On College and its labyrinth of Promise
This was a photo taken from a trip to Yellowstone National Park that I took with two friends from college in the late summer after our Freshman year. I was awestruck by the landscape, its expanse, and its beauty. It was on this trip that I spent a lot of time reflecting on the previous school year and anticipating the one that was fast approaching. It was on this trip that I made the goal to start writing more, recording my thoughts and feelings as the came. And it was after this trip that I made changes to the way I approached happiness, its comings and goings, and the person I wanted to be both in its presence and in its absence.
This is an essay that I wrote in the spring of my second year of college. I was just coming to the end of what had been a difficult time, that had spanned most of my first year of college and the early months of my second. “Difficult” is an all encompassing term for the sense of confusion and grief that I had experienced. College implicitly connotes vast promise, which is easy to get lost within. This was my attempt to record my own experiences somewhere within the confines of that vast promise and the ways in which I navigated and ultimately emerged from its labyrinth.
On August’s last Saturday, I climbed into the passenger seat of my 2001 Honda C-RV, whose trunk was packed full with boxes and bags containing the things I would need for my second year of college. My father was in the driver’s seat. Together we began the twelve-hour drive from Boston to Charlottesville to the soft hum of the old car and the din of Neil Young playing on the stereo. As we headed into the last hour of the drive, the sun was beginning to set and the deep blue of Virginia’s oppressively warm summer nights made me think of the blue nights that Joan Didion writes about in her latest memoir. Named for summer’s long twilights, Blue Nights tells the story of Didion’s relationship with grief in the years following her daughter’s death. “Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness” Didion explains, “but they are also it’s warning.”
W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming
I came upon Didion’s writing in the same place many millennials search for meaning: Netflix. Didion’s documentary, “The Center Will Not Hold”, is a nod to W.B Yeats’s poem, The Second Coming. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” I first read the Second Coming during my junior year of high school as a prelude to Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, at a time in my life in which the center was beginning to hold. Reading The Second Coming marked the beginning of my efforts to derive a sense of self and meaning from literature. Later, during my senior year of high school, Cormac McCarthy put to words the system of values which I had created when he writes about “the fire we carry” in The Road. In the bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape through which they walk, the man and his son each maintain a faith in the capacity of love and goodness, respectively, as a means to their end.
My mind began to turn increasingly to these texts after my first year of college during which the slow unraveling of my sense of self eventually gave way to complete collapse. The center began to crumble under the tumult of change which I experienced. I took classes which in no way pertained to my interests; my peers seemed to settle into this place which, to me, seemed far from home; a friend died; I held a job in banking. In this year, the drowning of innocence revealed itself and my youthful curiosity was lost in the shadows of life’s looming realities: mortality and uncertainty. The fire which I carried into college, predicated on the power of curiosity to propel forward the change I hoped to effect in the world, was reduced to embers.
“Can you evade the dying of the brightness?” Didion asks. “Where are you left if you miss the message the blue nights bring?” The dying of the brightness, as I see it, is the moment in which a deep sense of meaninglessness revolutionizes our understanding of what is important. Historically, I have relied on the things that I have found in literature to ground my understanding of meaning and my sense of place both within and beyond this university. As The Second Coming and Blue Nights, among other texts, have allowed me to reflect on what I have felt, lost, and longed for over the last year, I found myself so confounded in light of the things I have yet to learn.
We all go to college looking for something and we are so focused on finding it that we miss along the way all the bright and beautiful things that in no way resemble the thing we set out to find. Those things are made not less beautiful because they are different. In the end, we realize the whole time we were just looking for a version of ourselves that is somehow complete—complete with friends and knowledge and a new job, complete with visions of success. And what we come to find is that all the things we ignored, the bright and the beautiful, were the things that were imperative our wholeness. And that in our pursuit of being complete, we left ourselves as porous as a honeycomb, but perhaps not as sweet.
