How Long Should A College Essay Be?

How Long Should A College Essay Be? The views of my society are rather one dimensional towards being different. When reflecting that becoming part of this society would lead me to self-hatred, I have come to see Master as an example. The hardship he undergoes and the courage he portrays afterwards have inspired me to embrace who I am. He has always encouraged me to have my own personal outlook and opinion. I think he believes that conformity undermines intellectual potentialâ€"an opinion I now strongly agree with. I had thought that the truth was beneath this, like a mystery waiting to be solved. Maybe there was someone who had successfully revealed the “truth” of Lolita in all it’s ugliness, someone who had pushed past all Lolita ’s beauty and emerged with a final knowledge of it. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside. I sat in an armchair in front of a wood fire with a cup of tea and read. I read for hours until my skin stung, my neck stiffened and my head ached. At night, I would draw myself a bath and lay in it until the water went cold and read. Most distinctly I remember running to the bathroom, chapter after chapter, to throw up. It was all at once a beautiful and harrowing experience. I first began reading Pan Tadeusz when I was thirteen. And perhaps because it was my decision to read this epic, my reaction to it was stronger than it otherwise would have been. Until then, being Polish meant little more to me than having a second passport, wearing a traditional dress on holidays, and having a passel of cousins across the ocean. Then, how does one interpret morality in relation to beauty? They weigh so heavily on each other that it is impossible for them to existence independently. There is no way to read Lolita and believe one has at last found the truth of Dolores and Humbert’s story. It is a book of perpetual discussion, conversation, and questioning. I have also become an individualist who tries to defy the conformism around him. I live in a newly independent society that still has remnants of the old, Soviet conformism, and, instead of freeing itself, it has begun to bury itself in it. The obsession with following narrow dreams that I see in my peers is part of today’s conformism. My initial impression was that the truth of Lolita, its ugliness, was hidden behind its beautiful prose. It uses flowery words of love and affection to trick the reader into believing in some kind of horrid love story. I had thought that my job as the reader was to peel back the layers of beautiful imagery to reveal the novel’s and Humbert’s grotesque center. I wanted to brush off the proselike dust off an old book. Much like an individual doesn’t realize how hungry she is until she takes a bite of food, my intellectual hunger rose and demanded that I feast. I began to question the ideas behind my everyday actions regardless of whether other people thought this was a relevant line of inquiry or not. Out of this confusion and curiosity, my AP Research paper on the nature of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue in epistemology emerged. Readers at the time of the book’s publication would have remembered these, their imaginations leaving Paris for the Polish countryside. The poem’s lyrical Alexandrines transported me back to Poland, especially when the words were softly murmured, huddled underneath blankets, the pages illuminated with a flickering flashlight. Being Polish was a part of me, but not something I paid much attention to. Self-confidence is something I have struggled very long and hard with. I used to worry that I would stand outâ€"especially in school. Moreover, he has taught me to stand my ground and be perceptive. The critical viewpoint I have grown into has trained me not to take things for granted and to be inquisitive. So, in a way, The Master and Margarita has helped me to understand my father and appreciate him as an outsider, an individualist. The drive to conform to a standard so as to avoid standing out has become more and more apparent. However, the society depicted in the novel accepts such conformism to urvive, whereas the young generation can take individual freedom for granted. It impedes creativity and critical thinking, but these are essential in raising questions and seeing beyond the obvious. Instead, my peers choose to follow similar paths of education and career . At an early age they are asked to choose their path for life.