I've recently experienced my first Green Key weekend, and I have to say that it was a weekend like any other weekend, except longer and with more ennui. All of the campus publications ruminate on the meaning of Green Key, as if booze and casual sex were not ends in themselves. If Homecoming is about touching the fire, Green Key is about touching the void. Nonetheless, it has inspired me to take up my keyboard and write something. We cover the death of Romance very often in these pages, but do we ever cover our own coverage of the death of Romance or muse on why we are so concerned with it? We keep getting dragged back to the same old turf, over and over again.
If you look at any columns in The Dartmouth about our social scene, there is a common thread running through most of them (or at least every Zach Gottlieb '10 column): Tired of random hook-ups, careless sex and unmediated swilling of liquor, we yearn for a real dating scene predicated on conversation and getting to know other people on a more intimate and personal basis. Of course, we say, this is what everybody really wants -- everyone wants to form meaningful connections with other people and explore their own humanity. Why can't we do it? 'It's just that the fraternities are so well entrenched,' we say, that they continually suck us back into them. Alternatives are lacking. We insist, contrary to the wisdom of Shakespeare, that the flaw is in the stars and not in ourselves. But, of course, this is completely wrong.
The truth is that an exploration of our own humanity and meaningful connections with other people are wholly secondary to life. Whether we want to get away from our workaholic compulsions or overburdened intellects, we must find an escape into a world of non-self or less self. A constant flirtation with Oblivion becomes necessary, for only that dark syrup can make us forget ourselves, lost in an alcoholic binge or a carnal throb. The fraternities, I suggest, are our most readily available contact points with Oblivion, with the Void. They are like mystical portals into the netherworld.
Not only do our fraternities provide a natural stress-relief valve, but they are enthusiastically enjoyed and celebrated by a wide margin of the population. But (and this might be a little pompous and literary because it's a Nietzsche quote) "When you look into the Abyss, sometimes the Abyss looks into you."
When you go back to the void time and again, you start to feel depleted. It's a gradual breaking down, a sort of entropy. Occasionally, a Friday or a Saturday must be set aside for other pursuits. But eventually, you reach a point where the "salt hath lost its savor." I know this to be true in my life, at least. And when you survey the fraternity basement, it ceases to be the lurid carnival of yore, but now merely a concrete ditch with a fairly sticky and uncleanly floor.
This is not to disparage the fraternity system or to disparage the idea of a fraternity. Membership itself needn't prevent one from reaching the threshold of emotional, spiritual and mental depletion, and I think it's quite probable that many frat brothers and sorority sisters find that they are tired of the social scene without being tired of their respective houses. The best the disaffected among us can do (and I count myself in their number) is not to rally against the frats as if they were some great insurmountable dark force or hegemonic power structure. The current social scene is not our real foe -- if it even ever really was that and not just an enduring and unalterable human impulse towards dissolution. The most we can possibly do is to retreat, to coop ourselves up in our own little havens of creation and productivity, letting in whom we may choose.
No man is an island. But everyone is.
