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“Do not go gentle into the good night.” The poem is one of my all-time favorites, but not for its brief appearance in Nolan’s blockbuster or its beautiful titular line. Instead, I am entranced by its one particular sequence of lines: “wise men . . . their words had forked no lightning…” Here, the poet captures the regret and disappointment of the wise men for having not accomplished enough in life in spite of their talents.

The wisest man in my life was my father, an established professor of robotics engineering in South Korea who also happened to be absent most of my life. He and my mom separated when I was just a toddler. Ever since, my dad would show up at our doorstep twice a year to whisk me away on a father-son journey, which consisted of grueling hikes up mountains and impromptu excursions to untraveled areas. Though there were a few times I felt curious, I never broached the subject of his divorce for fear of hearing something I didn’t want to know. My dad, perhaps picking up on this, directed our attention to his impressive trove of knowledge about the world. In forests, he instructed me on the ecosystem of fungi. When we skied he taught me the physics of velocity on a downhill slope. He always spoke of how important it was for me to stay inquisitive about everything. In my young eyes, he seemed like the smartest person in the world for those two brief moments of the year.

The summer I turned twelve, when we took a short trip to the beach, was the last time I saw him. A few months later, my mom sent me to the U.S. to study abroad. I never heard from him again.

It was a couple of weeks after I came back to Korea that I learned what happened to him. During a heated argument with my mom, I demanded to know why dad left us, why he had to be so removed from my life that he couldn’t contact me for three years while I had been abroad. Suddenly falling silent, my mother directed me to the car and drove to a cemetery in the outskirts of Seoul. Pointing to one of the gravestones, she told me my dad had passed away a year ago. He had been suffering from diabetes for years.

She then recounted the story of how they married young when he was an aspiring academic dreaming of studying in the U.S, but that their poverty forced him to choose between his aspirations and his marriage. He chose my mom, but his regret overwhelmed him and made him bitter, straining their relationship to the point of no return. Settling on finishing out his studies in Korea to be near me, he constantly struggled with the thought of what he could have been. When he learnt of his fatal diagnosis, my dad strongly pushed my mom to send me abroad, hoping his son would realize his dreams. Fearing that the news of his death would interfere with my studies, he urged my mother to keep his death a secret from me until I went to college.

At that moment, I recalled the lines of Thomas’ poem. Sensing the dark, dad had entrusted me with his unfulfilled ambitions. I was his rage against the dying of the light. 

Everything I have done in the years since has been driven by my desire to “fork lightning.” Despite having no experience in sports, I’ve joined the track team for a whole year, testing my physical limits. Never the person to enjoy the spotlight, I volunteered for the clarinetist in a local competition. I decided to not fear an undetermined future. I pursued novelty, tried to do so, and always challenged myself. I was not discouraged in the whole process, and I was constantly longing for improvement. A desperate struggle will recognize my existence, and I will be remembered. My life will be shown to my father like that. I'll continue my father like that.

 "Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night" won first prize in the Ninth Annual Humanities and Sciences Writing Contest. Taewoong Jung is a junior majoring in Graphic Design at the School of Visual Arts. Judges Catherine Stine and Jeff Beardsley had this to say about Taewoong's personal essay: "This essay is quite well-written, and it also goes beyond this, to parse out a boy’s troubled confusion as to why his father is rarely around and then gone; of him missing his father and wondering what could have been. In a beautifully circular structure, it explores the poignant emotions of the boy—now a young man—as he understands for the first time how deeply his father cared for him and sacrificed his own opportunity in order to give his son a special gift. A piece does not have to contain a moral or message, but this one does, and it’s a worthy one: to not be afraid to “fork lightning,” to try things beyond one’s comfort zone and take bold actions that grow a person without always having to know beforehand what shape that growth will take."