This is the last of the three essays I have to turn in for the Michigan prompt, and I will use one of them for the common app also. Anyway, thanks in advance all comments are greatly appreciated, I know there will be parts of this essay which won't make any sense, but I don't know entirely know which ones are and which ones aren't, so if you could not what doesn't make sense, that would be great. I know this essay is pretty bad, my other two essays got bad feedback and I felt they were far better so I don't have a good feeling about this one.
C] Tell us about a book you have read that you
found especially challenging, stimulating, or
provocative. Explain why it made an impact on
you.
It was staring right in front of me for all these years, yet I remained so oblivious to its presence. To me, aesthetic value was a subjective interpretation full of fallacies and paradoxes. It didn't have any true meaning, it was superficial, and it didn't define character. But the Moving Picture of Dorian Gray by Oliver Wilde revolutionized everything I thought was common sense.
Much of this classic is predicated on this "superficial" nature of beauty, as Dorian Gray pursues depths of freedom and prominence, a certain green light one might call it. In the process, he loses all sense of morals that had defined him for so long. He is the perpetrator of scurrilous offenses; he is a typical tyrant of the power he wields as an upper class member in society. Dorian Gray became embedded within this culture of deceit, superficiality, one guided by instinctive outlooks. Ultimately, the "purity of face" was what transpired him from afterthought to phenomenon, gaining him a spot amongst the aristocrat's elite despite his repugnance.
This purity of face really ignited my interest. Lady Narborough said it best with "You look so good; you are made to be good". Never before had I considered the "purity" of a face. When I thought aesthetics, I thought clothing, hair, even accessories of a face, but purity? Seemed imaginary, quite superficial in its own right. I had always before closed my mind to any thought that a face could carry so much weight; I always assumed aesthetics would lose out to true form of character. My rigid morality never even allowed me to explore the mindset of others. But this book provided me a novel's worth of different interpretations, it was this "purity" that remained so provocative.
Oliver Wilden opened up a whole new world to me, one not bounded by intellectual thought, but by the senses and stimulants controlling our mind. Seeing the story from the eyes of the protagonist, the possessor of the innocent "purity" gave me a far different perspective to analyze its nuances from. Mundane objects became animate; this unknown medium suddenly had meaning through the perspective of this protagonist. To Dorian Gray, the world was governed by laws of ideology, prosperity and harmony, quite the contrary from my views of governance through pragmatism and intellectual thought. The openmindness I was relayed is a virtue of true essence, not necessarily resisting ideas, but attempting to uncover the dynamics of a different world through a different lens is a ideal that allows for far greater fodder for though that I could have ever created.
