For Stony Brook University, I had to write an essay about 'an intellectual experience that has matter to me most.' The limit was 8,000 characters, and I pulled off 7,781, but I just wanted someone to review it before I submitted it, to make sure it answered the prompt and was grammatically correct and flowed nicely and such.
Also, it would be helpful if you could include if you could learn anything about me as a person from this essay (since that's what the admissions officers want to know, I'm assuming?) Any way to improve this essay would be appreciated. I feel like I ramble on for a good portion of it, but I'm not sure what to remove and, if I were to remove it, whether it would make much sense. Actually, I'm not sure it makes sense right now.
Thank you in advance for any help or criticism you might offer. :]
"Make us one person!" the actor cried, mounting the horse with a bizarre passion that was overwhelming in its sincerity. We all sat in awed silence, unable to move, unable to speak, but with a possibly stimulated ability to think. I know for a fact that we were all thinking - no group of teenagers can sit in silence for that long with nothing going through their heads after seeing half of such a thought-provoking play - but what we thought about, on the other hand, may have varied: after all, the play had, so far, provided much for thought, and there was no guarantee that the same aspects had stuck in each of our minds. Maybe we were over thinking it, and there really was nothing to think about, just a simple play to watch and enjoy. Yet, the fact still remained that there were many thoughts related to the play going through my mind, so there must have been some thought to be given about the play. The first act had just ended and, of all the theatrical productions I'd seen, it may have been the most powerful performance I had ever witnessed.
Earlier this year, my sister, two friends and I took an excursion to NYC to see one of the most acclaimed Broadway shows of the year: Peter Shaffer's 'Equus.' Having read countless reviews on the production, most of which were favorable, we decided to see it for ourselves, and so we took a train to the city and walked half an hour in the snow to Times Square, only to find ourselves at the end of a very long line that led into the theatre. Many, myself included, had probably ventured to see the play in such weather because it had two renowned actors in it, but the entire audience probably left feeling that it was so much more than it was made out to be.
The play ended at 11 p.m., and, although we returned to my sister's dorm by midnight, the four of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning discussing the play, having gotten over our initial stunned silence. It wasn't until the sky started to lighten in the way only the pre-dawn twilight can that we felt as if we'd exhausted the topic enough for one night and finally went to sleep. When we woke up the following day, however, there was still so much to discuss.
'Equus' is the story of a troubled stable boy, Alan Strang, who blinds six horses in one night, and of the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, who tries to treat him but ends up exposing much more than he bargained for. There is the general argument of the story that, although psychiatry allows people to fit more easily into the roles society expects of them, it also robs them of the vital passion that makes them human. Underlying that, however, many other themes are presented, involving religion, mythology, and psychology, all accented with a terrifyingly beautiful and abstract portrayal of horses and an eerily hazy stage setting that provides a base for the mythic, fervent and often violent tale in dark, neutral tones. To some, 'Equus' may just be the dark story of a boy and a psychiatrist, but to me, it's as much the tale of a seemingly ordinary child psychiatrist's descent into a troubled boy's shadowy heart as it is the anecdote of an overworked psychiatrist's journey to self-discovery.
Much of the play revolves around 'Equus,' the spirit of an equine creature that seems to live in all horses. When I first heard the title of the play two years prior, images of horses in mythology came to mind. Often, horses are represented as symbols of grace and power, and they are seen repeatedly in old stories and tales. The Greeks won the Trojan War by means of a deceptive wooden horse, and in mythology, the winged horse Pegasus is a symbol of justice and righteousness. An anguished horse is a central focus in Picasso's anti-war mural 'Guernica,' and centaurs are often seen as man and horse united in the way that Alan wished to be.
In the play, Strang confuses his love of religion with a love of horses when his father replaces a violent picture of a cross-bearing Jesus that he worshipped with the image of a horse. Somehow, he transfers his commitment to his religion to the image of the horse, and what results is a deeply disconcerted boy who is left vulnerable and exposed, yet withdrawn. Alan's mother and father, one nurturing and religious, the other judgmental and stern, may also have contributed to the boy's confusion. Then there is the psychiatrist, burdened with reproach and unmet desires of visiting Greece, and lacking a passion that Alan has, who tries to figure out what's wrong with Alan and help him. As Alan reveals what really happened with the horses that night he blinded them to Mr. Dysart, the confession of how his crime affected him - of how his inability to express himself caused him to take out his anger on the creatures he revered most, how the mutilation of the horses was truly a self-mutilation - leaves the boy devoid of passion and perfectly 'normal,' so that he may live a normal life. Dysart, however, having been exposed to the most harrowing case he had ever had to treat, is now left with the poignant image of 'Equus,' leaving his own tortured psyche self-loathing and self-recriminating, in conjunction with his previous regret over having sublimated his own passions to conform to mold society had established for him. At the end, Dysart remarks that Alan will now be without pain, but he himself is haunted by Equus, wearing the horse's head, caught with the chain in his mouth, "straining to jump clean-hoofed onto a new track of being" that he can only imagine to exist.
In a profound conversation at some point in the middle of the play, Dysart exclaims, "To go through life and call it yours, you first have to get through your own pain - pain that's unique to you. All right, he's sick; he's full of misery and fear... but that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life! And let me tell you something: I envy it." At this point, Dysart has thrown his very existence into question and, because of the authenticity of his soul-searching, I found myself engaged in a similar process. I found myself questioning what my passion was, what pain I had been through that was unique to me, and I came up with nothing. Not necessarily nothing, so to speak, but an emptiness, a void that I felt I needed to fill. That scene caused me to rethink my existence, and I came up with the conclusion that I was more like Dysart than I was comfortable with admitting - that my appreciation for antiquity and other such nonsensical things was a byproduct of my need to feel some sort of passion for something.
On an intellectual level, neither I nor my friends found the play to be lacking. It contained argument and reference enough to keep us discussing into the night, long after the final curtain had come down, and even enough to keep me lying awake, replaying and analyzing scene after scene in my mind, long after my companions had fallen asleep. I can imagine that others who had seen the play that night were similarly reluctant to go to bed, perhaps because they thought they might wake up and not remember the passionate, deeply profound performance, that they would miss their chance to give it some thought. In the end, however, we were all probably thinking the same thing - what makes life worth living? Is it safety and security, as society often wants us to believe, or is it passion, the fervent desire of something to make us feel whole? And what about religion - is it there only to fill a void humans have, because we need something to believe in, to be passionate about?
At any rate, seeing this profound production was a major experience for me that provoked much thought of human and animal nature, its connection to religion, and the complications and passion of an insecure psyche.
