It’s been over a year since I got back from my Bridge Year in Ghana, and I still don’t know how to answer that question. How do I condense an entire year’s worth of experiences into one or two sentences? My frustration is with the question itself—it doesn’t lend itself to complex or thoughtful answers.
“Gogol advocated that we do not need to reject value-judgements, but rather understand all art as part of a grander movement; great art is the product of labor and reflection, vision and passion, building off the works that precede it.”
1. Mother. She must be. I think. Hands are folded, mouth is folded, below a collapsible razor nose. But that was before that type of folding razor, and my mother wouldn’t have had one for a nose, anyway. The eyes, … Read More
Every respectable ideology needs an encyclopedia. The editors of the Enlightenment Encyclopédie, when composing the organizational frontispiece to the work, situated religion but a few spokes away from superstitions and black magic, while the reader of the entry on “Cannibalism” interested in related themes would find himself advised to consult the “Eucharist” entry, were he to consult the book’s reference notes. The good Bolshevik editors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, for example, were quick to minimize the entry on “Jews” in the face of the Soviet anti-Semitism of the early 1950s.
Every muscle in my body tensed, and a knotted cocktail of fear and nerves pushed my stomach up into my chest. I wasn’t there to make a scene, but I prepared to transition to a sprint at a moment’s notice. I tried vainly to resist making eye contact, but neither of us could resist the strange magnetism of the other’s presence.
It’s Thursday at noon in Dillon Gym, and the Stephens Fitness Center sweats with the heat of Princeton’s faculty and staff. Let’s sit down with some of them and see how they stay in such good shape.
I spent my summer writing bad poetry and reading novels. Self-indulgent, I suppose, and I felt twinges of guilt for not following the ambitious career paths of my fellow classmates, who were off saving poor children in Kenya or studying philosophy in Greece. But after a rather stressful year, it was a relief to sit in my room, in my bed, with my books.
Some of us seem to have our futures mapped out to a T, from the high-profile internship we’ll take after graduation to the suburban condo where we’ll raise our first yellow lab. But this summer, I didn’t have time to rehearse.