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“I seek to ascertain a way to breathe life back into my sunken chamber. I need to discover an incarnate means to replicate the meditative shadow that appears on the wall of my inner cave. I must eliminate the distorted manner that I look at the world through the falsifying mirrors of illusion and delusion. My innermost fear is that I wasted precious time, squandered opportunities, and the clock will expire before I create any worthy testament to the pristine beauty of nature or innate goodness of humankind. I shudder in the creeping shadows of the evening struck by the thought that I lack the discipline, talent, and fortitude as well as the crucial gift of evaluation and analysis demanded to add to the collective good. I fear that selfishly ensconced in a cosseted life I ignored the shaft of light that openly beckons each of us to unbolt. I am clueless of how to release the glorious expression of beauty that our nature seeks to burnish in our fleeting ambulation across the plains of time. Do I dare pull back the curtain and unmask the timid man that stands hidden behind the sheltering layers of untruth that conceal the demesne of his mangled personal thoughts, feelings, emotions, wants, and needs? Inside this crusted urn, is there a shard of anything that can be cultivated for goodness, if only I possessed the strength of mind and insight to will it into fruition? Does one know how to share their modest notions with other people who might yearn to hear that they too are not alone?”

“Finishing large projects can result in a mild or severe thud of depression. The scariest part about completing any demanding project is that irrespective of how exhausting the labor might be the work also arrests a person’s attention. Working passionately is akin to a person consenting to a kidnaping. A person engaged in performing a princely task feels whisked away on a captivating voyage of undetermined final destination. At times, I wondered if the only thing that actually kept me going is the work of crafting sentences. Writing sentences is contagious. Finishing a sentence infects a person with a desire to write another sentence. The feverish rash of writing spread until it consumed all my resources. Once I stop writing, I will need to find a new reason to awaken each day.”

“Each generation produces its oracles and sages, independent thinkers whom serve as cultural bearers. Every generation produces perceptive individuals whose special radiance answers the trumpet call of the pernicious challenges bestowed by their times. These compassionate mavens provide worthy insights on humankind’s gallant attempt to escape its balmy pond of alienation and frigid sea of desolation. Conversations conducted by past and present essayist speaking in consonance between parallel times judiciously reflect the polyphonic cadence of robust jubilation wrought through living purposefully. The coruscating voices of the muses from times of yore manufacture the accordion spine of humankind’s expanding éclat anthology.”

“The tug of self-destruction and the desire to defy mortality by creating an everlasting mark upon this world are uneasy acquaintances. The strident edginess behind a writer’s searchlight voice is a product of the natural tension that engenders when an apathetic writer believes death could arrive tonight. Stunned by fear of a hard deadline, the writer is jolted from their state of laziness and mental neglect that trolling inertia dampens their aptitude to love life.”

“A personal essay is probably the most malleable form of writing style, because it enables a writer to engage in a felicitous conversation with oneself. The more formal rules that govern academic writing are largely inapplicable to personal essay writing. Personal essays are free from the forbidding cadence and rigid structure of thesis writing. A personal essay’s lilt reflects the movement of the writer’s mind.”

“An essayist’s tone can be grim or playful, somber or teasing, and critical or uplifting. Unlike a thesis that a writer drafts to establish, verify, and support a proposition, a person primarily writes a personal essay to please oneself by questioning, probing, and investigating the mysterious, anomalous, and the unknowable wreckage of our humanity. A writer frequently initiates a personal essay by simply clearing their throat.”

“Art consist of a writer or painter’s psychosis extirpated on the canvas of his choosing, a truism whether one is inspecting a Vincent Van Gogh masterpiece or deciphering the incomprehensible utterings and dissociated ramblings of one of the Philistines framed in the picaresque novel ‘Confederacy of Dunces, written by American novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969).”

“An essayist, unlike a fiction writer, needs to establish their objective reliability, equitable sincerity, intellectual integrity and maintain their authoritative trustworthiness because they are an acknowledged reporter of true events and relating or applying the ideas and principles of their sources.”

“Writing and other efforts to produce an enduring piece of artwork is a gallant response to the prospect of death. Every person knows that they must die, and consequently people build elaborate symbolic defenses mechanism to shield themselves from knowledge of their impermanence. Every person possesses autonomy of the will, the ability to choose how to conduct their life. The freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless; it provides a person with no sense of meaning and supplies no purpose to life because a mere collection of objects will not transcend their physical demise. An artist does not deny their impermanence but embraces the prospect of their death by laboring to create a monument of their existence that will survive their expiry.”

“Writing a personal essay or memoir addresses how a person thinks and behaves in the context of society’s prevailing moral and ethical codes, informal rules, laws, and customs. A self-ethnographer emphasis what he or she considers important regarding how people perceive and categorize the world, their meaning for behavior, how they imagine and explain things, and ascertaining what has meaning for them. Expository writing, a discursive examination of a broad field of subjects, is one method of cohering the dimensions of a person’s emic and etic thoughts and a linked series of memorable events into a unified personal ideology how to live a purposeful life. In cultural anthropology, the emic approach focuses on what people of a local culture think and how they interpret events whereas the etic approach takes a more objective view of how an outsider evaluates the behavior and customs of a culture. Usage of both emic and etic analysis provides the richest description of a cultural or a society in which the personal essayist operates within.”

“Personal essay writing that incites the mind and instigates personal growth involves examination and re-examination, a process of noticing and reflecting upon what a person perceives. Essayistic writing is an osmotic process wherein a person intuitively absorbs information and ideas, allows inchoate thoughts to gestate in the unconscious mind, and then consciously places the emergent strands of language and logic into an orderly and expressive format.”

“The womb of the world births us. My filth comes from the same earthwork that gives rise to all stories. My interior light connects me with all the other creatures that inhabit this world of rocks, air, grass, woods, and water. My genetic code links me inextricably with all of nature. I enter the medley in the river of life with the ability to respond as life unfolds before my childlike eyes. My homemade medicinal poultice might not be of any benefit to other people. Nonetheless, we should each write our stories because each of us aims to attain a greater degree of awareness of our own authenticity. We owe a moral obligation to our family, friends, and ourselves as well as to the community to make a determined effort to wring the most out of life. We must applaud all efforts to investigate the human condition. Even if my writing amounts to nothing more than a clumsy attempt to travel the same tracks other people burnished with much more insight, clarity, precision, and style, it is an act of self-definition to ascribe to any philosophy. Philosophy represents a living charter; it is a life of action.”

“Akin to any other human being’s creations composed from inspirational toil, the textual rendering of a person depicted in personal essay writing asserts an existence independent of the author. A personal writing voice speaks to me from a secluded mental closet. Writing makes private mental musings a public act.”

“Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.”

“When confronting their distorted way of living, personal essayists must inevitably deal with the horrors of the solipsistic self. Essayists remind us to be astutely aware that life is what occurs before death, and because life is the only truth that we will ever experience, we might as well attempt to get our arms around it and embrace it with all our might. In contrast to the essayist’s desire to make clear-cut distinctions, poetry is an airy art form that makes ample use of metaphors and allusions.”