Spreading Ourselves Too Thick

Whenever I put my favorite album on the turntable, my roommate groans theatrically.

“This is an amazing record!” I tell her with dignity, while turning up the volume. “This is an important record. This record represents a seminal moment in American musical history! Listen, it’s brilliant: ‘She moved so easily/ All I could think of was sunlight/ I said, ‘Aren’t you the woman/ Who was recently given a Fulbright?”’ You’re telling me you don’t love that?”

“I hate it. It’s bad,” she says, retreating. In a moment, I can hear the retaliatory strains of “Zorba the Greek” from behind her closed door.

Actually, my long-suffering roommate has a point. Whether or not you’re willing to concede that Paul Simon’s “Graceland” represents a seminal moment in American musical history doesn’t have much bearing on whether or not you’re willing to listen to “Graceland” for six hours a day. I bought the record last week and have been playing it near-constantly since. You ought to see the interpretive dance I’ve developed to “That Was Your Mother.”

Actually, my monomania vis-à-vis Paul Simon is not unique. It is just a particularly unfortunate manifestation of the monomania that consumes many of us during our Harvard careers. Living at home, I couldn’t listen to the same album over and over unmolested. (It’s not that I haven’t tried; over the summer, I kept a single mix CD in the car my brother and I share. After a few weeks, my brother threw down a gauntlet: “If I start the car and hear ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ blasting one more time, this CD goes out the window.” He followed through on his threat, too. Happily, the car was parked in our driveway at the time.) For most of us, college represents unprecedented freedom. For the first time, we can have chocolate pudding for dinner or stay out as late as we like or drink too much or hook up with each other without anyone’s noticing, much less caring. For the first time, we can spend hours on extracurricular activities without anyone’s asking us if we’ve done our homework, or if we’ve eaten dinner or if we oughtn’t to go to bed. For the first time, no one is preventing us from doing things to excess.

What is odd is that, with so many options for spending our time, we often choose so few activities to devote ourselves to. An unscientific survey of the “interests” section on thefacebook.com reveals that interests, while listed with varying degrees of cheek, are usually few in number—people are interested in “skiing and sailing,” for instance, or in “being a style icon.” We throw ourselves into a few activities with the sort of self-immolating vigor that I bring to dancing to “Graceland.” Academia itself encourages a sort of tunnel vision; incapable of tackling entire movements or schools of thought, we write papers and theses on absurdly narrow topics. In his short story “The Christian Roommates,” set at Harvard in the fifties, John Updike writes of the beginning of second semester: “Conversations go on and on; and an almost rapacious desire for mutual discovery possesses acquaintances.” Nowadays, a monomania this casual seems frivolous; the rapacious desire for mutual discovery remains, but we direct it towards our extracurricular activities.

Granted freedom, we are eager to confine ourselves. We are an ambitious lot; our monomania structures our ambition. It functions as a sort of limit—it’s impossible, after all, to avail ourselves of all of the College’s extracurricular and social opportunities; devoting ourselves wholeheartedly to one activity acts as a sort of check. This devotion to a single activity binds circles of friends and decides blocking groups. It can act as a sort of de facto career counseling. The danger, of course, is in our limiting ourselves too sharply. But monomania itself is often self-checking; exposed to something for long enough, we often tire of it. I knew, for instance, that I needed to stop listening to The Who when I quoted “Going Mobile” at length on an English final; other people burn out after long semesters spent in dance studios or in front of computer screens or rehearsing.

I share this theory of checked monomania with my roommate.

“Don’t worry,” I tell her, lifting the needle from “Graceland” to turn it over. “I’ll reach saturation point soon, I promise.”

“I’m worried because it took you all semester to reach saturation point with ‘Who’s Next.’”

What she ought to be worried about is what I’ll fixate on next.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alernate Thursdays.