First Year Winner: What Lies Ahead

WRIT 1702, Becoming a Better Writer. TA: Dion Tubrett. CD: Jon Sufrin

Abstract

“What Lies Ahead” is a beautifully crafted familiar essay with movement, reflection, and superb use of sources to complicate and extend the thinking. The writer explores perspectives about failure through the lens of Camus and Calvino, playing with the metaphor of the explorer who finds that “travelling is a process of remaking the past, of recontextualizing one’s own identity.” We must journey away from the moment to contextualize our failures and to give ourselves “choice” – choice about which of our identities will “inhabit this past” from a future distance, even if, as the writer concludes, we must travel on “an imaginary itinerary to an invisible city” to give ourselves hope and perspective.