the world finally came to terms with your mind. I downloaded the rest of the course selections and printed them out. In the weeks leading up to my departure, I trekked to the nearby field with my dog and my books, and I sat at the picnic table overlooking the woods. I dove into Aristotle and Thucydides while my dog investigated the nearby smells. Trying to single out any one appealing aspect of St. John’s is, for me, like trying to pick a favorite piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces might be more aesthetically pleasing than others, but none of them can compare to the whole picture. However, the classes were the part of the Summer Academy that stuck with me the most. Alfred Prufrock” and learned ancient history from the ancients themselves, we pursued an underlying philosophical thread, examining our readings through the lens of courage. 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. They were puzzles and fascinating in a way that other math wasn’t. He said only understanding yourself and your enemy guarantees victory. He said winning without fighting is the greatest victory. 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. 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. If the world seems incomprehensible, that is because you are not fully awake. I think we can’t resolve conflicts, avoid wars, or maintain stability without understanding ourselves and our neighbors. 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. I still have the battered schedule, which I kept in my pocket. Almost every morning I visited the campus bookstore. I bought a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners, which I managed to snag some downtime to read. I took far too many photographs of the displays in the New Mexico History Museum, and I brought home a beautiful little red rock from the hike we took nearby. I recall my afternoon arrival at St. John’s in a blur of adobe buildings, warm placita bricks, and inviting, clean sheets. 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. 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. In Plato’s Meno (thanks for sending!), Socrates posed an ingenious question to his student about how to double the area of a square. The student intuited that one would simply double the side lengths of the square but in reality that would quadruple the area of the square. There are no other works that best exemplify that power of words and ideas have had on my life and my outlook on it.