1st place:

Dear Mr. Hesse,

I absolutely refuse to take this letter seriously. For that matter, I refuse to take anything seriously ever again; you’ve made it utterly impossible. From the cacophonous notes of an abrasive band to the meaningless babble of businessmen and the bourgeois, what was once a cause for my loss of faith in humanity is now but a glorious joke, told a thousand times a day while never once becoming stale.

I began laughing at the world several months ago. Before then, I was stumbling through the inside of civilization that does not appreciate being mocked, no matter how much it may need it. From the inside, it was impossible to ascertain the true nature of the world, and there seemed to be no way to gain a new perspective. Just as the rabbi and the priest never end up sharing a laugh, I went about my life, thinking, or perhaps pretending, it was all very important.

I had begun planning for my future career, as I had been told to do by several figures of varied authority, and I had come to the frightening realization that all the things I enjoy are considered hobbies rather than careers. I thumbed desperately through hundreds of brochures, trying to find something I could conceivably tolerate until I was old enough to be put in a nursing home of some kind and be forced-fed multi vitamins to prolong life.

Somewhere in my search, I began to thumb through your Steppenwolf instead of the college pamphlets. It was among the many books I had received or purchased (I have the nasty habit of obtaining more books than I read). Rather than the thousands of empty and worthless paths I found in the career planning leaflets, I finally found the proper path through Harry Haller and his many alter egos, all entwined and dancing in the climactic ball at the Magic Theater.

I saw much of myself in Harry: I saw an elitist without much joy; pursuing the end of his life with a passion he didn’t show for anything else. In the lyrical merger of reality and fantasy, I finally found an intelligent answer to the questions I had been forced to ask about my happiness and myself. I watched in my head the beautiful scenes you painted, and I was liberated along with Harry when his many souls finally merge and dance at the magic ball. I found freedom in the million souls of Harry Haller as he found freedom in Pablo’s magic theater and the many doors.

More importantly, I have at last learned to laugh at myself, as Harry would eventually learn. I have stopped looking for success on the terms of a world that would still believes so thoroughly in itself and nothing else. Hopefully, someone will decide to pay me to travel and write. If not, there’s a chance I’ll starve to death, in which case I’ll be the one with the knock-knock joke on his headstone. For now, I am off to run around outside in the cold. It is now after one a.m. and I am sure to frighten the neighbors. Hopefully, you and Kafka will get a tremendous laugh out of it. Tell Goethe hello.

Judiciously,
Brett O’Neal
Nixa High School, Nixa, Missouri

2nd place:

Dear Jean,

In my relatively short life I’ve run away from home twice; one attempt was considerably more successful than the other. The first time I was six years old; a friend and I donned our coats and a large amount of reckless courage and slunk out of my front yard like desperate fugitives. Our strategy was vague; we planned to use our considerable childhood knowledge of the wilderness to hitch a ride to unmarked territory, to become a kindergarten version of Lewis and Clark. As we passed beyond the civilization of my neighborhood we felt purged of any human needs other than the bottle of water my friend cradled in her arm. I was ten before I was able to run away a second time; it lasted for a few days, mostly in my bedroom, with a book in my hands. That day I met Sam Gribley of My Side of the Mountain, the boy who ran away from home and took my imagination with him.

You and I both understand that there is a runaway in all of us. I’m sure anyone who has read your book recalls a childhood memory of when he or she packed a knapsack of toys and planned an escape route. I imagine everyone has built a secret fort in the woods where the glory of nature’s perfection is almost ostentatious. Sam is the childhood soul personified. He felt cramped by the world around him and wanted to spread out—to find his roots in the forest. Sometimes I too feel cramped by my world. There are so many established rules to live by that make my own propensity for reckless adventure impossible. Sam, however, makes up his own rules. When I started with him on his journey I was wary of him; his first night’s hardship without food or fire made me pity and befriend him; the magic of his first fire and the satisfaction of independence that followed made me love him. The day he found Frightful, his peregrine falcon, I went outside and called to the birds in my backyard. When he made pancakes out of acorns I mashed up some walnuts with a rolling pin in an effort to make my own fare. In the winter, when he holed up safe and warm inside his home of a hollowed hemlock, I holed up in a lean-to of pillows and blankets. It does not matter that I am not physically with Sam when I read your book, because his insight into the forest and the utter success of his childhood dream make him a part of me even as I grow into adulthood.

I forgot to tell you how my first runaway adventure ended. It was actually quite an adventure for a six-year-old-girl—my mom alerted the police when she found my friend and I missing, and presently we were found by a policeman in front of his own house! We were brought back to my home in the back seat of a police car; during the ride I resolved that, in reality, life isn’t something from which I can or want to escape forever. But by reading about Sam’s wonderful experience in the Catskills in My Side of the Mountain, I was able to flee, if only for a short while, to the free life my spirit yearns for. I can do this every time I open the pages. In fact, I think I’ll run away again tonight.

Your fellow dreamer,
Anita Sadhu
Hickman High School, Columbia

Honorable Mention:

Dear Mr. Watterson,

I read frequently as a young boy, introducing myself to classic characters and stretching my imagination across time and space. I sailed twenty thousand leagues with Captain Nemo, trekked to the Lonely Mountain with Bilbo Baggins, and searched for treasure with Long John Silver. Surprisingly, though, the character I most identified with came not from the pages of a novel, but from the pages of a newspaper. Calvin of your peerless comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes” fascinated me more than any other fictional character. His unique, imaginative, six-year-old view of the world influenced my own during my childhood.

