It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… you know the rest. But aside from (cliché) aphorisms, I never thought I’d get here, much less what it would be like at the end. I knew I would go to college since I was in the sixth grade — hegemonic ideals of football games and education as salvation run deep — but the act of “going to college” was really a blank. Yet, here we are.
Perhaps in celebration of the unknown, here is a list (a “listicle” if you will) of what I’ve learned during my time here. College itself is a greater project, and ultimately, I hope one of nostos (from the Ancient Greek νόστος, the act of coming home).
- The pasta line in the Marketplace is pretty short at 2 p.m.
- To be is not being, but becoming. Being (Platonic) is static; becoming (Aristotelian) is activity; indeed to be is to do. But the telos (the ultimate goal of existence) can quickly become a cage.
- To those that partake in UberEats/DoorDash: please make sure to be very clear about your drop-off location. It pains me when I see drivers lost on campus, and I often just don’t know how to direct them to all the dorms.
- I think, for people of color, college is a second colonization. Perhaps it is because now I see colonization in all things, but the harm of college echoes the harm of the original sin of colonization. The college project is not for my people. We have been disenfranchised; once again, we are forced to conform to the greater institution that somehow “others” us at the same time. Being at college, I’ve felt like the “Other” all the time — from walking through the Quad through being here on empty Saturdays. At the end of the day, college always reminds you if you fit in or not.
- College is hard. Many times, in my four years here, it feels too hard, completely unreachable, as if it was designed for students to fail (and as per my last point, perhaps it is). It is too much — the call to learn while learning how to be a person. I am pulled in so many ways. In this way, the absurdity of the greater project of college is so apparent: the (e)strange(d) social bubble, the absence of Latine people despite that we are in LA (Franklin High, just down the street off York, is 91 percent Latino): reality feels so far away.
- We, as human beings, have the ability to cause infinite harm; conversely, existence itself is harm (existence as trauma). It is harm all the way down, and I worry that is the mono-substance of being (harming, and being harmed — another reiteration of the difference between the Aristotelian and Platonic existence, active and passive). In this way, college is like a Caspar David Freidrich painting, the singular being up against the infinite changing world, trying to stay in place. At times, we are the singular (harmed); at times, we are the infinite (harming). Likewise, the landscape of college is one of infinite centerless centers. I find it hard to feel grounded here, to feel stable, and that makes me feel like I need to hold on even more. We cannot grasp the center, yet it is always pressing against us. We can try; we can keep trying.
- The jacaranda trees on campus (near the fountain) bloom twice a year. The tree is South American; I am too. The tree blooms in June, just at the start of the summer, and they burst with purple flowers (that eventually cover the Quad and the lawn near the fountain). For two weeks the world is purple; indeed, the trees were blooming the first summer I lived at Oxy, as they will begin to bloom when I walk the stage at commencement. Yet surprisingly, they also bloom in September, in the fall, and once again the light of the sun is diffracted, and the world itself is coated again with lavender hues, and the spectrums of light that reflect into my eyes from the earth are no longer red, yellow, and blue, but solely purple, so much so that even walking to the Cooler in late September is magical; the smell of the trees wafts through the air — I can almost taste it. The trees will bloom next September, only I will no longer be here.
- I am a vessel for a path that is not my own. I am a node in a history so vast that I do not know its beginning, so my parents, when immigrating, had to start anew, on unstable ground. Yet the weight of the unnamable, unthinkable past (and equally, the unnamable, unthinkable future — they are much the same) is too much to bear. In just sitting at the MP, I feel the ghost of a grief of which I do not know where it stems from — but I feel it. I am gasping for breath. The pain is too great; I feel too much. I am pregnant with mine own child, I have engendered myself; yet, in my heart of hearts, I am in love. For I have loved my time here, and I’ve romanticized it since that first summer when I saw the jacarandas bloom (my hair was in braids, my friend anointed my hair with the flowers; I am a child of the earth, of my people’s land in El Salvador, yet I am here now). I am unrecognizable from that person, yet we have the same determined history, only now I am one-who-reads-Foucault and that younger me didn’t, now I see cages everywhere when the one from three summers ago only saw possibility. But both of us — two people, universes of distance in between, yet the same beating heart — are both stardust.
I am still here. Herman Melville also writes on this feeling of self rediscovery in Moby-Dick, in Ahab’s final tragic monologue, marking the end of his journey: “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old;—shake hands with me, man.”
Contact Sebastian Lechner at slechner@oxy.edu
