How To Write The Best College Admission Essay

How To Write The Best College Admission Essay 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. The same people who hadn’t wanted to fight the Nazis in 1939 or earlier were now congratulating themselves for defeating them. They can decide if it is most meaningful to live with dignity, or with kindness, or with passion. Whatever the ultimate outcome, if they have made choices based on their principles, their ending is happy. Reading Jane Eyre gave me a vocabulary with which to contemplate my own principles. I find it useful to see my own traits and philosophies in a character, where I can examine them with greater clarity than if I were peering directly into my own mind. I finished re-reading the book in late December and the experience was well timed. This gives me hope that every individual holds ultimate power over her or his own life. 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. It was a simple interpretation of heaven, but it struck me. I am tempted to write about a more important book, something a little weightier and more historic, but I feel it would be most appropriate to write about Jane Eyre. It’s a book that’s exceptionally significant to me because it has been an exceptional source of comfort. I once heard art defined as anything that makes its audience feel and react. 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. I like this definition, so I’ll posit that any art that causes a person to feel, greatly, is great. So I’ll make Jane Eyre my great book, as it has caused me to feel greatly solaced. In a well-written book, life-altering challenges and mundane activities alike are transfigured into something of consequence, as if they are part of a grand, unperceivable pattern. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. The end of the book, and thus the Narnia series, is death. 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. 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.