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Here's that college essay that I don't really particularly like. I'm not sure just how good the book POV is. My mind has blanked all thoughts of deadlines. I need to research schools: Swarthmore, Haverford, Duke, and a few others--see if any of them are worth applying to.
Mudd Essay 1: Tell us about yourself. You can be clever or funny if you want.
Any comments are more than welcome.
Absently she runs her hand over my binding. I’m on her desk keeping company with all her other books—some short stories by García Márquez, King Lear, and her Merck Index. She’s reading her organic chemistry textbook now, but she fidgets, tapping her highlighter against my cover.
"Well, I’ll save the next chapter for tomorrow, I guess," she says slowly. "I should sleep. Enough with all these mechanisms!"
She hesitates, then picks me up and starts to leaf through me. I smile inwardly. She may spend more time with her chemistry books, but I don’t mind; I have a call that she can never quite escape. And I’m not required reading.
As she reads, she seems pensive, turning my pages and pausing at verses that catch her eye and give her cause for thought. She has perused my pages so often that I can almost follow her thoughts.
Suddenly she turns to Frost’s "For Once, Then, Something." The speaker sees himself reflected in a pool as in a "summer heaven godlike," and, after staring, catches a glimpse of something beyond the image: "Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."
And I know that this is my role in her life. I take her out of her own world that is so easy for her to see as a mere reflection of her own ideas and beliefs. Sometimes, the orderly lines of black marks captured on my pages provide her a means to see beyond and through the words to the ideas, and then perhaps even beyond the ideas to some grain of truth. The questions I raise in my pages rattle around in her mind after she closes the cover. How far can you slant the truth before it falls and becomes a lie? How much separation between people is necessary to keep privacy and keep the peace?
She moves on to Frost’s "A Dust of Snow." She thinks of the moon that evening, and the way the breeze felt before sunrise that morning. When she reads poems like this that captures a scene and the feelings it evokes, I am more than a springboard for her philosophical ramblings. I give her glimpses of thoughts and experiences from others. Through me she opens a window into a new world to experience a part of what others see and feel. She often reads poems like this after a long struggle with some chemistry problem that seems to reduce the world to one dimension. I know that I provide a balance in her life, where she can experience a part of the joy in a snowy day that a poem describes, or at least make her notice more in the world she sees. Her science can analyze a process, it can satisfy her curiosity about how it occurs, but it can never predict a person’s response to the final result. But I can at least present that response to all who care.
It’s late and she knows it. Her eyes glance at a few final lines: "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep…" She will go to sleep now, of course, as she has worked hard. But although her tired mind has nearly stopped thinking, I know that in a larger sense she will not let herself sleep. She will not let her curious mind turn blasé, stop giving her energy to complete her tasks as well as she knows that she can, or ignore her obligation to somehow be of service. I know her. She keeps her promises.
Mudd Essay 1: Tell us about yourself. You can be clever or funny if you want.
Any comments are more than welcome.
Absently she runs her hand over my binding. I’m on her desk keeping company with all her other books—some short stories by García Márquez, King Lear, and her Merck Index. She’s reading her organic chemistry textbook now, but she fidgets, tapping her highlighter against my cover.
"Well, I’ll save the next chapter for tomorrow, I guess," she says slowly. "I should sleep. Enough with all these mechanisms!"
She hesitates, then picks me up and starts to leaf through me. I smile inwardly. She may spend more time with her chemistry books, but I don’t mind; I have a call that she can never quite escape. And I’m not required reading.
As she reads, she seems pensive, turning my pages and pausing at verses that catch her eye and give her cause for thought. She has perused my pages so often that I can almost follow her thoughts.
Suddenly she turns to Frost’s "For Once, Then, Something." The speaker sees himself reflected in a pool as in a "summer heaven godlike," and, after staring, catches a glimpse of something beyond the image: "Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."
And I know that this is my role in her life. I take her out of her own world that is so easy for her to see as a mere reflection of her own ideas and beliefs. Sometimes, the orderly lines of black marks captured on my pages provide her a means to see beyond and through the words to the ideas, and then perhaps even beyond the ideas to some grain of truth. The questions I raise in my pages rattle around in her mind after she closes the cover. How far can you slant the truth before it falls and becomes a lie? How much separation between people is necessary to keep privacy and keep the peace?
She moves on to Frost’s "A Dust of Snow." She thinks of the moon that evening, and the way the breeze felt before sunrise that morning. When she reads poems like this that captures a scene and the feelings it evokes, I am more than a springboard for her philosophical ramblings. I give her glimpses of thoughts and experiences from others. Through me she opens a window into a new world to experience a part of what others see and feel. She often reads poems like this after a long struggle with some chemistry problem that seems to reduce the world to one dimension. I know that I provide a balance in her life, where she can experience a part of the joy in a snowy day that a poem describes, or at least make her notice more in the world she sees. Her science can analyze a process, it can satisfy her curiosity about how it occurs, but it can never predict a person’s response to the final result. But I can at least present that response to all who care.
It’s late and she knows it. Her eyes glance at a few final lines: "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep…" She will go to sleep now, of course, as she has worked hard. But although her tired mind has nearly stopped thinking, I know that in a larger sense she will not let herself sleep. She will not let her curious mind turn blasé, stop giving her energy to complete her tasks as well as she knows that she can, or ignore her obligation to somehow be of service. I know her. She keeps her promises.
