Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering. Rob Bell
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now?”
This is a standard question on undergrad applications:
“In order for the admissions staff of our college to get to know you, the applicant, better, we ask that you answer the following question: Are there any significant experiences you have had, or accomplishments you have realized, that have helped to define you as a person?”
An applicant named Hugh Gallagher sent this response to NYU:
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I’ve been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees. I write award-winning operas. I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear.
I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400.
My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy.
I once read Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations with the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair.
While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami.
Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four-course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven.
I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin.
I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
Brilliant, isn’t it? What is it that makes the essay so . . . enjoyable? Clearly the content is striking itself—it’s weird and smart and imaginative (full-contact origami?) and random (touring New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration?) and oddly poetic all at once.
But it isn’t just about the “what”—the content; it’s also about the “where.” It’s on a college application, which is generally where people are at their most serious, trying to impress the admissions staff with their eloquence and achievement, not boasting of how they “woo women” with their “sensuous and godlike trombone playing.”
There’s a phrase we use when we’re describing something we consider new and fresh and unexpected.
We say it’s “out of the box.”
The problem with the phrase is that when something or someone is judged to be in or out of “the box,” it reveals that “the box” is still our primary point of reference. We’re still operating within the prescribed boundaries and assumptions of how things are supposed to be.
“Out of the box” is sometimes merely another way of being “in the box.”
And then there are those, like this applicant, who come from a totally different place.
They ask another kind of question:
“There’s a box?”
In 1941, in a village in Nazi-controlled Poland, a young man came home to discover that his father had died while he was at work. What made his father’s death exceedingly more unbearable was that several years earlier, both this young man’s sister and mother had died. As he held his father’s dead body in his arms, he lamented,
“I’m all alone.
“At twenty, I’ve already lost all the people I’ve loved.”
One writer described it like this:
“Ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God.
“But it didn’t come without tears, and it didn’t come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror.”
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