Into these forested deeps, the yawning pastures of Pennsylvanian green: I found that the deeper I traveled into the country, the quieter my mind became, pari passu. The fewer obstacles that obstructed my vision into the stretching landscape, the more that the aperture of my eyes narrowed, the farther I got from the caterwaul of my life in the City, a simultaneous cleansing of my mind occurred. My focus narrowed into a thin corridor of light, a concentrated beam, a sharp laser that seemed to cut through all that frivolity and callowness that once clouded my mind so as to produce some clarity, a few ounces of long-awaited perspicacity. The clouds overhead were imperial in size. The cerulean blue of that entirely inaccessible space above became brighter; it looked cleaner. Nature sprawled out her beauty body before me, her gracious proportions, and I was frozen in a bitter mixture of shock and admonishment: this beautiful planet, of which I can sit and ruminate on for hours ad infinitum, yet we occupy ourselves with the exercises of tyranny, malice, and murder. The drive wasn't particularly long, no, it was about three hours. I knew, however, what I had to achieve in this academic term. I knew that it wasn't about the marks anymore, those fucking adventitious mind games that drive my generation into suicide, depravity, and apathy. It wasn't about brown-nosing professors into writing me a pristine letter of recommendation. These pithy activities are reserved for the meek, the scholarly prurience that has led to the steady decay of this generation. No, my goal was much more unpleasant. It was much more obscure. I knew that my duty for this term was to reflect on my understanding of morality, of ethics.
Concealed deeper than any farinaceous, visible layers, I knew that I harbored the same hatred and malevolence that I reviled in others who were more open about it. I knew that if one were prod enough, to dissect enough, the same dark blood of racism, prejudice, and spite could be found running through my veins as well. How could I deny this for so long? The way that I chose friends, the people I chose to avoid, those whom I wanted to help, those to whom I'm attracted to sexually, romantically. It isn't cultural upbringing, that harbinger of post-modernity is an insufficient, spindly answer. This preferential behavior was the same poison that fueled civil strife turned ethnic cleansing, cousin to genocide. I was already preparing for the battles against a world of strife, discrimination, injustice, when, in fact, the same elements constituted my very mentality. I consulted many about my fears, and though they reassured that it was something of a youth-turn-man bildungsromanesque problem experienced by every Tom Sawyer, ever 이상(Yi-sang), I couldn't accept that answer. My fear was that my morality became nothing but ornamental, and upon the slightest bending of the will, everything that I thought I stood for crumbled like some frangible, friable, insignificant thing.
So I inspect myself, without mercy, without fear of loss or defeat. I observe my weakness and prey about them, I do not supplicate a higher force to empower me. I establish firm footing, a steadfast grounding, and I prepare to hold my own against whatever torrents of doubt and darkness that lay ahead of me. I suspect that this introspection will not leave me unscathed, but will batter me, scrabble at my established mind, and bend and twist my comforts. I'm afraid; at the same time, my fear provides a light, a hubris, into a direction that I sense is progress - a sense that provides me with the comfort of knowing that I cannot fail.
