I wrote about a person who has influenced me.
This is the topic of your choice common app essay, >250 words.
Please critique this as much as possible.
Paint by Numbers
Seventeen arms posed, thirty-four eyes squinting at a stool. Seventeen crumpled, off-white papers with wobbly sketches file into the garbage can. We concentrate harder, this time.
But we see only a lonely stool and blank sheets of 11 × 17's.
And soon, we receive advice only an artist could give. Black rectangular glasses frame her gaze as she questions the stool in its space. Her words are slow to link together, but eventually she reminds us, "There is ten apples on the tree. Do not think there are ten apples on the tree; be an Is Thinker. The stool is one with--" And like any typical sitcom, the bell rings, and with it, Mrs. Skop's train of thought derails itself--not that the rest of her sentence would have provided sufficient elucidation for her first two sentences, I am sure.
"What the heck?" I question my table mate, whose roll of her eyes and rise of her brows only contribute to a classroom wave of sorts. Not wanting to attempt to ask Mrs. Skop for clarification,
I replace my charcoal in its spot in my toolbox. I don't have time for enigmas now.
Sitting at my desk that night, I kept kneading her words, rolling them out, and kneading again. I considered it a blessing that the day's assignments only required the left hemisphere of my brain. Systematically, I calculated the answers to a physics worksheet; logically, I clicked my way through cyberspace, perusing notes for an online biology course. As I was devising a method, preferably a mnemonic device, to remember the steps in the CAM respiration process, my subconscious, having relentlessly re-watched and rewound the scene in art that day, suddenly burst to the forefront. My left brain, desperately seeking logical explanation, had evidently worked Mrs. Skop's meaning to the surface in the same way our bodies seeks to rid themselves of finicky little splinters and other foreign objects--and I suddenly understood her. The stool is one with the space--therefore, I just have to draw the space, and then the stool will take shape. All of the spaces carved out by the stool in essence form the stool--I now possessed the tool, the insight, the truth behind great art.
I yearned to actually see the space, to expertly sketch the space, the stool. But I still had work to do, now. Mnemonic device, mnemonic device... Over and over I practiced my overwrought little sentence, but I kept forgetting what each letter represented. For the second time that day, I wadded my loose-leaf into a careless clump.
A tiresome sigh--wait! Science is just art with numbers and binomial nomenclature, I realized. Science's medium is energy; with each brushstroke, science amasses and converts energy. Nature, therefore, is like art: both seek balance, unity, and proportion. Normal force or CAM process or ionic bonding, they all occur in order to share energy among the components of the greatest masterpiece ever sculpted: the earth. I possessed the tool, the insight, the truth behind science!
Ironically, Mrs. Skop taught me more about the beauty in the mathematical balance of science, than she did about a sketch of a stool. I now approach the enormous jumble of chemical and physical equations that we call earth by analyzing it in much the same way that I search for meaning in a Magritte. Because of Mrs. Skop's easily misunderstood and underappreciated artistic logic, I have discovered the source of my scientific reasoning and a holistic perspective of the world. When pondering the dilemma of to be or not to be, I is. All is.
