Office Of Admissions

Office Of Admissions Lolita inspired in me a fervent hunger for discussion of truth. By the time high school rolled around, that girl was nowhere to be found. If you flip through the book now, you can see the pages I gripped so tightly that they tore. After reading Lolita, my brother and I spent the following days dissecting every minute detail, trying to find some kind of understanding of Lolita. This book is foundational to me because of its portrayal of divine creatures and the exhibition of basic human desires and imperfections. Stories of centuries ago would flit around us as her voice gave life to Orpheus, the musician, Prometheus, the maker of man, and Pan, the god of nature. In times of strife, I would often revisit these myths, using them to process and understand the stress of my young life. So, must all beauty be false and can truth only come ugly? To clarify, my response was not a result of any past trauma. My visceral reaction to Lolita remains a mystery to me. The words manifested in my body, and remain there today. I can’t look at it without a wave of nausea and fascination crashing over me. 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. 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. School didn’t require, and at times, actively discouraged my insatiable desire to figure out the puzzles of the world, so I shoved that side of myself away and forgot that it even existed. This epic is not only a great bookâ€"it is the great book of Poland, as important and symbolic as the Vistula River that flows from the Polish mountains to the Baltic sea. Constitution, Poles are required to memorize sections of Pan Tadeusz, especially those which are thought to embody the core of what it means to be Polish. A Pole reciting the opening of Pan Tadeusz is like an American reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Its author, Adam Mickiewicz, is considered something of a literary god, somewhere between Dante and Shakespeare. The novel also addresses conformism and its effects on society. The conformism in the novel is blindly following government orders, not questioning the comical levels of commodity deficits, the lack of freedom of speech, and restrictions on art. 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. After years and years of being told what to think and the “right” questions to ask, I had retreated into intellectual paralysis. I would uncomprehendingly coast through my classes, molding my knowledge to fit the next quiz and promptly forgetting it afterwards. We searched together for insight, sat up late after dinner arguing about whether or not Humbert loved Dolores, and what the final meeting between Humbert and Dolores meant. My experience of Lolita is intrinsically connected to the discussions I had with my brother.