Essay Tips

Essay Tips It is a book of perpetual discussion, conversation, and questioning. 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. The Yosarian in me changes the question from “How do we succeed? ” to “How do we minimize the loss of civilian and allied life while we inevitably fail? ” The Clevenger in me responds to this new question with a sense of patriotic, even divine, duty. As a small child, I did not fully grasp the implications of translation and the issues that arise from recitation. Although divorce is not an issue of the gods, they fell in and out of love and this was synonymous with events in my own life, and with members of my own family. While arguments with my brother could never be described as divine, our struggles often reminded me of the fights between Apollo and Artemis, siblings who squabbled but ultimately loved each other. This never-ending cycle is the reason Afghans have been fighting almost constantly since 1979. This is why I think that “warheads on foreheads” is strategically counterproductive. Being given the Sisyphean task of killing our way out of an insurgency, the only response I can have is to work very hard to be sure that the warheads are landing on the right foreheads. I can already see itâ€"myself, sitting in classrooms where everyone wants to be thereâ€"where I am not being measured, rated, scored, and I can learn through communicating, not testing. Where Johnnies not only question my truths, but theirs too. So, must all beauty be false and can truth only come ugly? The D’aulaire’s take on Greek tales gives sweetness and life to staggeringly human stories while still painting characters in divine light. Although gods, the heroes of Olympus would make mistakes, get angry, and fall in love. This basic principle that even gods made mistakes allowed me to process my everyday life. 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 wanted to brush off the proselike dust off an old book. 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. So, I though, it must have been possible for me. It was late December and the snow was gently falling outside. 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. Now, as a student of Latin, I understand the strain of translation. No two translations are ever the same, usually due to the education and bias of the translator. The D’aulaire’s remain true to the wildly complex myths of Ancient Greece while crafting an accessible book for children. The story of Orpheus, the musician who looked back at the last second to ensure his beloved was following him, remains a non-example in matters of perseverance. This book is foundational to me because of its portrayal of divine creatures and the exhibition of basic human desires and imperfections. I was trapped in a classroom where my peers could only see one truth, one dimension of a book because they hadn’t read it.