Notes from Undergrad

Senior year is a bookend, a fast deadline that guides growth like a trellis, a meridian that divides adolescence and adulthood. It’s a time perfectly appropriate for that morbid heaviness felt when contemplating life and death, one’s plans for life, or one’s lack of plans. Or when contemplating that there may be no perfect plans or right answers—even the best of runners cross the finish line spent and near collapse.

I don’t know if others feel this heaviness in the air but I believe that, as seniors, we begin to feel the burden of our future years sliding on our shoulders even as early as in August. I remember feeling the beginning of this pressure in that month, at the end of that month, when I heard that Seamus Heaney died.

I was on campus, working in the library, and read the news. I heard soon thereafter about a more-or-less impromptu memorial being conducted in the Woodberry Poetry Room. Recordings of Heaney’s own voice reading his poems played in the background; his books were pulled from the shelves, laid opened on the tables. A few people had gathered. I knew none of them. And the peculiar thing about Harvard, or really any elite institution, is that when strangers meet me, they ask not about me (at first) but ask whom I know.

Until a mutual connection comes to light, my status—and by extension the level of respect due me—is unknown. Often, it’s preferable to share a connection, even just a mutually disliked acquaintance, than to have none, to be a genuine stranger. I think this ‘guess-who-I-know’ game is pretty much ubiquitous—as is the experience of seeing someone you’ve newly met open himself up briefly, only to shut down. The discovery that you are not part of someone’s student group, or concentration, or club, often means you are not part of someone’s world.

Of course, this is not true of Freshman year. But it is true of Senior year, and is acutely felt by me because I have taken time off from Harvard and have seen near all my friends graduate already. I expect this to be true also for many who have likewise taken time off whether the reasons be academic, financial, or related to mental health.

I don’t mean to seem as though I’m careening off into an endless digression, though. In fact, I’m coming around to the main point which is that this heaviness I attributed to the psychic burden of adult responsibility is instead the burden of a forced parting, an exclusion. Graduation after eight semesters is in many ways arbitrary. The whole of the Senior class is required to go, to make room for the next bunch.

But how many of us are ready to go? Cases of famous drop-outs like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg should serve as examples that students are often ready to leave college behind before completing 8 semesters. Some of us are capable of find and holding down jobs; some of becoming captains of the innovation industry; yet some of us haven’t yet found jobs, discovered abilities or skills that make us valuable in a tough economy, or developed interests and talents that might give our lives meaning and direction.

I can’t count the number of meeting with OCS advisors, departmental advisors, and other administrators that dealt with course requirements, program deadlines, and other such logistical matters. Far too many meetings. But the number of meetings concerning what I want to do with my life? Far too few, and met mostly with shrugs, with little interest in my personal development.

Instead, I’ve been guided on a path of least resistance toward a degree that may or may not advance my career. I’ve been molded into another proto-alumnus and bombarded with requests to give my “senior gift” to Harvard. It’s a topic for another column—the unseemliness of Harvard’s begging—so I must regretfully leave the question to those who come after me.

I’ve had the feeling lately that really none of this matters much: heaviness, fear, outrage, graduation. When my senior year was again bookended by the death of another literary master (Gabriel García Márquez), I became obsessed again with “Cien Años de Soledad.” The ending: as Macondo dwindles out of memory, the town and the Buendía family are forgotten, swallowed by oblivion. Graduation is not different. The Harvard I have known will vanish, no matter what I’ve done or not. It’s a pessimism that makes it easier to digest the ending—of the book and of my student days.

I would be remiss to close without an offer of advice or of something positive to say. I’ve always liked books more than people; I think they stay with you longer, inhabit a deeper part of your brain. Read more. Don’t be afraid to. Read Heaney. Read something that no professor assigned you. Read for music and surprise. Read García Márquez. Prepare for the solitude that washes over you when you close the door to your last dorm room, dark and empty of any trace.

Michael T. Feehly ’14 is a joint history and Scandinavian studies concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.