There is no place as wrought with psyche-shattering potential as the orderly, new-paper-scented aisles of Barnes and Noble. A forest of books surrounds me, bearing their unbroken spines, begging for the gentle wear and tear of my care. It is here that the cloth of my consciousness has been woven and rewoven with the cracking open of every novel and volume of poetry.

When I was innocent and in the third grade, my father promised to buy me any book I would read. It was a promise that would impact me more greatly than anything to date and sent me home with the dark romance of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights buried between my lanky arms and lap. From then on, in my life that was no longer separated from literature by the fact I was a penniless kid, the thoughts of geniuses from Homer to Rimbaud began to mingle with my own. As a fourth grader, Walt Whitman forced me to reconsider the grass, and I felt hope in the hopelessness of fate. In the fifth grade, I followed Sylvia Plath on her trek through the depths of depression, and I felt like I wasn’t alone in the sea of emotion. I went with Siddhartha when I was twelve on his journey of self-discovery (or self-destruction) before I stood at his endless river and understood. Eighth grade saw me reading Walden, which strengthened my desire to be self-sufficient and to stand up for my ideals. I began high school reading Sartre, and I’ve gone many times with Kerouac on his crazy journey across America and back again. Ginsberg, as I was a junior, showed me the beauty in a deluge of the English language, and my pattern of thought began to flow like one of his poems. 

Being confronted with these ideas and considering them carefully at such a young age elevated my own intellectual ability and challenged me to think and feel as deeply as they did.  I became, once and for all, a thinker who will go anywhere and do anything to expand my knowledge, who will talk endlessly to anyone trying to understand their point of view, and who will read any book I can find for the ideas nestled between the covers.

Reading has given me an open, peaceful mind prepared for receiving the world around me, and the thinking skills necessary for formulating opinions about what I observe. The chief desire I have for my life is that I may learn and understand as much as I possibly can about the world around me so, by the end, I might have something original to say and add my own thread to the tapestry of human history.