Text for
“My Utopia” Ken Little,
Period 2
(content B+/form B+)
(It was written in 1959 or 1960? I was 13 or 14 years old)
My Utopia
My Utopia would not especially be a certain quiet place where everybody sits around all day smiling on fat stomachs and smoking their favorite pipe, generally doing nothing. To some people this would be great, but for me I like a little more complicated life. Not a life where everything is given freely to anyone who desires it.
Life means more if you put something into it. Everyone must do their share. As someone once said, “What I gave, I still have. What I kept is lost forever.”
My Utopia would be my ambition. I would be very satisfied to sit around and watch the rest of the world, if I can reach my own personal goals in life. But until I realize these goals, I don’t think I could be happy in any kind of environment. It might be pleasing for a while, but there would still be a deep yearning to fight for and win my goals. I would be very much happier struggling along towards these goals , rather than sitting back and doing nothing.
Like most people, I would like to have world peace, freedom from sickness, and general good conditions. Maybe someday in the distant future, this will come about but you really can’t hold your breath until it happens. So, in the meanwhile, I will try to work toward my Utopia or ambition. I want to be the most famous artist of the twentieth century. Now, this may sound silly or just like a stage-struck kid, but I am serious. The idea of becoming a run of the mill commercial artist haunts me. I would rather not be an artist than to be lost in the crowd.
I don’t mean I want to be another Rembrandt or Picasso but rather something along the Norman Rockwell line.
I love art and if they offered six periods a day of it, and you could still graduate, I would take all six.
My Utopia is my ambition and my ambition is my art.