I am indeed taking a minute to brag a little bit. We had to write an essay in my English class (go figure) and this here was the assignment (I don't do a really good job of explaining it well)
Final Paper (Personal Literary Essay)
Your last paper will not be a researched paper; it will be a personal literary essay of about the same length (3-5 pages). This will combine and replace the research paper requirement and the creative/performance requirement for this unit. It is due Tuesday, June 16th at 5 pm at my office (no email submission).
Imitate one of the 18th century authors we are reading in this unit by composing a philosophical or critical essay that addresses a contemporary topic (in our time or in the 18th century). Like the essays from this period, yours should have a casual and inviting tone (or possibly satirical), with an interesting persona that is partly you and partly an artistic construct.
You are not to write a personal essay in the same way that you would learn to write within that genre today; that is, the focus should not be on rendering vivid scenes of personal experience that carry the weight of interest (like fiction does). This essay should have more of a social and philosophical color to it, personal in terms of voice and opinion but not so pointedly in terms of personal experience. Use the essays from the period as models for various approaches.
Your essay should be a "literary" essay in the style that you employ (which should be witty in an 18th century way), but it also needs to be literary in its content: it must quote or allude to or critique authors or works of literature from any of the periods we have studied (You can also allude to works of art or culture that post date 1800, too). This is NOT to take the form of a report or some sort of essay exam review of authors or works we have studied. Just garnish your musings with literary observations and quotes in the manner that the essayists from the period model to you.
I believe this will be an enjoyable way to get a feel for 18th century writing and thinking, and it gives you an opportunity to do something that is less strenuous than a conventional researched paper (hopefully). As always, you are welcome to run drafts past me.
So there that is. The assignment straight from my teacher's....fingertips.
I was a little nervous about this (oh, warning, this is a longer post than normal. If you don't want to read a lot, just bail now, while you still can.) because when an assignment is open-ended like this I feel like there is a very good chance I will do it completely wrong. So when I had my personal intrview with my professor, h asked me if I had started to work on my final paper yet and I told him I hadn't but I was looking forward to it (I always try to be more optimistic than I really am when I talk to teachers one on one) because we wrote papers like this in my Japanese lit class called
zuihitsu that were just personal responses to the reading adn I loved them. I told y teacher that
zuihuitu translated to "follow the brush." And he thouhgt it was neat and told me to follow that vein on my paper. So I did. And here it is:
Who am I to be the judge of literature? Who am I to declare to the masses what is great and what is dreadful? Is literature not for the enjoyment of people? When was it decided that the writing and reading and interpreting of books was a sport in which the most deficient got fed to the dogs? In Japan, where literature has been written and rewritten and appreciated while good England was still tumultuously barbaric, there is a certain form that is truly for oneself - unlike the hypocrites who write letters to a loved one with eyes slit and looking toward profit - called
zuihitsu, or translated into English - follow the brush. Let the words flow how they will; take no heed where the brush and the ink take the words, just follow. I shall follow my pen completely, taking no heed to the reader that I am sure is eager to trounce my words.
Pen! Take me away.
I often wonder about the honesty of writing. Even mine as I let my words flow freely, declining the use of editing. How true are my thoughts? How
mine are my thoughts. Is the mind truly it’s own place? Is this question that I ask truly mine or is it one that has been asked so many times that we all ask the same question and muse over the conclusion and consider ourselves original when we realize an idea. Are our very ideas not impressed by everything that we see and hear? If it truly is the external objects that furnish our minds with ideas, and we all see the same things where, then, is originality? Creativity? Innovation? Honesty? I shall not be able to present my true feelings if I do not know them, if I cannot distinguish what is me.
What is me. What is me? Can one define a person any better than one can define a poem? We like this person, but can we say what it is about that person we like? We might like the form or the style, or perhaps just the way the person makes us feel. Or, perhaps, we do not like that person at all and have just as little luck pinpointing exactly what it is that we find so distasteful. I don’t particularly like Marlowe, Marvell, or Pope, but I have no justification for it.
Perhaps I like Donne. Perhaps there is reason for it. Perhaps I am a sensual creature that cringes at my own tastelessness and find refuge in the words of one similarly sensual and guilty. Perhaps I find hope turning to God in Holy Sonnets. Perhaps I am an usurped town but would never have known it without Donne’s clever rhymes.
