Cambridge Is Not Expanding

In a classic vignette from Annie Hall, Woody Allen recalls a farcical episode from his childhood where his mother drags him in to see a psychiatrist, convinced that her son is suffering from depression because he’s stopped doing his homework. A nebbishy but precocious nine year-old, his face dwarfed by the trademark horn-rimmed glasses, kid Woody is a charming avatar of his neurotic, anhedonic adult persona. “The universe is everything,” he says by means of justification. “And if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart—and that would be the end of everything.” His mother butts in: “What is that your business? What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” The exchange is a comically morose take on the idea that genius is childhood recaptured at will; for Woody Allen, grown-up gloom is simply the mature form of a congenital quirk: existential thinking.

I suspect that in our younger, more vulnerable days—before we succumbed to the spiritual myopia of the “Harvard Bubble”—many of us must have had similar thoughts and doubts about the meaning of life. Nourished from an early age on the diet of my parents’ scientific humanism, I remember lying awake at night in terror of death: my own and the universe’s. Like sex, this state of fear and trembling had its latency period (there were about eight years there where I only thought about baseball).

At first, my narcissism led me to believe that I was the only one who had such misgivings. But when puberty hit, I discovered the enchanted world of existentialist literature and alternative music. Suddenly, I was no longer a freak; I belonged to an aristocracy of misunderstood brooders and first-rate melancholics. I read Camus, rocked out to the Smashing Pumpkins, dressed in black—the usual clichés. Like all thirteen-year-olds, I was a loser. But in my mind, I was deep and bohemian, a genuine suburban Übermensch.

Over the years, perpetual existential crisis has quietly faded into the background. Surely, some of that comes with maturity; we always outgrow our posturing adolescent angst. But part of me has begun to consider this a serious loss. In a way, I’m currently having an existential crisis over the lack of existential crisis in my life. Unlike the young Woody Allen, I do my homework—and polish my resume, agonize about graduate school, write trivial articles for The Crimson, all without thinking about the inexorable outward stretching of the universe (Annie Hall might not be up-to-date on the most recent developments in physics, but every theory I’ve come across ends in inevitable cosmological doom). As an English concentrator, I’ve written four papers on Hamlet, and read the play countless times. Yet not once while I was preening my way to an A-minus did I pause with mortal anxiety over the harrowing image of Hamlet addressing Yorick’s skull.

I blame Harvard for some of this—partly because it’s fun to blame Harvard, but also because we really are immersed in a careerist, corporate, and insipidly utilitarian dystopia. We hear a lot about stress, even clinical depression and mental illness in the Harvard student body—no wonder, given the enormous pressure on each of us to make a splash in the world.

But whatever happened to the lost art of existential crisis that used to be the sine qua non of college experience? I’m not advocating that we ultimately throw ourselves into the Charles River, like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury. But surely it wouldn’t hurt to skip class once in awhile, go boating with dapper northern bluebloods, play with our father’s watch and indulge in jumbled metaphysical speculations about the nature of time. The incest part might have been a little weird. But Faulkner, like other writers, had a point about the indissoluble link between beauty and death, a theme that turned over eternally in his characters’ minds, and an ache that has vanished amid smaller ones for many of today’s undergraduates.

A little more morbidity might make us all a bit happier here. Next time you’re fretting about your GPA or your upcoming consulting interview, just remember: You’re in Cambridge, but you’re also in the universe. In the long run, we’re all dead. Enjoy a little Weltschmerz.



David L. Golding ’08-’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is an English concentrator in Dunster House.