Consistency

2007-12-21 - 12:59 p.m.

One more thing --

N was writing college apps last weekend. For one college she had to both submit a recent graded essay, plus write an essay about "sense of place."

She wrote the essay -- it contrasted her summer sense of place with our families back east, but then her other sense of place here in B, and it somehow concluded that she wanted to experience a new place and there was a theme about how here in B people have opinions, but they're the "right" opinions, and other people in other places have different opinions, and she wanted to form her own opinions that were hers because she'd thought about them, and not just because people told her they were right. And then after we mailed the whole package, she looked it over and realized that her graded essay, something about Jonathan Swift and E.M. Forster, was all about consistency, and not just accepting received opinions as your own. Wow.

"Well, you're consistent," I said.

And it's true, and also, I think it shows that writing papers about all kinds of things is the best way to figure out what you yourself really think. I think I realized after writing 20 papers in high school and college about appearance vs. reality in Shakespeare and elsewhere that that was something I was sort of interested in. Perhaps it had to do with my bizarre family. It seemed to be a family, but I wasn't so sure that it really was a family. Now, 30 years later, I'm beginning to think that it really is a family. Somethings things, by appearing to be something for some number of years, actually do become the thing they seem to be. (Perhaps this was addressed in the Velveteen rabbit.)

Yikes! Stirrings from above! (click back)

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01

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