essays! help me!

EDIT: I've now posted an updated version with some of the edits.

I just sent out a mass text asking people to help me edit some essays I'm writing for an application, and this is the easiest way for everyone to see it. This came about because I realized this morning how I wanted to write the essay and that it was already half-written, so the organization really sucks. This is a SUPER first draft, but I'm hoping for some power-editing so I can get it in by today instead of having to wait all weekend. I'm sorry it's so difficult to follow with all of my notes. Also don't judge me. :D

Thanks so much, you all are awesome.

2. What book have you read recently that you found especially significant or valuable? What difference has it made in your life?

ISSUES: fragmented sentences, starting with ‘because’ or ‘and’. Informal. Also informal: contractions. Parenthetical notes I need to make decisions about. Schplotch material needs to be cleaned up. Some things don’t actually make sense. Is abbreviating OHYS okay? The conclusion sucks. Not sure if I made everything relevant enough, or even made the point that I express in the last sentence. Relevant enough to the prompt? References to the book too obscure?




This December, on the reliable recommendation from most avid readers of the family, I picked up Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. There is no doubt it was unlike any literary experience I have ever had because, for the first time in my life, despite having adored my fair share of books, within five minutes of finishing the last page, I had turned back to the first and begun again. Perhaps it was the poetry of Marquez’s prose (even in translation!) that had me so intrigued, or maybe the poignant ending, but something had hooked me and it was only in reading it a second time that the entirety and exceptional wholeness of the novel’s meaning was much more than a vague sense of awe in my mentality.

That is what strikes me most about this story of the Buendía family’s rise and fall – the wholeness of its expression. I picked up this book at a truly opportune moment, because as a new perspective had begun to form itself in my consciousness, One Hundred Years of Solitude offered that exact perspective in novel form. As unable, still, as I am to express the profound outlook that this book embodies, I find myself walking through my life as though watching it through a new lens. An intense and thorough sense of change overwhelms me at the most odd or inane moments – as I glance at a computer screen or catch a whiff of baking bread, or feel the brush of lips against my shoulder – and makes me wonder if the whole way I have been viewing life has been a minute degree in the wrong direction. It is the warp and manipulation and morphing of time and, seemingly, a glimpse of hidden reality.

Time, to us, is just a continuous succession of moments, of events. We are trapped in the way our actions move through time, our visions and perspectives are bound by the way moments enter our eyes and ears and minds and senses, our tongues wrap themselves around a language that limits us. We see the past, present and future as endlessly done, doing and will do: immovable, visible and infinitely impressionable. But sometimes we notice patterns and we anticipate sameness or potential, and we feel the past permeating into the here and now. And that, to me, is because time isn’t an endless succession of moments: we can see its sameness because it is one moment, the same moment, it’s a stack of moments, seeping through again and again. It’s all the same.

Déjà vu has taken on a distinctly new flavor and the draw and significance of history is suddenly tenfold. Memories are a glimpse of one moment through time; history is our way of drawing lines or pulling strings or tying knots in the human timeline. As One Hundred Years demonstrates, the isolation of the Aurelianos or the exuberance of the Jose Arcadios, the tragedy of the common solitude, and the cataclysmic demise of the family transcends generations, and remains throughout the passage of decades and entrance of every character or event and shade of difference imaginable. The human plight, along with the human triumph and ineptitude (error? Or what?) and isolation, is universal and understood; it is simple and the same and a connection we can all boast of or mourn together and alone, a commonality (do I need more words that mean this?) that ties us to one another and to eternity alike.

And so perhaps walking through life should be a little easier this way. Universality is always a great comfort and though we all die alone there is a large amount of solace to be had in the profound approach found by a manipulation of our perspective: that as alone as we are, we all live and die in the same way. Really, it’s all the same.


This sentence:
"
Not only that, but we are all the same, (;? Or a dash? The ‘we are all the same’ doesn’t seem emphasized enough. Also how do I make this relevant by explaining that this perspective is related to the one described in the previous paragraph about time?) in ways that I had never seen before."
was originally the beginning of the paragraph that starts: deja vu has... but then it was pointed out that it didn't belong there. should i just get rid of it or is there somewhere else to put it? if i'm getting rid of it should i rework the conclusion?