Prompt:
"Literature is the best way to overcome death. My father, as I said, is an actor. He's the happiest man on earth when he's performing, but when the show is over, he's sad and troubled. I wish he could live in the eternal present, because in the theater everything remains in memories and photographs. Literature, on the other hand, allows you to live in the present and to remain in the pantheon of the future.
Literature is a way to say, I was here, this is what I thought, this is what I perceived. This is my signature, this is my name."
This essay has specific directions to be personal, not argumentative.
Start//
Cracking open a book never fails to incite a Pavlovian reaction. It starts with a conscious removal of peripheral thoughts, then the wiping away of my anticipatory grin, and finally, a deep breath. This ritual has a religious undertone, as I know I am about to expose myself to a truly transcendent form of expression. I brace for an unfiltered dialogue of intellect, a deluge of emotion, a broadcast of the most human characteristics: imperfection, vulnerability, and temptation. And then it begins.
I am held captive by sensation. For a time, I become Greek, Barbadian, or Moorish. I am, in an instant, no longer a post-African American Civil Rights Era black; I hear the crack of the whip, and breathe the air of a guilty nation. The words become a medium by which I can feel the deepest, and most candid of emotions. I let the barriers of language and time dissolve, allowing me to become a receptacle for the timeless stories and lessons of humanity. I let the past have a voice.
I have developed a strong affinity for these interminable emblems of the human condition that we call literature. They are often the sacrificial lambs of their generations, speaking against their antiquated zeitgeist. They are the silent defeaters of kings, the liberators of the woman and the slave. I do not know of a more powerful force in the sparking of our American Revolution than Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Nothing helped inspire the abolitionist movement more than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Literature defines who we are and it moves us forward as a civilization. For me, it keeps me sane, and I am therefore eternally indebted.
//end
It has a 300 word limit and mine is 280.
Thanks!
You've done a really good job giving a personal view on what literature is to you, a view in addition to the one in the prompt, and it's really well written (:
Just a thought, although it says it doesn't require you to refer to the quote, your essay seem as much a response to the prompt as it does an essay on what literature is to you. I'm not too sure if that's a problem though, but maybe you could draw a few explicit links to to the prompt? Like perhaps when you say you let the past have a voice, you could say something about how the past doesn't die in books, and that what it teaches you is always for the present. I hope you get what I mean.
I think besides that it's clear and crisp and rather effortless (:
Hello my name is nasrin , Iranian. Your writing is good but some sentences is un clear. . Like you, I write but not story, I write my emotion. Whit writing, I feel calm, I understand things before I didn't pay attention. My words confess my inner thought and emotion.
