Essay 1:
Vincent van Gogh is a personal hero of mine. Not because of his art, although its beauty and his transformative vision has resonated across generations, and not because I am myself an artist, at least in any accepted sense of the word. I also recognize, of course, that as a man estranged from his family (with the vital exception of his younger brother, Theo), plagued by mental illness, and perhaps best known for his radical self-harm and eventual suicide, he is not the ideal role-model.
Still, I find inspiration in the tragic tale of a man, derided and cast out in his own time, who, nevertheless, continued to pursue, with singular focus, his passion. van Gogh needed no praise, no glory, no acclaim to persist, and the world is undoubtedly better for this devotedness. I see in van Gogh’s life a kind of determination I think is worthy of striving for. I, too, seek to be the kind of person who persists in my passions not because I seek fame or approval, but because it is what I love to do. This is what it means to truly be passionate about something. And while I certainly do not consider myself a visionary on the level of van Gogh, I use his life to remind myself that sometimes innovators are ridiculed, sometimes genius gains no recognition in its time, and sometimes glory only comes to the dead. Silence or scorn from others is never a reason to give up.
Essay 2:
As humans, we have a unique tendency to prescribe either grand or unknowable origins to aspects of our humanity. The existence of many diverse human cultures is one such aspect. Animals, after all, do not exhibit unique patterns of mating, kinship, and social stratification due to being raised in a particular group. From an anthropological perspective, however, the explanation for human culture, of any kind, is quite straightforward and lies in two simple facts: we walk on two legs, and we have big heads.
First, being bipedal is significant primarily because it limits the maximum width of human hips. This is because hips that surpass a certain width cannot maintain a two-legged, upright walking position. Narrow hips correspond to a smaller birthing canal. This is where the ‘big head’ issue arises. As cranium size increased among our bipedal ancestors, small birthing canals became an obvious problem. Thus, hominids began giving birth to increasing less developed infants. Evolutionarily, this speaks to a preference for increased reason and logic (associated with growth in cranium size) over physical prowess. More importantly, however, the less developed an infant is at birth, the more time there is for learning behaviors from their environment and those around them. This type of learning is what allows culture.
Such an explanation may seem irrelevant to anyone who isn’t an anthropologist, but as someone who spent much of her undergraduate years studying human conflict in one form or another, it is fascinating to me to explore the link between two seemingly modest evolutionary facts and something that is so crucial to our understandings of who we are. We owe an awful lot to having two legs and big heads.
