The desire to escape the prison of our minds is universal.
Since this is the "Senior Giving Sage Advice to Freshmen" column, I thought that would be a good opening sentence. But despite its pomposity and pretension towards giving serious advice, I honestly think it is something to keep in mind. College is all about finding Ways of Escape escape, that is, from the solitude of the dorm room, from the enclosed self which is every day made harder and colder by the brute northern wilds.
Your first opportunity in attempting to banish solitude is to join a fraternity or a sorority. You won't be able to do this yet, but you'll have time to soak in the atmosphere. To the nearly 70 percent of you who will eventually join, I admit that this column is not addressed to you or to any cheerful, life-loving types. It is addressed to The others, the navel-gazing 35 percent who will not join.
I didn't join a frat, hence refusing what is probably the definitive Dartmouth experience. I don't doubt it's fun. But if you don't think it will be fun for you, it's time for your immediate introduction to the Jones Media Center the faithful alternative escape.
Yes, Jones has a superb DVD collection ranging from highbrow Ingmar Bergman fare to Jackie Chan's masterpieces. My relationship with Jones has almost been like a relationship with another person a stoic and un-emotional uncle who lends me movies that are sometimes good. Ah ... me and Jones ... Jones and me.
I wrote that with tongue partly in cheek, but in all seriousness, Jones will acquaint you with art, whereas frats will acquaint you only with life, art's cheap imitation. For, indeed, if you choose the frats, you are choosing life (boring) rather than a fantasy world devised by yourself and Hollywood (cool).
If you want to make that choice, fine. Go with the flow enjoy your wacky vomiting contests and fun, clothing-and-appearance-based sorority rush gauntlets. That's life: a basement floor slick with piss, beer, grime and "camaraderie." But if you count yourself a member of the lucky 35 percent, you can possess something better than mere life. You can possess art.
This isn't to say that if you're a sorority or fraternity member, you cannot possess art. You can. It's just that your engagement with tiresome old "life" will hamper you. Think about how nonsensical life is. Nature, for example, is completely tedious and brutal (as, some might say, are frats). It is only by investing imagination in nature (or a frat) that it becomes interesting and it is only when things are so enlivened that you get "Walden" or "Animal House." As Oscar Wilde noted, while commenting on Japanese art, "The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people." Apply this to Dartmouth College and everywhere else.
To live art is to engage with the common life while remaining removed from it in spirit. (And I don't think you can transform yourself into the arm or big toe of a fraternal institution and still pull this off.) You will not be in the prison of your mind, nor will you be in the prison of the world. You will dye the world in colors you like, rather than becoming dyed in her colors. You will occupy the glorious middle, where everything happens where powers surge forth from the mind and infect a hapless world with some luster. For your colors are always more interesting than the chaos of nature or of a frat. Nature creates tsunamis and Ebola, just as frats create exclusion and alcoholism. Individual man creates The Sistine Chapel and the polio vaccine.
When I first arrived at Dartmouth, I thought that I was going to become dyed in its ever-fresh Ivy green color (to some extent). I thought that my college self would somehow be different from my high school self. Many of you may find this to be true, but I haven't. I've only progressed to mildly more articulate incarnations of the same befuddled person. I find that I am a harbor on which I am eternally landing just as I eternally depart. To throw in your lot with the masses is to land on a deserted isle. It is self-marooning. It is to refuse the journey toward one's own continent.
Godspeed, 30 percent! ... and 70 percent, too.
