Well here it is: my last ever column for The Chronicle. This’ll be my 32nd piece of opinion writing for this paper, topping off almost 30,000 words of work written across 16 months. If I’m honest with myself, I probably should have taken the advice of that curmudgeonly old man at the New York gay pride parade this year and spun them all together into some kind of independent study for class credit. First piece of advice to take away from this column, people: always follow the unsolicited advice of irritable old men at gay pride parades.
Alright, so before I launch into this column, a few personal things. First off, I am very unemployed. If any employers are reading this and need, like, a person to do something—anything—contact me. Second, there are a bunch of things I didn’t get to write about this semester, so here are some condensed versions of the columns that never were.
- Don’t move the Women’s Center, Duke! I know you’ve lost your way PR-wise recently, but really? Moving the Women’s Center to the building where sexual misconduct meetings are heard? Do you not, perhaps just a tad, sense how some people might be uncomfortable with that? I know you’re trying to make space for the new cultural centers, but if you really need space that badly then why not just follow your otherwise-beloved strategy of building them a glass box?
- Regarding freedom of speech: okay, all I’m going to say is of course speech can be harmful. Plenty of countries have anti-hate speech laws in light of that very fact. And yes, free speech is wonderful and important and can be a valuable tool in the defence of minorities and minority viewpoints, but we need to recognise that it also protects the circulation of hate. The hard work shouldn’t be spent blindly defending free speech but instead working out a compromise based on the acknowledgment of both its benefits and drawbacks. Also, content advisories aren’t new or dangerous, and neither are trigger warnings.
- Did anyone ever work out whether stuff you put in the recycling at Duke really does just get thrown in with the rest of the trash? Someone should look into that. You have my blessing.
And now on to the actual column.
It’s popular around this time of year to speak of graduation as not being an end, but instead a beginning: keynote speakers talk about how we’ll take the lessons we learnt here and bring them into our real lives beyond this campus; graduation isn’t called graduation but rather “commencement;” columns pop up reflecting on how seniors can transition into the rest of their lives.
But that’s all silly, of course. Of course the end of college is an end. Let’s be clear here: I am never going to see some of you people again. Some of the things you are doing now you are doing for the last time. Our lives here are ending. The idea that—this is only a beginning—doesn’t do that reality justice. It is an end, and I think that in itself is something worth valuing.
For one thing, I think we should all be viewing this as a useful practice run for our ultimate deaths.
Hear me out here! Look: in the period leading up to graduation you have all the perfect ingredients for a psychological dry run of your eventual demise. You’ve got the looming sense of finality. You’ve got an equivalent to getting your will in order in the form of desperately getting rid of your possessions via All Duke. You’ve got the kind of nostalgia so overwhelming that you remember drunken freshman fumbles as epic stories of youthful vitality. If you can make it through the next month you’ll know that you have what it takes to one day die of old age. Well done, you! I certainly hope that whoever plans my eventual funeral will have the optimism to frame it as a commencement.
But here’s my main point: there’s nothing wrong with this being the end, and there’s nothing wrong with treating—or mourning—it as such. Just from my perspective, I’m about to graduate with no job and so be legally required to leave the United States. Most of my friends are here. My life has been here for the last four years. I literally don’t know what I’m going to do with myself, besides maybe do that whole millennial/creative/Lena Dunham thing of stumbling around at my parent’s home for a while feeling like I’m too good for a normal job. Adding to my struggle, there are exactly zero British employers who know what an International Comparative Studies degree is.
Am I sad as a result of this? Of course, but thank God for that. The end is a great thing, friends. The end is what sets everything in proportion. Set against the backdrop of our looming mortality we can finally look back clearly on what came before. Never mind all that stuff about “it all went so quickly.” How long ago does this year’s Heatwave concert feel? When was the last time you went in The Chapel? Are you really the same person you were sophomore spring break? These all feel so long ago and so unique. Your time at Duke has been filled with these experiences—don’t go trivialising that by painting your entire time at Duke as a smooth, single event. Embrace the end and the hindsight it gives you. Embrace the finality. Go back to places you haven’t visited since freshman year. Write letters to your best friends. Think honestly about how you’ll never live in this place again. And if it makes you feel sad – good. Because if you feel sad it’s ending, that’s how you know it was all worth going through in the first place.
Bron Maher is a Trinity senior. This is his final column for The Chronicle.
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