Making mountains meet

“Mountains never meet, but human beings do meet.”

Sitting in the bright, stuffy office at the rural Kenyan hospital with a clay duck in my lap (it was a goodbye gift) and my impending departure weighing heavily on my mind, these were the words that were intended to deal with the giant elephant in the room. The saying is a Kenyan proverb, and if you know me at all you likely aren’t surprised that I chose to begin my senior column with a reference to my summer working in Africa. 

Though the phrase speaks to a certain truth—that human connections can accomplish what our habitat can’t—on this day it served a more important purpose of overlooking the fact that my relationships with the many individuals I met had come to an end. 

It’s in times like these—moments of conclusion and commencement, when washed-up seniors are charged with providing coherent narratives of their four years here—when platitudes like this one are most abound. Faced with a largely uncertain future, we resolve to fall back on anesthetizing ourselves with the hope that these experiences are not fleeting, that our relationship with Duke doesn’t end with the conferral of our degrees. 

Duke’s Gothic architecture and statues of tobacco moguls are deceiving in that they make us feel as though we’re part of a centuries-old tradition like our Ivy League cousins. We forget that Duke is merely a new kid on the block, that its over-arching priorities are constantly in flux and that its institutional memory is short. 

In an attempt to craft this column, I sought refuge in my personal Chronicle archive, though I found that most of my articles—all 125 of them—were about events whose importance was quickly lost, about goings-on that no longer mattered. Duke forces us to constantly adapt to imminent change, shifting friend groups, academic interests and physical campuses every semester. We build benches merely to watch them burn.

As graduates, we will soon be tasked with whittling down these four years of blurry movement—riding the C1, swaying in Cameron, bouncing around Europe with little more than a passport and a $10 phone—into a coherent response when we’re stopped on the street and asked: “So, how’d you like Duke?” These disparate experiences—nights spent sipping Tusker in a Kenyan dance hall, drinking sangria in a Spanish bar, chugging cheap beer out of a Solo cup—largely echo the same set of feelings, though they aren’t easily digested into a coherent sentiment. 

Our semesters may be punctuated with term papers and poster presentations, but college is mostly about the process of getting to and from those benchmarks. What matters more than the words inscribed in that 70-page paper is the act of getting to that last page; what was most important about our internships wasn’t what we accomplished in whatever dimly-lit office or lab, but how that experience influenced what we chose to pursue next. It’s why we spend this time majoring in subjects that won’t hold firm grasps on our futures, reading Russian novels and Spanish plays whose significance is so minute that they don’t even have Wikipedia pages. 

The beauty of these benchmarks is that they provide us with a constant metric with which to bridge experience and expectation. We spend four years chasing varying versions of ourselves only to find that those visions were misplaced and misguided—that we’re back at square one and that any attempt to evade the inevitable restart is futile. What’s more noble than the hurdles we’ve crossed—the degrees completed, countries traversed, wins tallied, mountains climbed—is how we codify them into a concise narrative, how we make them motivate our next steps.

As many a senior column will attest, one of the perks of working at The Chronicle is witnessing the peace that descends upon campus in the early hours of the morning from the vantage point of the office. Night after night, the quad strikes a supernatural balance, with traces of fog eerily surrounding the footsteps of the Duke Chapel’s formidable presence. 

These late nights often signify times of tension, excitement or depression—perhaps a DSG meeting ran too long, a team clinched another national championship or a student had been tragically killed. These are the nights when a lone reporter or editor realizes just how impossibly jarring college is, not because of the lectures or the social life or the tests or the internships or the job applications or the firsts or the lasts but because of the fact that these all take place within one community, defined by one degree and one name. 

It is in making sense of these highs and lows—the nights spent gazing at the starry Kenyan sky, emerging from a nightclub into the grungy streets of Madrid, leaving the Chronicle office after putting an issue to bed—that we attempt to make these proverbial mountains of our college experience meet. 

Should the task be too challenging, at least we’ll have the second half of that proverb to fall back on. After all, we’re only human.

Matthew Chase is the co-editor of Towerview Magazine and a former University editor of The Chronicle. His biggest accomplishment at The Chronicle was having the audacity to sit through almost every DSG meeting freshman year.