Infinitely.

A Monday Afternoon (the college essay of which I am most proud)

The short film Powers of Ten begins with an aerial shot of a couple picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera zooms out ten meters. It then zooms out again, but the degree of the zoom has increased by a power of ten; the camera is now 100 meters away. It continues to 1,000 meters, then 10,000, and so on, traveling through the solar system, the galaxy, and eventually to the edge of the known universe. Here the camera rests, allowing us to examine the vast nothingness of the universe, black void punctuated sparsely by galaxies so far away they appear as small stars. The narrator comments, “This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception.” Then the camera reverses its journey, zooming in to the picnic, and—in negative powers of ten—to the man’s hand, the cells in his hand, the molecules of DNA within, their atoms, and then the nucleus both “so massive and so small” in the “vast inner space” of the atom.

I tried my hardest to stay awake, or, at the very least, to give the appearance of being interested. With my head hanging limply in my hands, I listened to the slow drone of the teacher carrying on about some famous painting in some famous style by some famous artist that I cared nothing about, and counted the minutes to the end of class.  Unfortunately for me, the class had only just begun, and there was a still a full year lying ahead. 

It was the first day of eighth grade.  

The first class of the year: art.  

My interest: none.

I had never been an artistic person.  Sure, my parents had encouraged me when I would proudly present them with pieces of mangled construction paper, weighed down by globs of half-dried glue and disheveled pom-poms in every imaginable color.  They would hang the “masterpieces” in their offices and on the fridge… not as a symbol of any grand artistic talent, but as my reward for trying to achieve something so wholly unattainable.  Even as a child, I somehow recognized this façade and gave up on art for things that I was actually mildly interested in, like putting together my puzzle of the Periodic Table of Elements.

Sitting in that art class that Monday, however, surrounded by what looked to me as Picasso-worthy paintings by my peers, I felt lost.  There were no praiseful parents in sight, just award-winning art mocking my own foolish ambition for thinking I could ever produce something with a fraction of the quality of those around me.

My teacher, whose name I can’t even remember, held up a poster of George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon” for the class to see. The purpose was to demonstrate the Impressionist style of Pointillism, in which the artist creates an image by using nothing more than tiny dots.  From a distance, it merely looked like an ordinary illustration from any juvenile picture book.  I could just imagine the caption: “See how many people YOU can count!”  underneath it, engaging the uninterested kids and making them believe that counting to twenty is truly the most enjoyable thing they will ever do. 

But up close, zooming in and breaking the boundary between person and art, the images blurred into small dots, rendering the figures unrecognizable and stranded amidst a swirl of disorder and chaos, and the true essence of the painting was visible.  Within what seemed to be a perfectly red dress were dots of yellow and blue. The “green” grass actually had specs of grey and yellow.  I couldn’t make myself look any closer; something about the painting’s unexpected deception struck me.  Stepping back again, the calm figures reappeared and the unsettling disarray morphed back into a familiar scene depicting leisurely strolls and dainty parasols against the backdrop of a serene lakeside.  

These small dots, as the foundation of this painting, are in essence the foundation of our world, equally unsettling as it is intriguing.  Our society is formed by billions of individuals, each with their own unique identity but somehow connected by unseen and unspoken ties.  They are then broken down into smaller pieces, cells, which are broken down into even smaller particles, atoms.  Life revolves around one dot in particular, Carbon, a simple element without a mind or a conscience of its own - just twelve electrons mindlessly orbiting around its twelve-proton nucleus.  Within this motley conglomeration of particles comes something intrinsically complex: the world.  Earth is nothing but its own form of Pointillism, of entropy, one created long before Seurat and his Impressionist contemporaries.  And what is Earth but an insignificant dot in the vastness of space, filled with brighter and more beautiful balls of flaming gas and rock?  This succession of dots has no limit, but rather represents the interconnectedness of all beings, coming together as small, individual flecks of matter to form one coherent identity. 

But I don’t want to be relinquished to a dot. I don’t want my fate to be determined by the identity of those other “specs” around me.  Rather, I want to be the one point in the blur of the surrounding Pointillism that sticks out, the yellow dot within a swirl of red or the nucleus within an atom, defining myself amidst the surrounding entropy.