The following is a portion of an essay Amir wrote in his junior year at Ramaz as a sample personal college essay. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost one of the pages.
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Well this is my personal college essay, and it kind of pisses me off. Whenever people bring up all this college crap, it tends to piss me off. College shmawledge, it’s always future this and future that. I’m a friggin junior, and I’m seventeen, and I just heard Don Henley sing something about being sixteen forever and it really didn’t mean a thing to me to tell the truth. I’m a friggin junior and not unlike my good forefather Abraham, some god has been testing me and luckily I got a 1450 which means I passed. Not so fast, they tell me, a 1450 is not a success complete. Many more high numbers must be collected before the golden gates of Heaven (or is that Harvard) will open up.
But all that is along way off, at least a year, and right now I’m stuck in pre-final hell land and just about the worst thing I can do is think ahead to that judgment day early in May when my entire high school worth is assessed. That is a sick, scary thought. Either I’m missing something or somewhere along the line we lost something and now everything has gone crazy and corrupt. Is this the plan: Study in high school, so you can go to a good college, so you can go to a good university, so you can get some dumb job, so you can earn money, so you can support a wife, so you can have kids so that they can go to school . . . .
Am I missing something there? Is that what my dad is talking about when he says to me, Amir, you gotta have a plan? Well, I don’t have a plan, and though that scares me sometimes, mostly it just makes me feel superior . . . unencumbered . . . more fee than the rest of the bastards running as fast as they can down the dark misty road of success and responsibility and consistency. It is one hell of a marathon, and I am far too lazy to compete.
The irony is that so few know what they are running for. So few can even see this road beneath their legs. I know it is there because someone told me. She said, Nature and life seem to be very familiar. Just stay on the road and everything will be fine. (I read that in my camp brochure). I say, Stay on the road, and you won’t see a damn thing. There are a lot of nifty trees that smell like root beer, pretty vistas, and cool looking animals that all lie just off the path. Hell, you may get a few scratches but that is the risk. I mean, why else did we get on this road in the first place for? You see, that is what bothers me the most, most destinations are not destinations at all, rather, just the lack of destinations. It is going on so you can go on. Stop before you reach the end, because once you get there, they will all be dead, or you will be dead. I do not know, because I have not been there yet.
I did see the end once, though. You see, this path of mine has all twists and turns of various dimensions and sometimes . . . the end comes very close to where you are standing, and if you look hard enough, you will be able to see it. Rather, you won’t see it. You won’t see it because it is not there. Let me explain how I saw the end that is not there:
Last year before the Passover holiday, I went to visit the Jewish homeland with the Dorot project in Manhattan. I brought
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immensely, for I do not really know what society is. I think, though, that it has something to do with man’s futile search for purpose. Something to keep us running around this narrow, circular track so quickly and so frantically that we are blind to the nothing that we are falling into.