留美申请范文Essay：University of Chicago

College: University of Chicago

I wanted to draw in the rain. It was not really rain, just a lot of people in raincoats trying to make each other believe that they were hiding from the sky for a reason. Well, maybe it was a bit wet, but no one seemed to notice that there were many more people on the streets than there would have been had it really been raining. Real rain would drown out the city with noise, wash pigeons into drains, sweep cats straight into the river, tip over garbage cans and float the trash away, and leave red marks wherever raindrops hit bare skin. This barely had distinguishable drops; there seemed a strange continuity to this rain, as if it were an extraordinarily dense mist, or a very airy river that was flowing out of the sky and oozing onto the ground rather than, as real rain would have done, attacking the ground like a machine gun.

It wasn’t even dark. When I came out of the school building I had to blink my eyes, to let them adjust, in exactly the same way that I had almost every day since school had begun. I had my umbrella open, of course. Everybody had their umbrellas open. Everybody was wearing a raincoat, too. Everybody was hunched forward, shoulders tensed. None of them cast a shadow, but that was their own fault. Of course, I had no shadow either. Was I afraid of embarrassment?

Yet this light, from a sun ineffectively hidden by translucent clouds, was interesting in a way. When figures are equally lit from all directions, they become weird creatures, gray and colorless without becoming less lively. It was the illusion of rain that made them less lively. I thought about how I could draw objects without shadowing, how to describe contours on a uniformly gray mass.

Looking up, I was distracted by the view down the street. If drawing objects without details seemed hard, how much harder would infinite details be? As I liked down the street, and the facades of building formed unreproduceable angles toward the horizon, and the windows were placed in patterns so complex that it would take days to sort them out, and every iron railing on the steps was a work of art, I felt like crying.