But, there it is again.
I would never have known it without Donne’s clever rhymes. Does the mode by which we learn something effect the truth of it? It certainly is telling about our own creativity. I would never have called myself an usurped town. Or would I? How can I now know that I would not, of my own accord, without Donne constantly whispering at the back of my mind, used the same words.
Usurped town. It is a common enough image, an easy enough analogy. Could that have been my very own creation given the chance? Or perhaps, creativity is what blooms despite the chances given.
Doesn’t that sound poignant. That is my own creation, surely. I cannot remember a time that I read that or heard that. I remember once, I read on a board at school that when we receive the answer, we forget the question. I wondered who to credit that statement to. It seemed clever enough, but the obvious did not occur to me. I asked the pupil next to me and she kindly informed me that it was, in fact, our professor who made the statement that struck me so. I wonder now why that should have surprised me so. I don’t think that I often consider people I know personally to be able to make great statements of illumination. My mind is biased. Intelligence is such an abstract concept that someone I am in close contact with should not be able to share it.
Oh, pen, where have you taken me? I suppose I am now discussing Intelligence.
I associate intelligence with micrography. It is interesting in it’s own right and has many appeals, but really is nothing but distortion. Something is not truly seen for itself if seen out of context. A hair is not really a hair if, when observed, all one can see is the body of a serpent. Newton’s Calculus is a great gem of knowledge, but what good is it really? Apparently a German, Leibniz, also studied Calculus, developing this idea of finding calculations using
d, some infinitely small value. Infinitely small? From what I understand of this Calculus, and I do not claim to be an expert, this
d is very important. What if a scientist put this infinitely small value under a microscope? No longer would d be infinitely small, but would be something sizable, understandable. And all of Calculus would unravel altogether.
Intelligence, knowledge, cannot be studied closely. Flaws will be seen, chaos will ensue. Some of our most beloved ideas, just centuries ago were unhinged and some of the people of the time remained so indefinitely. Possibly, it would have been better to have not looked closely at the stars and let people continue in their belief that their little world was the center of all the universe. It could have been, still, I suppose, only in a much less literal sense than they would have liked for it to be.
What if we were to look closely at one so beloved as Shakespeare? What would we find? Innovation? Genius? Pop culture? The man was one of the most prolific writers (of the writers we care about, that is), but, perhaps, he was only just prolific to put bread on the table. Each sonnet, each great play, each line in precious iambic pentameter was simply a scheme to make the public pay the toll. Isn’t it right that a toll is a toll, a roll is a roll, and if we don’t get no toll, we don’t get no rolls?
Maybe at the very beginning, innovation is sacred, ideas are original, and creativity is just that - creative. But they cannot remain that way for very long. People pollute, power corrupts. Money changes everything. Maybe even for the right price, the right prestige, the right preeminence, my own
zuihitsu could be tainted, my pen led instead of followed.
I turned this in on Tuesday and was a little nervous about it still, but it was done!
Today, when I turned in my final test thing, my teacher kin of stopped me and handed my paper back to me and whispered, so as not to disturb the others while they were still working on he final, "Email me a copy of this." I was struck. In an excited way. "You liked it?" I asked. He nodded and then smiled and then looked back down to his desk. I was so excited!!! I left the classroom and looked over my paper at his remarks and I was just beaming. He had marked smiey faces and good in differen places and at the very end he had written:
I was so happy! 98! Hooray!
Okay, so it was a long brag, but now I am done.
I wasn't exactly happy or completely at peaceof any of that a lt of people say in testimony meeting, but I was content which was the most I could ask for. 
I eventually got up from where I sat on the ground at the overlook and then walked up the narrow path for aobut ten minutes or so until I got to a big rock that was flattish and just on the ground, waiting for me to sit on it and lean against the other rocks. I just sat there in the sun, feeling it hit me like something tangible.
I did a lot of thinking. I thouhgt about the kind of person I am becoming and the kind of person that I used to be. I thouhgt about the advice Kyrie was going to give me. I thought about school, church, work, and home.
I thought about one of my friends who over the summer took me up to his thinking rock. And I cried. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was alone and it was a relief; I could cry.
