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BrandonNesfieldFirstEssay 3 - 10 Mar 2016 - Main.EbenMoglen
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-- By BrandonNesfield - 19 Feb 2016 | | | I can’t attribute with any certainty the extent to which nature, rather than nurture, or vice versa, influenced the risk aversion that pushes me toward a corporate career that I must rationalize or justify with talk of “financial stability” and the thoughts of satiating my licentious appetites while developing new ones. The cold fire that fuels one’s dissent into safety and security at the expense of creativity and risk still burns within me—it would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise. I’d like to think that I can rediscover the type of passion that emboldens the career frontiersman who eschews the warmth of security blankets to brave the cold, empty, and infinite fields of possibility. | |
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> | This seems to have been a good draft for clearing the building
site. You've explained an ambivalence, documented an internal
conflict. But even though the pronoun most in use is "I," the
draft in the end has as its subject what the sociologist David
Riesman famously called "other-direction," in his book
The Lonely Crowd. We see that others' attitudes (about work, about
money, about "licentiousness") are defining an identity in which
life choices are presented as outcomes of a process you do not
fully inhabit, and which is "yours" only in the sense that others
have created it in you. The next draft of the essay is the one
in which, having allowed those voices their way, the
"inner-directed" person who is engaged in learning about the
world and himself speaks not about an "I" manufactured from the
views, preferences, and obsessions of others, but from the
interior uncertainties those powers usually silence.
Your writing here is capable, but too complex to be forceful.
Simplify next time around. Use shorter sentences. Avoid
"experiential schooling in South African history," "brilliantly
burning dreams" and so on. You saw a burned child and wanted to
help the wretched of the earth. You went back to Duke and
reassumed the identity and values of pampered rich people whose
consumption is more important to them than others' misery. You
confronted status anxiety, and it was stronger than you were.
These are good things to write about, but the more simply the
more effectively. This is merely prologue: you need to reserve
deeper words for the deeper process of forgetting all that and
listening intently to who you are inside these days.
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