Throughout my undergraduate career, I have wracked my brain with questions like: What do I find important? What do I like? What do I want to do with my life? Since my days in high school, I always figured I would become a doctor, a medical doctor, of some sort. I liked science and I liked the logic of math. However, as I left the realm of public high schools and entered my first college setting, I realized how competitive and fast-paced and nerve-wracking college science classes really were. I felt like I was losing my youth just to subscribe to a career path that would ultimately force me to lose my life in constant work and stress. And for what? To make more money?
After some soul-searching during and after my first semester of freshman year, I realized that I wanted to become a medical doctor for two reasons: one, I wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and two, I wanted to help people. The second point, I am still wrestling with, but by meditating on the first reason, I realized that I can’t expect to understand what a “human” is by looking at microbes in a lab; I realized I needed to study what humans have created. And what better human creation than the most human of creations: literature?
I quickly dropped my biochemistry major and decided to study Classics. Diving into the history of the Ancient Mediterranean, discovering some of the smartest and wittiest minds, and cultivating a deep understanding of languages through Latin and Greek, I realized I had found my home. After two more semesters and a couple of English courses, I picked up an English major as well, concentrating on literature, culture, and film. Both of these majors allowed me to dive into what I see as the ultimate human psyche; literature allowed me to view the inner workings of others’ minds, whether contemporaries or ancients or anyone in between. Whether through narrative or poetry or philosophy. 
The three main literary figures that I wish to briefly discuss throughout the rest of this piece are Carl Gustav Jung, Marcus Aurelius, and Bob Dylan. Each of these figures helped me not only academically, but also personally as I have sought out an answer to life through literature. Jung, the famous psychiatrist associated with Sigmund Freud, developed the concept of the collective unconscious, the idea that all humans hold shared unconscious aspects through hereditary means, which he claims are expressed through myth and literature. In a piece on the importance of literature, Steven Mintz argues a similar point, claiming that narratives hold the power to “define… collective identities and interests.” Mintz goes further by claiming that narratives also serve an “ontological” purpose because they help people understand their own lives. For me, these two points display how literature plays such an important role in humanity. Literature allows us to connect to each other over the barriers of space and time to then draw conclusions about our own life.
While Jung showed me how literature reveals the expressions of the personal and collective human psyche, Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor from the 2nd century, revealed to me the powers of human reflection. His work, commonly called Meditations, contains Stoic reflections through personal journal entries. When reading this piece, I felt both large and small, meaningful and meaningless; Aurelius explores his psyche and therefore relates himself to the psyche of humanity, exemplifying Jung’s claims. Through this piece, written almost 2,000 years ago, I confronted the universe within and without me. And, that is why literature holds an important role, that is why literature displays what it means to be human.
The last literary figure that I mentioned above, the most contemporary of the three, is Bob Dylan. Jung helped me view the psychological aspects of literature; Aurelius, the philosophical. Dylan, on the other hand, pulls me away from such formal or academic views; instead, he reveals the emotional reality that literature can display. His poems are songs, his songs are poems. Both forms of expression explore more than just our minds, they explore our souls. Through Dylan’s works, I can ignore the complicated arguments of Jung and the strict Stoicism of Aurelius and rather just live; his pieces allow me to feel, rather than think, about literature. In a piece by Cécile Alduy, she makes a similar claim while arguing for the importance of poetic thought and understanding. She states, “Poetry is ethical, philosophical, and spiritual in essence: it’s an exercise in seeing, in listening, in being.” And this exploration of the now simultaneous with the exploration of the eternal, the exploration of what makes me, me, and what makes us, us, is what drives me to study literature.
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