I’m taking my SAT’s soon!! #excited (joke)
Recently, I received a practice essay prompt that I found really interesting. Happiness is actually something I think relatively often about, so I had a lot to say on this subject. It took me a while to start writing, (I sat around trying to brainstorm/outline, facebook messaging for a few minutes), but here is what I got down in 25 minutes! I translated everything directly from my test paper, so it is still just a first draft.
Prompt:
“No one is contented in this world, I believe. There is always something left to desire, and the last thing longed for always seems the most necessary to happiness.”
–Marie Corelli, A Romance of Two Worlds
Assignment: Do you think that people are capable of finding happiness or are they always searching for something beyond what they have? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
” People can find happiness in a multitude of different forms, such as beauty, youth, love, or even complacency, depending on his or her own perception of the world. (Some will find happiness in the never ending pursuit of knowledge, some in the bliss that follows ignorance.) However, no matter by what means initial happiness is granted, humans will continue struggling to find truer and more permanent form of this happiness. We can look to an example of the Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.
Dorian first truly becomes unhappy when he is shown a new perspective of the world by Lord Henry Wotton. He realizes that beauty is the truest form of genius, because it need not be proved, instead it can be shown. Upon realizing this, his own exquisite and rare beauty no longer holds any sense of happiness for him; instead, being able to hold onto this beauty and youth becomes what he hopelessly strives for. The realization that his beauty, which one satisfied him, was ephemeral, again made him unhappy and longing for more.
Ultimately, when we come to the realization that everything in life has a transient nature, nothing can make us truly happy, unless it holds the promise of eternal return. If even our very lives do not that promise, nothing within it does. This ultimate realization of transience is what makes our searching for happiness so changing and untrue. Dorian goes to extreme lengths to fight the natural transience of life, constantly for his beauty and youth to last. In the end, Dorian dies a murderer, old and alone.
Happiness is not something that can be permanently attained, because life takes back all it gives. Things are by nature fleeting, and as a result, the struggle for true content is never-ending.”
What do you guys think? Agree? Disagree?
-A
