Finding Life After Nostalgia

A funny thing happened to me one Sunday in September 1997. I had returned to Harvard early that year, and as I was walking through Harvard Yard, I noticed several thousand people seated in front of Memorial Church. At first, I took little notice. But as I tried to pass through the Yard and heard President Neil L. Rudenstine's voice over the loudspeakers, I suddenly realized what was going on: Convocation for the Class of 2001. In a fit of nostalgia, I sat down in the back and eavesdropped. And as I glanced around the Yard, I noticed that I was one of the only people there who could judge whether the first-years were hearing the truth.

President Rudenstine was talking about how college was a "journey" and an "adventure." You may have arrived at Harvard with a firm idea of who you are and what you will become, but by the end of first semester, you might discover that you no longer want to be a doctor, or a businessperson or "God help us, a lawyer." Instead, he explained, you might discover a passion for Akkadian texts or for the life and times of airborne spores. And while you might have trouble convincing your parents that airborne spores really are your calling, you should follow the soaring path to which those glorious spores will lead you. Various deans then spoke about the wonders of living in a place occupied by generations of ghosts. The band played, the choirs sang and the first-years set off on their journeys and adventures.

The entire event was more or less the same as it had been at the start of my own first year. As a first-year, I thought hard about what all the speakers said and decided that they must be right. Yes, within a year's time, I would become incredibly interested in some subject I could barely imagine now. These strangers sitting next to me would become my closest friends.

But during Opening Exercises in both 1995 and 1997, the officers of the University failed to point out the most important transformation in store for us. The great change ahead wasn't that we would change our concentrations from economics to English. It was that we would change our ages from around 18 to around 22, and that is a far bigger difference.

As a first-year, I don't think I understood the magnitude of that change. I had studied hard for four years in high school, and I had deferred life for a bit, postponing the usual adolescent sagas until there was something or someone really worth my love and my pain. It wasn't until I came to college that people finally bothered to lie to me, or bothered to entrust me with their private truths--to tell me anything that mattered to them, in fact. It wasn't until I came to college that I began caring about people enough to hate them or to love them.

On that September day in 1995, we of the Class of 1999 looked around at each other, wondering which of us would become heads of state. But we mostly thought about that exciting pronouncement that one of the speakers made, that this would be the last time our entire class would be sitting in one place until we reunited for Commencement in June 1999. None of us bothered to think that maybe the most important people we would meet at Harvard weren't even here yet, or that some of those wonderfully well-adjusted people we had just met would crack before second semester, or that four of our classmates would not live to see our senior year. Yes, Harvard Yard is occupied by ghosts: not the ghosts of the Cabots and the Lowells, but the ghosts of the people who we used to know and the people who we used to be. Today, they are intentionally placing us once more in the same spot where we began our years here, and today the president and deans of Harvard will try again to make us nostalgic and to offer us advice. But this time, we aren't the people sitting in the back who have been through it all already. We will not know until many years later whether or not the speakers are right.

Maybe the moment that Harvard will reward you will be the moment when you forge your greatest ties to the University. Maybe it will be the moment when you get some job or make some leap through the connections and thinking that you gained here. But maybe it will be the moment when something that is distinctly not Harvard--even though you might have found that something here--becomes more important to you than Harvard. And when you succeed in taking what Harvard has given you, whether it was something you searched for or something you stumbled upon--you will manage to make it larger than Harvard, to make it into life. And maybe then you will be able to pass through Harvard Yard without too much nostalgia.

Dara Horn '99, a literature concentrator in Eliot House, was associate editorial chair of The Crimson in 1998.