College Admission Essay

College Admission Essay Not one of the book’s characters can be defined in terms of “good” and “evil,” or “right” and “wrong.” Rather, they are all unequivocally human, for better or for worse. The one absolute truth to our existence is the divide between life and deathâ€"and, some may argue that death is the only cessation of our humanity. Until recently, I felt little obligation to involve myself in any substantive way with humanity as a whole. I am forever grateful to Pride and Prejudice for reigniting the passion for reading I had lost in middle school. The move to Texas was one of the hardest transitions in my life as I was greeted with a culture shock and had to reinvent myself. In California my peers and I had shared the same views. We were all so liberal which at the time felt like a blessing, but when I got to Texas it seemed as though everywhere I went my ideas were challenged. On an almost daily basis I was asked to defend my views on a subject, but my debating skills were limited to logical fallacies and ad hominem attacks so I wasn’t too successful. These endeavors were formative, and I do not regret them. However, in their extremity, they were defense mechanisms against the demands of the world, and they were not sustainable. In trying to cultivate my own separate reality, concerned predominantly with my own experience, I became drained and depressed. In my eyes it didn’t matter what I said because I was right and they were wrong. The Book Thief refuses to flee from this ambiguity. Instead, the characters within its pages are mixtures of everything and its opposite. Its author, Adam Mickiewicz, is considered something of a literary god, somewhere between Dante and Shakespeare. The novel focuses on ways the Soviet regime exerted its power on its people. Coming from a post-Soviet country still struggling with its past, where some adore past times while others despise them, I am interested in how the regime worked to indoctrinate people. I liked to learn by tinkering and building things. I read books about agriculture, built a chicken coop and a garden, and even slept outside in my family’s field. I found these methods of occupying my time to be more fulfilling than the types of entertainment, namely social media, being employed by those around me. On several occasions throughout my childhood, I decided to become a “scholar;” I would hole myself up with books that I couldn’t quite understand and pore over the pages until my eyes ached. Reading allowed me to feel connected with important ideas and values that were scarce in my surroundings. Although the novel is not a history book, its presentation of characters helps to crystallize the essence of what the Soviet Union looked like. The fact of it being a literary work has made it easier for me to comprehend and visualize the historical period which was so devastating to my country. The novel helped me understand that the harder an ideology is pushed on people, the harder they will rebel in indirect ways. The constant fear turned people into animals willing to do anything to survive. For fear of being next to disappear or jealousy because someone lives a tiny bit better than you, espionage and treason become a normal part of life. This sense of clarity I received, was due in part to Pride and Prejudice because even though it did not provide me with the answers to my questions, it had given me a sense of self awareness. The notion that prejudice clouds perception was a truth that I don’t imagine I’d have come to as early without the help of Austen and it made me wonder how much more I could learn from reading. After that I became obsessed with reading, falling into my old habits of staying up late to read the last chapter, staying in to read at lunch, and going to the library every weekend. Before I had defined this connection as one of my most important values, I experimented with various methods of separation. In bursts of inspiration I would “homeschool” myself, withdrawing into seclusion. The story’s protagonist, Liesel Meminger, learns this lesson through her experiences in Nazi Germany, a place and time in which we are often inclined to believe that good and evil existed as separate entities. The Book Thief introduces a myriad cast of characters and thrusts them into the polarizing world of Nazi Germany. I would uncomprehendingly coast through my classes, molding my knowledge to fit the next quiz and promptly forgetting it afterwards. School didn’t require, and at times, actively discouraged my insatiable desire to figure out the puzzles of the world, so I shoved that side of myself away and forgot that it even existed. This epic is not only a great bookâ€"it is the great book of Poland, as important and symbolic as the Vistula River that flows from the Polish mountains to the Baltic sea. Constitution, Poles are required to memorize sections of Pan Tadeusz, especially those which are thought to embody the core of what it means to be Polish. A Pole reciting the opening of Pan Tadeusz is like an American reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.