This short essay is a response paper to Rachel Carson's article "The Marginal World." I chose to work on it further because I didn't clearly express my ideas in the previous draft that it seemed like I was saying people couldn't feel poignant towards ephemeral beauties, and that I was completely denying Carson's poignant feeling. I wanted to clarify that I was only trying to give another way of seeing these beauties that I personally found better, and left the decision of what to feel to my readers.
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- Dec 2017
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In conclusion, maybe seeing ephemeral beauties with lament help people value these beauties more, I consider this behavior to be pessimistic, for they always feel sorry for something that’s gone. In my perspective, we can be come optimistic by looking at these beauties with happiness and gratitudes, that we are not immersed in sadness after the beauties are gone, but rather feeling grateful and looking forward to meet them again.
This newly added conclusion served to express and clarify my idea that, though I could understand Carson's feeling of poignant, there could be a more optimistic way of looking at ephemeral beauties. I personally do not like feeling poignant, so I hope that feeling can be replaced by gratitude and happiness. However, it is up to the readers to decide what to feeling--I am just offering a possible angle to inform my readers that, feeling poignant is not the only choice.
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I won’t feel poignant.
I deleted the original sentence, which is "I couldn't understand why she felt poignant." That weakened my argument: if I couldn't understand Carson, I would look so biased and stubborn to the readers, as if I was only trying to make them think like me.
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It’s not bad that Carson felt poignant towards these ephemeral beauties; however, from a more positive view of life and beauty, I want to suggest to see these ephemeral beauties with happiness, gratitude, and excitement rather than sadness and lament.
I added this part to further clarify that I was only suggesting my perspective of see ephemeral beauties through a more positive perspective. I could understand why Carson or some people feel poignant about these beauties, and I wanted to say that there could be a different way of seeing them.
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Like the recent solar eclipse that won’t happen for another 100 years, I didn’t feel sad about it’s short existence but rather feel amazed that I was this fortunate to see it.
I changed this example by making myself the character. By doing that this became less general but more personal: I was not trying to represent other people and saying what they should feel; rather, I was trying to tell the readers what I felt, and let them decide what they want to feel.
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First of all, although Carson found the beauty of ephemeral things poignant, I hold a different opinion.
The original sentence here was "It is interesting that Carson found the beauty of ephemeral things poignant." By that it seemed that I didn't understand how Carson was feeling. By revising this sentence I clarified that I could understand her, while I also had a different idea.
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personally
By adding a "personally" here I emphasize the fact that it is just my perspective, so I am rather trying to express my idea than forcing my readers to think like this: I am trying to communicate with my readers.
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When I wanted to hide from a new world, my dorm was a shelter for me; when I walked out to explore the new world, my dorm helped me to realize my true self. You can say that it is only a simple dorm–but don’t judge it by its external values–it is my shelter, my own world, and where I find myself.
In my first draft I went too far by talking about getting rid of the limits and become someone you truly are. I revised this ending paragraph to relate to the essay as a whole: the meditation on place. Whatever I went to in the body paragraphs, my main idea is how my dorm as a place help me to adjust to college life and to find my true self as internal values.
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Thus it was not our external that mattered; it was our internals the true selfs. With the external values of an Chinese international student, I could be good friends with native students, and really blend into their social zones; I could be a confident person not worrying about my identity as a colored student when walking in the campus; I could do anything that I wouldn’t do only because I was judged by my external values. Everyone could.
Making myself a example, I clearly explained why external values didn't matter, but our internal values did. With a personal example I went to the point "I could do anything that I wouldn’t do only because I was judged by my external values. Everyone could."
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I felt more like a true self, touching my inner world without the constraint of my outer part. The world always judged us with our outer parts: appearances, skin colors, and identities assigned to us based on where we were from or what group of people we looked like. We were, therefore, confined by these limits that we also tended to judge and limit ourselves with our external values, for example, like Asian international students wouldn’t get along well with American students.
This is a further development from my first draft, from thinking about being a brain to somewhere farther, to a place where I realized we were all confined in our external values and thus ignored internal values.
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In this brand new life, I was gaining completely different and new experiences everyday. For a short while I wasn’t willing to adjust to the new environment and life here, considered myself a Chinese international student lost in the world of native students and college staff; fortunately I eventually stopped hiding myself and stepped out of my dorm.
I wrote this part in the final draft in order to give transitional information, which connects my acceptance of a new life with the following discovery of my true self. In the first draft I wrote "Once for a while I confused myself with my identity... and fortunately I found myself willing to accept and adjust to this new life," which was quite confusing. I revised it to make it clear, and added some examples to make it reasonable rather than too general.
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Not bad, I told myself. Maybe I could become a part of the college community. Maybe I could make friends with native students here. After all…I should go out of my dorm. Encouraged by friendly people around, I accepted to adjust to my new life. After three weeks of school, I was more or less like a typical college student, familiar with the campus, busy with study in the library, and back to dorm only for rest. I made more connections with people around me, like joining my peers’ discussion of homework problems before class, having dinner with someone I just met in the cafe, and asking my room assistant for help. I have to admit that it’s hard to really blend into native people’s community due to different backgrounds and life experiences: we might laugh at different jokes, considered relationships with others in a different way, an even perceived our life and careers at different angles. But Boston College told us, everyone here, though different in race, appearance, belief, sexual orientation…etc., was respected and considered equal.
This part is completely different from the first draft. In the first draft I ended the paragraph with one sentence "After three weeks of school, I already feel that I belong to here in Boston College." In this final draft, I gave many examples of my adapting process, which served as a transition of myself from being afraid and not willing to leave my dorm to being used and happy to have such a college life. I accepted the new environment and my new life as a international college student.
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people I didn’t know much about, a completely English-speaking environment, and entirely different weather…all overwhelmingly new and uncertain that I missed the good old days when mom and dad were always behind me. I knew that, for most people I met, the pedestrians, Uber drivers, and college staff, we could speak the same language, while varied so much both outside and inside. I was worried about my identity: “Do I belong here?”
In the first draft I ended this paragraph with "The desks stood by the windows, through which you couldn't see any but the grassland." I was trying to give details of my dorm, but that detail doesn't help me develop or help readers understand me. So I revised it by giving more details at the beginning of this paragraph, and wrote about my condition when I first came to the United States to help the reader have a better understanding of my feelings as an International student both new to the U.S. and college life.
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Apparently my Chinese roommate had finished moving in.
This didn't exist in the first draft. Without saying that I have a Chinese roommate, it will cause confusion at the end of paragraph two, where I say that my door is a familiar place to me. If I mention my roommate is from China, my claim will make sense.
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