Edgar Finds His Purpose

A General Introduction: Edgar Finds His Purpose
And this is the year that fate has chosen to thrust me into the world, which those older than me cleverly call "the real world." It is as if I had not been paying attention for the last four years. No, I have been paying attention. The world has its weaknesses. Men have lamented since the dawn of thought about the innate failings of men and the possible resolutions that could be brought forth. However, how smart the man, the perfect world is seemingly unattainable. As proof, I find that I am not running into philosopher kings on every corner.
There is a reason that Sir Thomas Moore chose the name of Utopia. In translation, it means "no place." That was written hundreds of years ago, in a time where great discoveries happened on an almost daily basis, and if you read the literature, a time when men were more enlightened than any time that had been before and had come since. If hundreds of years ago men were cynical about the fate of the world, how is it that a man in this day and age can make some sort of difference in the fate of the world?
We look up at the sky, and gesture at the futility of such an action. We shake our fists at the cosmos and lament. "I am just one man," you find yourself screaming at the sky, "what can I possibly do?" I know that I am too young, too inexperienced to know the answers to these debates that have been raging since the great minds of Athens were preserved as marble likenesses. However, I am old enough to recognize that I do not know these things. I think attorney general John Ashcroft put it best when he said, "There are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. There are things we know we know, there are things we know we don't know, and then there are things we don't know we know. The things that we don't know we know are the most dangerous."
And that, Hopefully, is the point where I come in. A writer's duty is to expose Truth and Beauty in the world, paying careful attention to the proper noun status of these things. If I can, in my time on the Earth, make some of those unknown unknowns into the known unknowns, the world will be a better place. However, I feel that I need to learn more, and be guided by those who have walked the same path, but are slightly ahead of me. The experience of life is a wonderful education. Men who dropped out of school at sixteen know some things that I might never even fathom to think about. I need to learn more. My heart and my soul yearn for it, and my rational mind would be highly offended if I did not utilize all its powers. I was granted with some great gifts that I never asked for, and it is my duty to humanity to use them.
And use them I will. I feel that I have all the tools; it is just that their uses are alien to me. I fumble around like a child with the tools of my craft, and the guidance that someone older than me can offer is much appreciated. As the flower cannot blossom without the rain, a mind needs cultivation through the process of education. Graduate school is the logical choice for me. I can be no autodidact.
Although I can be no autodidact, I can hope for greatness. This is an abstract, untenable thing, this greatness, but it is what I truly hope for. Someday, I want promising scholars and writers to read my work, and be moved. Maybe they will want to study it, applying it to the theory of the day. More likely, I would hope that some young reader, somewhere, is emboldened to take up the pen and dream lofty dreams as I do today. Graduate school will help me on my way. Someday, some English Department’s headquarters will bear my name. Now, will you open the door for me, in this same building?