At the age of eighteen, I did not know that I had an accent. Emerson, in his essay “Circles,” says that “the life of a man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles.” If this is true, the circle of my existence at 18 was extremely small and circumscribed by ideologies that derived from my heritage as a third generation Texan whose father hailed from North Carolina. My childhood on a working farm was in many ways idyllic, though fraught with hardships such as the lack of potable water in the house I grew up in. At age 12, instead of a bar mitzvah, I received a .22 rifle, and between throwing a baseball endlessly against the side of the barn and shooting at any number of creatures and objects, I managed to pass lazy summers playing by myself. [Read more…] about John Orr on the Value of a Liberal Arts Education
