Three and a half years ago, I made a pact with the Universe: Get me into a top university. I want nothing else.
(This was before I realized you could ask the Universe for much bigger things.)
My parents entered university against an acceptance rate of 0.35 percent, delayed by the Cultural Revolution. My father went on to finish his Ph.D. in three years. He sometimes wrote on the bathroom counter because his newborn (me) was a crybaby. I was the unexpected second child of a visiting scientist on scholarship in Canada. His first daughter went to Princeton.
According to China's One Child Policy, my life would have been impossible-extinguished. Academia was my birthright.
I'm graduating. My only definite grown-up plan is a plane ticket to Paris and a train schedule.
What did I learn? And was it worth it after all?
On Monday night, I learned about post-socialist Hungarian nostalgia. I learned that the plesiosaurus was not a dinosaur. It was a marine sauropterygian reptile. Epitheliochorial placenta had an index card with a picture of a hippopotamus. I learned to (mis) program Wackadot. I learned about nature on non-recycled paper.
Did you know that if you put an old citation on your windshield, you can park anywhere? I learned about ethics. I learned that according to medieval cartography, the men of Ethiopia had one large foot. When he rested, the foot could shield him from the sun.
I learned to devalue the academic institution. Scholastic suffocation as a means to an end: graduation. I didn't want to answer your questions because you didn't seem to care. So I left campus for a year. And I spent each summer in a different city. In Africa, in the rented station wagon to iSimangaliso, on the white beaches of Ponta d'Ouro, I hoped that visceral experience might grant me real understanding. I wasn't completely wrong. In New Zealand, I picked mushrooms for three days. There is no immediate correlation between fungi diversity and dead standing tree trunk girth.
I came back. Isn't scholarship about submerging ignorance? But the objective became a checklist without meaning. No amount of miles could erase it.
I learned that there is a very real illusion of experience. God is false. Authority is destructive. You are wrong. What you begin to understand is that the wisest are the humblest. Give me knowledge enough to know I know nothing. You crumple against the enormity of history, and learn that extricating yourself from the timeline is impossible, inhuman. I learned that I take things too seriously.
I learned why you like Hitchcock, Welles, Godard. But I still cry with happiness when I see "The Lord of the Rings."
Academia has no poetry, I said. It has no passion. Footnotes are the poetic antichrist. Will we never escape context? Of course, she introduced me to poetry. My favorite: What He Thought, by Heather McHugh, Introduction to Creative Writing. I learned about Giordano Bruno. I learned about difficulty.
I learned that I could not be a surgeon. But I could love science for giving you a new kidney.
Academia is all order, no emotion, I said. Intellectual passion is oxymoronic. Passion transcends, screw artistic intent. Art is great if it is brutal. Every moment must be cataclysmic. It was too easy. I learned to defend ardently what I didn't believe.
But it wasn't all me. Staying on topic is dangerous, Professor. Digressions are fodder to understanding. They reside unformed in the guise of a tangent. Thank you, in the back, for making irrelevant observations.
I learned that life is confusing. I learned that confusion can disguise itself as doctrine. All you need is a reminder of personal ignorance by another's confession of ignorance. He said that ideology is a prison for humanity. They tell you not to use words like "humanity" because, really, what could you possibly say about humanity in eight pages? Maintain a clear focus. Refer back to your thesis. But don't summarize and don't reiterate. What was I saying?
University is not a bubble. It is a suspension of time. At times, the frenetic immobility disheartens. Sometimes, it's beautiful. I learned that you were right all along: We don't know enough.
So, yes it was worth it. Even "Biology of Dinosaurs."
Janet Wu is a Trinity senior. This is her last column.
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