Your first assignment will be to create your own blog and then to write a brief autobiographical sketch. I have attached an essay below. It is a five paragraph essay with three subtopics. Use this essay as a template for your won autobiography. Focus on 3 subtopics that you will develop - things that play a significant role in your life, or things that have influenced you. Most importantly have fun.
This is a very well written essay. I hope you find it intersting as well as powerful. Let it be your inspiration!
The
Model Essay
"Preface
to the Autobiography"
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly
strong, have governed my life. These passions, like great winds, have blown me
hither (here) and thither (there), in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of
anguish reaching to the very verge of despair. They are passions which I was
not born with, but rather acquired over the course of my life; the longing for
love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of
mankind define my existence.
I have sought love, first, because
it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would have sacrificed all the rest
of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it
relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering
consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold, unfathomable, lifeless
abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in
a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that the saints and
poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good
for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.
With equal passion I have sought
knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know
why the stars shine. And I have tried to comprehend the Pythagorean power by
which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have
achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they
were possible, led upwards towards the heavens. But always pity brought me back
to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine,
victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a painful burden to their
sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain make a mockery of
what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I
too suffer.
This has been my life. These three
passions have guided my progress through the mayhem that is life, yet I have
found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were
offered me. The longing for love, the quest for knowledge and the pity for the
suffering of others have given meaning to my existence, as it should to each
and all.
By
Bertrand Russell
