Essay Prompts

Essay Prompts 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. It was all at once a beautiful and harrowing experience. Much like an individual doesn’t realize how hungry she is until she takes a bite of food, my intellectual hunger rose and demanded that I feast. This basic principle that even gods made mistakes allowed me to process my everyday life. Although divorce is not an issue of the gods, they fell in and out of love and this was synonymous with events in my own life, and with members of my own family. There is no way to read Lolita and believe one has at last found the truth of Dolores and Humbert’s story. It is a book of perpetual discussion, conversation, and questioning. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. So, must all beauty be false and can truth only come ugly? Then, how does one interpret morality in relation to beauty? They weigh so heavily on each other that it is impossible for them to existence independently. I began to question the ideas behind my everyday actions regardless of whether other people thought this was a relevant line of inquiry or not. Out of this confusion and curiosity, my AP Research paper on the nature of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue in epistemology emerged. Readers at the time of the book’s publication would have remembered these, their imaginations leaving Paris for the Polish countryside. The poem’s lyrical Alexandrines transported me back to Poland, especially when the words were softly murmured, huddled underneath blankets, the pages illuminated with a flickering flashlight. My initial impression was that the truth of Lolita, its ugliness, was hidden behind its beautiful prose. It uses flowery words of love and affection to trick the reader into believing in some kind of horrid love story. The obsession with following narrow dreams that I see in my peers is part of today’s conformism. The drive to conform to a standard so as to avoid standing out has become more and more apparent. However, the society depicted in the novel accepts such conformism to urvive, whereas the young generation can take individual freedom for granted. While arguments with my brother could never be described as divine, our struggles often reminded me of the fights between Apollo and Artemis, siblings who squabbled but ultimately loved each other. The story of Orpheus, the musician who looked back at the last second to ensure his beloved was following him, remains a non-example in matters of perseverance. This book is foundational to me because of its portrayal of divine creatures and the exhibition of basic human desires and imperfections. 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. I first began reading Pan Tadeusz when I was thirteen. And perhaps because it was my decision to read this epic, my reaction to it was stronger than it otherwise would have been. Until then, being Polish meant little more to me than having a second passport, wearing a traditional dress on holidays, and having a passel of cousins across the ocean. Being Polish was a part of me, but not something I paid much attention to. I live in a newly independent society that still has remnants of the old, Soviet conformism, and, instead of freeing itself, it has begun to bury itself in it. 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. I had thought that my job as the reader was to peel back the layers of beautiful imagery to reveal the novel’s and Humbert’s grotesque center. I wanted to brush off the proselike dust off an old book. I had thought that the truth was beneath this, like a mystery waiting to be solved. Maybe there was someone who had successfully revealed the “truth” of Lolita in all it’s ugliness, someone who had pushed past all Lolita ’s beauty and emerged with a final knowledge of it. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside.