I had a startling "college" moment last night.
I was sitting in the University Theater committee meeting, generally not paying attention to what was being said but paying close attention to everyone's faces, and I was remarking on how, maybe for the first time here, I know nearly everybody in this committee meeting. And then abruptly I thought... what I am I thinking? No, I don't.
Why? I believe it's because, at the end of my third year here, I've developed a comfortable heuristic in which I think I'm familiar with the cache of names and faces and people I'm surrounded by (not unlike the end of high school), even though I don't know every single individual personally--especially in UT, where you're a part of an organizational family ipso facto--and yet for a few moments I glimpsed what's behind that comfortable paradigm.
If the impression my mind makes up is that all of us in the room have a shared origin--we all go to the same school, we're in the same organization--then the opposite impression I was suddenly struck with was just how different our origins were and how different our destinations are.
It's like we're located in the narrow passage of a great hourglass (you know...OF LIFE!), with this vast existence before us that we ignore and this huge space in the future completely unaccounted for. We forget the role of the university-as-magnet, drawing these bodies in from all over the country, holding them close (sometimes uncomfortable so) for 4 years, and then flinging them out in a staggering diaspora. And the reason I felt so young in that room last night was because when you're a first-year (and maybe when you're a fourth-year) coming in (or out) you get a sense of how meaningless that magnet is, and you think, "How the hell do I have anything in common with these people? Because I'm sitting in a meeting with them discussing light hangs?" And I suppose this is like any time of your life--fleeting--but maybe the university is particularly adept at fooling you for a time that you're somewhere permanent.
I guess it's a lot like theater, too--the impermanence, that is. Macbeth compares the lifespan to an hour in which the "poor player" walks across the stage busily reading some stupid lines, but in this the modern world the lifespan is all about performing play after play--not alone, but with a cast of other human beings--pretending each will last forever, and then tearing them down to start new ones with whole new casts again and again until you die. Maybe the lines still signify nothing, but at least you're getting new ones all the time.
Put that in iambic pentameter, and I'll split the royalties with you.
I was sitting in the University Theater committee meeting, generally not paying attention to what was being said but paying close attention to everyone's faces, and I was remarking on how, maybe for the first time here, I know nearly everybody in this committee meeting. And then abruptly I thought... what I am I thinking? No, I don't.
Why? I believe it's because, at the end of my third year here, I've developed a comfortable heuristic in which I think I'm familiar with the cache of names and faces and people I'm surrounded by (not unlike the end of high school), even though I don't know every single individual personally--especially in UT, where you're a part of an organizational family ipso facto--and yet for a few moments I glimpsed what's behind that comfortable paradigm.
If the impression my mind makes up is that all of us in the room have a shared origin--we all go to the same school, we're in the same organization--then the opposite impression I was suddenly struck with was just how different our origins were and how different our destinations are.
It's like we're located in the narrow passage of a great hourglass (you know...OF LIFE!), with this vast existence before us that we ignore and this huge space in the future completely unaccounted for. We forget the role of the university-as-magnet, drawing these bodies in from all over the country, holding them close (sometimes uncomfortable so) for 4 years, and then flinging them out in a staggering diaspora. And the reason I felt so young in that room last night was because when you're a first-year (and maybe when you're a fourth-year) coming in (or out) you get a sense of how meaningless that magnet is, and you think, "How the hell do I have anything in common with these people? Because I'm sitting in a meeting with them discussing light hangs?" And I suppose this is like any time of your life--fleeting--but maybe the university is particularly adept at fooling you for a time that you're somewhere permanent.
I guess it's a lot like theater, too--the impermanence, that is. Macbeth compares the lifespan to an hour in which the "poor player" walks across the stage busily reading some stupid lines, but in this the modern world the lifespan is all about performing play after play--not alone, but with a cast of other human beings--pretending each will last forever, and then tearing them down to start new ones with whole new casts again and again until you die. Maybe the lines still signify nothing, but at least you're getting new ones all the time.
Put that in iambic pentameter, and I'll split the royalties with you.
2 Comments:
"I think the point might be to find MORE Breakfast Clubs."
Perhaps poorly paraphrased, but surely you remember.
So I haven't had an original thought since senior year of high school. As long as there's new audiences...
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