[The same perplexity each year during the college admissions season; I feel like I say some version of this every year.]
A few years ago I was talking to an undergraduate who had asked me for advice about choosing majors. She thought she might become a Russian major: her family had lived in Russia for three years when she was an adolescent, she still spoke some rudimentary Russian, and was ‘very interested’ in Russian literature. I knew nothing about our Slavic department (except that there was a Russian language house if one wanted an immersive dormitory experience) and could not claim to be an expert on Russian literature, but why not? I always approve of people studying any kind of literature, and a deep personal childhood connection to a land and its language was as powerful a motive as any, we could all do worse than have an emotional connection to the things we study.)
But as I spoke to her, and probed her interest, (and hoped to learn something new), I began to realise her knowledge of Russian literature was confined to about 2 or 3 Russian authors, and that she’d read only a single work from each. It did not appear either that she had developed any meaningful insight or critical appreciation of what she had read. What truly startled me was that I myself could name, off-hand, 12 or 13 Russian authors from each of whom I’d read at least one work, sometimes more, and I’d read all that by the time I was her age, give or take a year or two. And I found this contrast astonishing. I am not the one with a professed interest in majoring in Russian, nor had taken any Russian literature classes even in translation: they were simply books that, being a reader, I had read in the course of my teenage life. This is not a kid from whom resources had been denied, to whom books were expensive, or inaccessible, or unavailable in a language she could understand, who had been limited to reading the three minor works she could check out of her underfunded town library. This student was from a well-to-do family, the child of an diplomat himself not unintellectual, and had been educated at expensive international schools in various world capitals all her life. I could not believe, was upset even, that she could speak blithely of an “interest” who had never made any effort to cultivate her knowledge of this purported area of interest. (As far as I know (I may be wrong) she never did end up taking any classes in the Slavic department in her time at UVA.)
This memory came back to me recently — for a Dutchman had written to me, surprised to see me list Cees Nooteboom as a favourite author. Was he much read outside of The Netherlands, he wanted to know, and had I read any other Dutch authors? I thought for a bit, and found I could count off six or seven single works by various authors, in addition to works by Harry Mulisch (four) and Nooteboom (all but one of the novels in English, and some of the essays) — not unsubstantial, as I said to V afterwards (with enormous satisfaction), and probably not what you might have expected from a random Asian girl on the internet who doesn’t speak any Dutch nor work in any related field and who has never been to the Netherlands. But that again is the point. I had read them (in the bowels of Alderman Library while not going to lectures) not because I thought 15 years later this would come in extremely handy for flirting with a Dutchman. I read them because I am a person who reads and because I had read them, I became someone who has read Nooteboom. The reason I was reading Nooteboom at all in college was that he’d been mentioned in a Byatt essay at a time I was just beginning to learn Latin and Greek, and I was reading Byatt because the problem of tales and fragments were starting to preoccupy me, and Nooteboom led to more Nooteboom and then more Dutch writers.
The point is simply this: you don’t make a plan about how to prepare yourself in a particular way so that you can present yourself in a particular way to an admissions committee. No, if you are a certain kind of young person, with a certain curiosity or hankering about something, then those things you are interested in would naturally be a part of who you are. I don’t care if you study sea urchins or nuclear physics or Piers Plowman or prehistoric art history. I care less what you are passionate about than that you are passionate about something. But the fact is that you will not be able to help being anything else. The history of the person you are becoming, have become, is the history of that curiosity, that hankering, that interest.
And here is the other point. If you truly are a mathematician or a dancer or a painter, you don’t need to write about how much you love maths or love dance or love art. You write about maths itself, about movement itself, about colour and light, and how you write about it is a function of the mathematician and the dancer and the painter that you are and have worked to become, your own quality of mind as it takes root in your field. And even when you are talking about something else, even if is something banal, what you are really talking about is maths, or colour , or dance. Because dance or maths or colour is what you see the world with.
So it is completely bizarre to me that colleges would ask you to write about a transformative experience, and for you to try and chart that transformation in a five paragraph essay, because if you have been transformed, then the person you are now is the person who bears the imprint of the transformation. Why not simply ask who you are?
So that is my yearly rant on the subject.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird