Can one experience alter a person´s view on human equality? According to the successful and prominent author Michael Faber it can. In 2006 he wrote a personal essay named “Me and Dave and Mount Olympus”, in which he depicts a specific and life-changing incident with a homeless person, which changed many aspects of his own life. Until the meeting in the homeless shelter, Michael Faber is in an ivory tower and sees himself as “on top of Mount Olympus” looking down on the human race. His arrogance disappears after the intense meeting, where Michael Faber discovers, that both of them are equals in the eyes of the universe. Michael Faber´s reliability is strengthened by the fact that this is an authentic story, and he really did become a famous author later on in life. He can use the story as a foundation for his claims.
Michael Faber´s main claim is to enlighten the readers and perhaps persuade and encourage the readers to review how they look at other human beings. It explains through intelligent language and use of metaphors, how his animalistic meeting with a bum named Dave taught him that everyone is equal.

Even though “Me and Dave and Mount Olympus” is a personal essay, it still has the classic home-away-home structure. We hear about his life before, during and after his encounter with Dave. The reason why we hear about Michael Faber´s life before and after the incident is, because we need to get to know him in order to understand his mentality and his situation. Back in Australia he is an alternative and poor artist living of welfare with his wife. He does not care about his social status because, “Who needs status when one is an Artist, already living on Mount Olympus?” (li. 35), implying that he is such a genius, that he does not need a real job or a high social value. He feels better and more important than other people, and he does not care about them. When Michael Faber returns to Australia he is changed completely, and he gets a job as a nurse to, “take care of people´s bodies, their animal needs” (li. 186). The home-away-home structure is a way to explicitly show a personal development; in this case his transformation from being an arrogant snob to a person who takes care of others. In addition to that the structure and the descriptions of his state of mind before the experience appeal to people in the same situation as him: People who are in an ivory tower and cannot realize that the world does not revolve around them. Michael Faber wants to enlighten these people and convince them, that there are other ways to visualise the world.

The language emphasizes Michael Faber´s personality. He manages to imply a lot of foreign words, “sphere”, “monastically”, “genteel”, “accumulated” and “existential”, and he also packs every sentence with adjectives, “I’d stood in dole queues with them, sat in dingy laundromats with them, done the same dead-end jobs”, (li. 158-159). Besides that the personal essay has foreign expressions such as, “terra incognita” (li. 60), “Aussie naïveté” (li. 57) and metaphors, animations, comparisons and personifications, “demoralizing afternoon” (li. 52), “back into the arms of easy work” (li. 67) and “Polluted sea of humanity (li. 42). All this indicates and stresses that Michael Faber is self-satisfied and arrogant. Furthermore Michael Faber actually writes a remark, “Both of us were writers, misfits, snobs” (li. 38), which directly states that their neighbours in Australia saw them as snobs. One might ask why Michael Faber still uses unnecessarily many adjectives, metaphors and foreign words, when he knows that some people – for example Dave from the homeless shelter – would not have the vocabulary to understand it. This could in fact suggest, that he is still arrogant and feels more valuable than other human beings. On the other hand it could be a way for him to aim for a specific target group: A group of people who have a similar personality to the one Michael Faber had before the incident in the homeless shelter. He writes, “in my colossal arrogance, I’d seen the world as an artists’ playground, a hive of creative industry (li. 160-161), which points out, that he is very much aware of his former arrogance. As a result of that he intentionally aims after this specific target group. He does that by using intellectual language and metaphors to reach their level, so he can persuade them to make the same personal change. The last part of the personal essay confirms this claim, “Nowadays, I make my living writing books, a benign pursuit that hurts no one and gives many people pleasure (…) But in some hard-to-define way, perhaps everything I write is touched by what he taught me” (li. 190-193). There is an implicit message in this part saying, that this experience contributed to Michael Faber’s career as a successful author.

Michael Faber´s argument and message is, that if you are a snob and an arrogant person, you will not achieve success, unless you make the same alteration in your life as him and acknowledge other people regardless of their social status. He manages to create through intelligent language, metaphors, a clear structure and the fact that he is a popular author, a strong and reliable ethos, which helps him persuade the reader into making the same life revision.

Michael Faber´s convincing Ethos plays an extremely important part in this personal essay. It helps him encourage and motivate the reader to listen to him, because of the portrait he paints of himself. The structure and the language make it easy for the reader to place himself or herself in Michael Faber and experience the story from his point of view. Because of that he has an unmistakable message to the reader.
One might question if Michael Faber even changed his personality? Maybe the language is not supposed to aim for a specific target group that can relate to his former personality. Maybe he kept the complacent language, because he did not change at all. Maybe the experience with Dave only improved his egocentric world picture and confirmed his own excellence by the “amazing discovery” that others also matter. One might argue that he figured out that everyone is equal, but he still feels better and more important. When Michael Faber returns to Australia after the incident with Dave, he continues his old life. Later on he then finds a woman to work for, “A well-off woman whose house I offered to clean told me she had a policy of never employing servants who were as intelli¬gent as her; it led to problems, she said. I finally gave in and got a proper job: I trained as a nurse” (li. 184-186). He still feels too important to clean up houses, and when he gets the nurse job, he refers to it as a “proper job”. When he talks about how satisfying and rewarding the job is he says, “The volunteers who staff homeless shelters understand this.” (li. 189), which is actually a way of raising his own value.