Describe the world you come from – for example, your family, community or
school – and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations:
All men are fascinated by the
truth. My fascination is then with the idea. I was born in Moscow,
and had to leave its still fresh embrace when I was five, too young to have
absorbed much of Russia’s
culture or traditions. My family settled into an isolated community in the San-Francisco
suburbs a year later, when I was too old to accept a new culture or set of traditions.
The move left me un-rooted in this world, ideologically free from place and
time. My intellectual community became my books and my father. My father, a bio
chemic, taught me about the physical and objective side of existence. My books
taught me about the subjective, intellectual, and spiritual side. The books
themselves intrigued me as well. When I read a good book the words and ideas in
it seemed almost tangible to me, as if the people inside of them really existed,
as if the mind that created it all was right there with his world in the cup of
his hand. Although it was more beautiful than my dad’s teaching, I knew that it
was just ink. That fact cultured a certain disdain for the unreal, what
importance does it have if it doesn’t effectually exist? It wasn’t until I turned fourteen years old,
about the time that I became interested in art, that I realized the real world
my father taught me about and the intellectual world of books were intimately
connected. It wasn’t a revelation as I expected it would be, but rather a slow
understanding. I knew that I finally understood when I looked at an art deco chair.
The chair was elegantly simple; made of two metallic inverted half circles, one
larger pointed up for a person to lie in, and the other smaller pointed down on
the bottom as the legs. Although what I was looking at was a purely physical
metallic object, I saw that it was simultaneously an idea; the knowledge of its
creation and purpose. The fact that an
idea could be coaxed into physical existence fascinated me. I realized that building
is the art and knowledge of materializing the idea and the human mind, a way to
sculpt the beauty of the mind onto the staleness of physical existence. If man is indeed a bridge between animal and over
man, then engineering is the most human art. Truth, that unexplainable feeling
that that lives in everyone’s heart, is engineering as a noun. It is that which
is real, that which has a physical counterpart. Engineering is creating that
reality, that physical existence.
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it needs a conclusion but other than that I like the essay. What do you guys think?