Any help would be appreciated:
Self-proclaimed mature people all assume that the entirety of our existence can somehow be boiled down or extracted to a series of "significant experiences" (or "events" or any other synonym for punctuated equilibrium) which sculpt who we are, as if Michelangelo tossed a few unwieldy stones at a boulder and up sprung David. Yet the reality is that I traveled to Ecuador and came home me; I did not stand atop a mountain and shout and pound my chest and find myself. I know now, though, that carretilla means wheelbarrow and llucho means naked, that you can always cut more meat off a seemingly exhausted raw chicken, that roosters are unreliable but cows always moo at dawn.
The first time I read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I found myself utterly uninspired by it, disaffected by the fact that I found it unattainable. Like true beauty, though, it grew on me ever so slowly, like you do not realize the idyllic elegance of a sunset until one day you glance out your window and find the sky ornamented in hues of fading orange that progress to throbbing crimson that transmute to opulent violet, adding childlike caricature to figures captured in its rays.
Maybe I'm naive and have yet to realize that this day will never be as good as - can never be as good as - days remembered. In fact, I know I am naive, that I have not yet "measured out my life with coffee spoons."
I am eighteen. I say this as if to remind myself of the inevitable - we are products of sun and wind and oxidants and the thousand other elements that add stubble to the chin and canyons of collapsing collagen to the face. I am eighteen, as though that is the magic number at which point life is illuminated through cigarettes and voter registration cards and legal consent and adult correctional facilities. I am eighteen, as though that makes me (as my favorite teacher once put it) recognize my own hypocrisies. Nevertheless, I am eighteen, and Eliot's "overwhelming question" has assailed me, perhaps not with full force but rather with a soft nudge to introduce me to the intricacies and eccentricities and other "-ies" of life that (as Hamlet would say) our fool flesh is heir to.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
I have nothing more in life but to address his overwhelming question - although I suppose that is the very purpose of life. And in that realization I have begun this protracted period of maturation, of the recognition of hypocrisy, of the denial of naivety. So the answer is Yes, but it comes not from the grand and magnificent - the "significant experiences" - but rather from the seemingly trivial, the insignificant which make life beautiful. And life is astonishingly beautiful if you love the occasional inconsequential, if you love laughing, and smiling, and climbing hills, and wearing socks, and eating Junior Mints.
Self-proclaimed mature people all assume that the entirety of our existence can somehow be boiled down or extracted to a series of "significant experiences" (or "events" or any other synonym for punctuated equilibrium) which sculpt who we are, as if Michelangelo tossed a few unwieldy stones at a boulder and up sprung David. Yet the reality is that I traveled to Ecuador and came home me; I did not stand atop a mountain and shout and pound my chest and find myself. I know now, though, that carretilla means wheelbarrow and llucho means naked, that you can always cut more meat off a seemingly exhausted raw chicken, that roosters are unreliable but cows always moo at dawn.
The first time I read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I found myself utterly uninspired by it, disaffected by the fact that I found it unattainable. Like true beauty, though, it grew on me ever so slowly, like you do not realize the idyllic elegance of a sunset until one day you glance out your window and find the sky ornamented in hues of fading orange that progress to throbbing crimson that transmute to opulent violet, adding childlike caricature to figures captured in its rays.
Maybe I'm naive and have yet to realize that this day will never be as good as - can never be as good as - days remembered. In fact, I know I am naive, that I have not yet "measured out my life with coffee spoons."
I am eighteen. I say this as if to remind myself of the inevitable - we are products of sun and wind and oxidants and the thousand other elements that add stubble to the chin and canyons of collapsing collagen to the face. I am eighteen, as though that is the magic number at which point life is illuminated through cigarettes and voter registration cards and legal consent and adult correctional facilities. I am eighteen, as though that makes me (as my favorite teacher once put it) recognize my own hypocrisies. Nevertheless, I am eighteen, and Eliot's "overwhelming question" has assailed me, perhaps not with full force but rather with a soft nudge to introduce me to the intricacies and eccentricities and other "-ies" of life that (as Hamlet would say) our fool flesh is heir to.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
I have nothing more in life but to address his overwhelming question - although I suppose that is the very purpose of life. And in that realization I have begun this protracted period of maturation, of the recognition of hypocrisy, of the denial of naivety. So the answer is Yes, but it comes not from the grand and magnificent - the "significant experiences" - but rather from the seemingly trivial, the insignificant which make life beautiful. And life is astonishingly beautiful if you love the occasional inconsequential, if you love laughing, and smiling, and climbing hills, and wearing socks, and eating Junior Mints.
