Hurry Now! Memories End Soon!

I decided not to attend the Senior Class Champagne Brunch this past month because I remembered the experience of eating in Annenberg vividly. During Senior Dinner Swap, another event designed to memorialize a Harvard experience, I relived standing before endless rows of tables, green tray in hand and no friend in sight. I thought that I would be able to console myself by buying a Class of 2010 coffee mug, but it had been sold out. I realized then that the senior class officers weren't kidding: the other senior items—those purchasable memories—were going to sell out, and soon!

Each senior event, carefully designed to encapsulate a memory, was going to disappear faster than used textbooks at the Coop. Memories were going to sell quickly, because each senior who recognized that his time at Harvard was valuable and that it would end soon, would rush to eat in every dining hall, attend every “last lecture,” and buy every item of senior class merchandise. During the weekend of the Champagne Brunch, I realized that hoarding and buying Harvard memories in the form of extracurriculars, events, and mugs is misguided.

Even if I could defy the laws of physics and participate in every Harvard extracurricular, I wouldn't want to, because it would mean straying from the extracurricular niche I had found and loved after months of wandering. It would mean denying the value of having a number of extracurricular options so dizzying that it forces us to make choices and find our place here. After speaking with Daily Princetonian editors at the Georges Conference last month,  I learned that several of us carve out our college niches by remaining loyal to the activities we loved in high school, but there are others who wade through the options, looking for more. I joined The Crimson’s Arts Board because I wrote for my high school paper, but I strayed because I needed to look for a new extracurricular home. I thought I had found it in the student group Stories for Orphans.

Although I enjoyed editing children’s books and helping run Stories, the emails that I received from Arts-l bothered me constantly. For months I debated fully returning to 14 Plympton Street, until the Georges Conference made me realize that if I had become bored with writing reviews and features when stories were everywhere then maybe I was looking for my niche in too many places. Maybe I wasn’t letting myself reshape my memories by adjusting my activities. The weekend of the conference, I decided to stay with Stories but also return to The Crimson to write editorials instead of arts articles.

In searching for extracurriculars again, I was reframing my experience by acknowledging the value of my work and reshaping it by modifying my activities and interests. I realized that I had actually contributed—to varying degrees—to The Crimson for four years and to Stories for two. I played violin throughout those years. After eight semesters of shopping classes, I found an interest in Israeli culture, politics, and society that I turned into a thesis.

Because the activities and interests I found came with a complete set of memories that I had only to reframe and reshape in order to treasure, I didn’t need to conform to Harvard’s culture of shopping and buying. There was no need to wrap up memories in every senior event because being human at Harvard means finding one’s interests and values while realizing the limits of time. It means giving up some events and activities to make room for others and acknowledging that what one has is valuable.

Even outside of Harvard, it is unnecessary to chase memories that are attached to buildings and booze cruises. According to Psychology Professor Daniel T. Gilbert, Americans don’t need to long for places associated with their memories, because those places are everywhere. With every corporate coffee shop that we see, we can remember that special date or that productive thesis meeting. According to Gilbert, “When the industrial smoothing of our nation’s once-variegated edges has been fully accomplished, Americans…will be marinating in memories that happened everywhere but not somewhere, reliving experiences that are located in time but dislocated in space.”

Although we Americans might lose our value for specific places, we can all come to value freedom by realizing how much time we have to reshape our activities and reframe our memories. Because the reshaping and reframing of memories doesn't end soon, we are free not to hurry our shopping for or even purchasing of them. There is no reason even to conform to the senior class's vision of special activities, because we can create our own memories, which can be more special than just another drink from the party punch.

I smile when I remember how my best friend and I recently ate crepes at La Creperie like we did during a first-year study break, because I found my own way of memorializing my Harvard years. Although I won't be able to withstand the pressure of Senior Week reminder emails completely, at least I’ll know I have valuable alternatives to remembering my time here.

Alina Voronov ’10, a Crimson arts writer, is a government concentrator in Cabot House.