Freshman Admission Essays

Freshman Admission Essays The same people who hadn’t wanted to fight the Nazis in 1939 or earlier were now congratulating themselves for defeating them. I can see aspects of both Yosarian and Clevenger in myself. Like Yosarian I think it is important to question my reality, and view what I am told is “common sense” with skepticism. After I had returned the book to the public library, I was still reciting The Raven by memory. Even then, I deeply appreciated that an emotion could be found in a strange combination of words. I understood that books, like people, carry complex emotions. 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. Most distinctly I remember running to the bathroom, chapter after chapter, to throw up. I also understood that this was not a story about a raven. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside. This never-ending cycle is the reason Afghans have been fighting almost constantly since 1979. This is why I think that “warheads on foreheads” is strategically counterproductive. I think it may be the moral certainty we now have about that war. Nazis are evil, we know that now, or at least many of us do, but at the time, the war raged for three years before the United States entered. Even when we finally joined we only declared war on the Nazis in response to their declaration of war on us. Clever minds like Lehrer, Vonnegut, and Heller looked at Americans patting themselves on the back after the war, as if we had won a moral victory. D’aulaires’ genuine storytelling provided me with a basis of classic thought as a young child. This classical state of mind has remained with me throughout my public education, pushing me towards extracurricular resources focusing on Greco-Roman culture. I am desperate to understand not only the myths, but the politics and day-to-day lives of citizens. This foundation of classical thought has allowed me to navigate modern literature. Pashtuns are the ethnic group that make up a majority of the fighters in that country and they have a system of core beliefs that make one a Pashtun called Pashtunwali. One aspect of this is Badal, or retribution, essentially meaning that if someone harms or even insults a friend or family member it is your duty as a Pashtun to take revenge, generally by spilling blood. Because of this, for every fighter we kill, we create a whole family of new fighters. Being given the Sisyphean task of killing our way out of an insurgency, the only response I can have is to work very hard to be sure that the warheads are landing on the right foreheads. The Yosarian in me changes the question from “How do we succeed? ” to “How do we minimize the loss of civilian and allied life while we inevitably fail? ” The Clevenger in me responds to this new question with a sense of patriotic, even divine, duty. A small book of Greek myths is my moral base, and, because of it, I am now pursuing a more classical education. 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. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. My first booklove was Edgar Allan Poe’s Great Tales and Poems. While Clevenger just blindly believed and followed what he was told was patriotic, Yosarian questioned why a bunch of people he didn’t know wanted to kill him. The aspect of Clevenger that I identify with is not the blind followership, but followership nonetheless. I may not agree with the goal we pursue or how we try to reach it, but if I am given a job to do I will do it thoroughly and with all my effort.