Mourning the lasts

Speaking to you today as a columnist, I resent the new burden that comes with using this paper as a receptacle for my own words, instead of for my facts’ and my sources’ words, which I’ve merely clipped and juxtaposed as clever moderator since my first year here.

 I don’t pretend my words now to be of service to you in any way because if I did, my name would be splattered across these pages more often than now. And I don’t intend to separate myself from you because we’re not so different, or speak for you because we’re not so similar. The difference between us is that I’ve been challenged with the assignment of translating four years to 700 words, and you haven’t yet. Come graduation, someone will ask you to translate all of it (“So... how’d you like Duke?”), and you’ll be choked by the confines of adjectives, brevity, emotion, anxiety and the impatience of your little brother wishing you’d just shut up about college already, since he’s in high school and doesn’t know what you’re talking about anyway.

There was really no way of doing research for what I’ve written here, and I did try. Flipping idly through 1,619 Facebook photos, I found them to look largely the same—an index of nights that have evolved in much the same way for four years, punctuated with the red sheen of solo cups and blurred by the incompetence of drunk cameramen. Dipping into my zipped archive of old term papers, I found them foreign and unreadable, archives from a time many short-term memories past. And punching my name into The Chronicle’s search bar—and no, I didn’t mean “carolina through”—to find my record of contributions here, I found them accounts of goings-on that no longer mattered, contextless and with impermanent significance.

People keep telling me to appreciate the lasts of college, but I don’t quite know how to live as if sucking the life out of each moment until it’s bone dry. It’s too difficult to assign meaning to the lasts of college, because there are countless parts of college so soaked with meaning from their repetition over these four years. Mourning the lasts requires a certainty I’m not yet prepared to offer that there will never be another: another afternoon brunch at the Nasher spent rambling, savoring and tallying drinks ingested the night before; another midterm paper submitted past deadline when your palms are sweating and you haven’t read the last third, or half of it; another time acknowledging the Chapel as you trot past, knowing that it’s part of something you’re a part of—and in that way, the graceful thing might even be yours.

But on graduation, our claim to ownership of the University ends, in large part—at least until you make a donation worth enough for a plaque with your name on it. Even then, you’ll return here again, but only on certain weekends and staying at certain hotels. However you may try, you can never quite do things the way you used to do them. You can’t ride the Shooters’ bull anymore without seeming a lecherous creep to the 18-to-22 set onlooking. You’ll look at current students with skeptical regard, echoing that same old refrain that Duke isn’t as fun as it used to be.

As students here, each day is spent absorbing—letting facts, images, gossip, drinks, names and experiences soak in through our pores, mouths and ears. And then we wrench out all that we’ve soaked in when we’re told to, producing papers, opinions, albums and accounts of what the hell happened last night. What I’ll seek most, in graduating, is the chance to languish in the fullness of what I’ve soaked in, no longer spitting it up every day for a grade. What it is that I’ve soaked in is difficult to ascertain, more easily expressed in maxims that would sound trite if I weren’t more tactful about wording.

Leaving here, I’ll still remember to push up against my limits of experience and in so doing, find them; to feel pressed to meet the constant burdens accompanying  privilege and expectation; to banish apathy and idleness; and to consider intellect limitless so long as it is maintained and cultivated. I owe thanks to all those who exerted their influence on me over these four years, however subtly or forcefully, who know who they are.

Caroline McGeough is a Trinity senior.  She is the recruitment chair of the Chronicle.