“Calvin and Hobbes” captivated me from the first time I read it. I had never seen a sassy, imaginative six-year-old boy that could have a philosophical discussion with his stuffed tiger in anything I’d read before. Whereas some readers may have been put off by such a fanciful basis for a comic strip, I was instantly hooked. Watching Calvin crash his toboggan and clash with his teachers amused me, but watching him think and grow and learn from frame to frame fascinated me. One strip a day in the newspaper wasn’t enough “Calvin and Hobbes” to satisfy me; I had to have every published collection. I read every one over and over as if I were trying to memorize them, picking up jokes I had missed before and realizing a bit more of the depth of Calvin’s ponderings each time I did.

It would’ve been impossible for me to read comic strip after comic strip of Calvin’s life without being influenced by them, especially since I was six myself when I started reading them. At that age, I saw in Calvin a figure more like me than anyone I knew in person. I fought with my parents over going to bed and brushing my teeth as much as he did, and I too spent hours letting my imagination carry me to all places conceivable and inconceivable. His deep, almost sagacious conversations with Hobbes turned the cognitive gears in my head more effectively and more often than anything else. I remember an especially poignant Sunday strip in which Calvin and Hobbes find a dead bird, prompting Calvin to muse over the miracle of life. “Our existence is very fragile, temporary, and precious,” he says, “but to go on with your daily affairs, you can’t really think about that, which is probably why everyone takes the world for granted and why we act so thoughtlessly.” Such insight was like Plato or Locke to my six-year-old psyche. Observing Calvin learn rough lessons on the page meant I didn’t have to learn the same ones so roughly in life; I learned them vicariously.

Calvin influenced me back then because he was just like me; I felt that I could’ve had all the experiences in life that he had on paper. Calvin influences me now because he makes all the truisms and maxims that seem so complicated in life seem so simple in a comic strip. Whenever life vexes me and no one has any good advice, I can look back into the pages of “Calvin and Hobbes” and find the relief I need, along with a bit of humor. Calvin reminds me that even though life is hard, a bit of thought, imagination, and laughter will make sense out of anything.

Sincerely,
Kelly Riley
Jefferson City High School, Jefferson City, Missouri

Honorable Mention:

Dear Mr. Huxley,

As we come to this time, this crossroad in our society’s history where the past meets the future, why do we allow ourselves to be blinded by the glaring lights of our culture? Now, when it is imperative that we stand up and face the challenges of our own “brave new world,” we choose to turn our backs and allow our senses to be dulled by the soothing mechanical voices, telling us that this is where we belong.

For some reason unknown, we allow ourselves to be lead through the suffocating darkness, knowing within our minds that we must eventually stumble and fall. Even with this knowledge, we obediently follow, like sheep in an absurd parade of sex, drugs, and mindless entertainment.

Only after reading Brave New World did I feel the blindfold pulled from my eyes. For the first time, I saw with clarity the problems that our society refuses to face. Somehow, the pursuit of knowledge has been twisted into some kind of lunatic attempt to play God. The concepts of honor and morality have been replaced by the shallow pursuit of personal satisfaction. Greed is now praised and respected; called “ambition” and “business savvy.” Don’t these people realize that their brothers in humanity are dying, hungry and cold, on the streets? The concepts of love and respect have been contorted into a loathsome search for momentary, physical pleasure. And then these people wonder why it feels like something is missing from their lives. This is the state of our “brave new world,” and I can only imagine the sorrow you’d feel if you were here to see it.

Understand this, I don’t claim to be some kind of hero, savior, or shining light in the darkness; I’ve lived in my own ignorance for much too long to make a statement like that. I can’t even promise that I will be able to resist the pulling force of this culture from leading me astray from time to time. Believe me, I wish I could be a strong enough person to make that promise, but, as you must know, it’s difficult to stand firm against the flow of the current. What I can say, however, is that my heart has been opened, and the blinders have been removed from my eyes. For this, Mr. Huxley, I have you to thank.

In your book, John “the savage” was one of few that could see the ignorance of world that he was thrust into—a world not too dissimilar from our own. John came to feel, as I sometimes do, that there was no place for him in the world. Instead of changing himself to fit society’s expectations, though, he rejected the corrupt traditions. He rejected the drugs, the promiscuity, and the lack of morality. He refused to be imprisoned, blind and helpless, in a silk-lined cage. And in doing so, John inspire me to question my own world. My own cage.

As I look around me, I see waves of people drifting through life in a daze, living solely by what is expected of them. In my own high school, I see tomorrow’s leaders—my peers—following unhesitatingly in the footsteps of their predecessors, not questioning and not thinking for themselves. I think that we need more “savages” in our world. I like to think that, since reading Brave New World, I’ve done my best to do what I believe in my heart to be right, but I sometimes get frustrated that I can’t change everything by myself. I’ve learned, however, that all I can do to is think, do what my heart tell me is good, and, in doing so, try to inspire others to follow their own hearts. I believe that if we all did this, my generation could always be remembered as the one that brought society back to the right path. There is still hope for us.

Sincerely,
Adam Shelton
Harrisonville Cass R-9 High School, Harrisonville, Missouri