Essay Topics

Essay Topics Miss Rumphius was patient and listened to herself, and so could find her place by the sea. My mother read me Miss Rumphius regularly before bed and from the redheaded heroine’s delicate tale, I crafted not only my goals in life, but my approach to adulthood as well. Like other fantasy writers who go by initials, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Rowling summons foreign phrases, literary devices, and language jokes, and transfigures them into clever names for her characters, objects, and places. We let talking heads and sound bites guide our politics, our philosophy, and our way of life. Whether it is a Republican or a Democrat, a talking head is a talking head, and a blind decision is a blind decision, no matter what choice you make. I can’t help but think that if more people read Descartes, Plato, and maybe even the U.S. Constitution, we’d have a higher level of political discourse and a better government. This may not have hit me with the same depth at age five as it does now, but looking back at Miss Rumphius, I can see the sowing of my current thought processes. The main character is the narrator’s great aunt, not her mother or grandmother. There is no mention of her being involved romantically, marrying, or even considering a family - she is unapologetically independent. This perspective is increasingly, and tragically, rare in a world obsessed with information and afraid of questions. Intellectual complacency even pervades higher education where students are more concerned with marketing themselves and acquiring credentials than pursuing truth and acquiring wisdom. Beliefs are too often determined by trends and political bias, because in the social media age, how we are perceived matters more to us than what we actually think. I want to go to St. John’s because the whole methodology is in such a way that I can begin to love math. Every tutorial and seminar is taught with this same level of depth and understanding. A roommate is across from me reading the same book, and every couple minutes we stop to comment. I stayed up late the night before reading a different book, and though we have only just started reading this one, we are both hooked. I want all the above because ignorance is a killer, and willful ignorance is the biggest killer we face as a nation. Unhealthy diets and alcohol-fueled accidents are leading causes of death. At St. John’s math has life, beauty, purpose and in college I don’t want to wonder why the quadratic formula is written the way it is, I want to know. There have been so many times in high school where we’ve been assigned some math problem for homework and I would just be completely confused by it. For me, that answer doesn’t help, but only leaves me more confused and mystified by math. Furthermore, they know this largely happens in discussions about Great Books around small tables. Having tasted this kind of discussion in high school, I will seek it out the rest of my life. There is not one book on its own that calls to me, but knowing they are on my horizon fills me with anticipation. I can see me, a year older, sitting inside, curled up around a book and blanket. The sun has set early, so a lamp is on, shining warm light onto the pages. Despite this, there is a calm joy in her independence, and her adventures to faraway places seem to fill her life with meaning. I have longed for this freedom all my life, and it has been my ultimate goal in pursuing colleges, careers, mentors, and even social circles. The narrator is a niece, so Miss Rumphius had to have had a sibling, but the young Alice speaks only of her aunt, and so was born my dreams of being an inspirational aunt myself. Every part of the model and curriculum at St. John’s encourages an honest pursuit of truth, but the classroom discussions most of all. The liturgy of every class-- beginning with a single question and every individual being addressed as Mr. or Ms.-- reflects a zealous love of truth. In the classroom, ideas and individuals are honored accordingly. Astoundingly, Johnnies spend every class with individuals who probably have entirely different career goals. In their honest pursuit of truth, they recognize that preparing for a career and to be fully human should be one and the same.