possibilities

I want to be a writer. I want to sit at a desk and string words together from 9 to 5. I want to sit in contemplation until I find the perfect verb to take its place center-stage in a sentence. I love writing.

I have to keep telling myself this as I exhaust myself learning about rhetoric, something that I have never even been introduced to before. My saving grace is Annie Dillard, the author that I am doing my Style Analysis Essay on. She gives me hope that there is more to writing than putting commas in the proper place and following the many, many rules of rhetoric.

Here's a quote from Dillard's essay "Contemporary Prose Styles,"

"Fine writing is not a mirror, not a window, not a document, not a surgical tool. It is an artifact and an achievement; it is at once an exploratory craft and the planet it attains; it is a testimony to the possibility of the beauty and penetration of written language."

And I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly. For some people, there is beauty in a completed math equation or a perfectly lit photograph or that light that comes into a student's eye when they finally grasp a before-foreign concept. For me, there is beauty in well-written language, in words that ignite the reader's imagination or enable the reader to put himself into the story line. There is beauty in a sentence that has been constructed, like a puzzle, one delicate piece at a time.

But that's just me. I'm sure you find beauty in whatever it is that you are passionate about. Run after it, dedicate yourself to it and teach yourself to master it. Do something that you love. What if we all pursued our dreams?