My favorite part of The Dartmouth aside from the opinion page, of course is the overheards. The overheards are ultimately more than just a fun snapshot of collegiate excesses and buffoonery although they are, undoubtedly, that too. A deeper analysis is required. What the overheads truly are, in a sense, are notes for a performance (college life) handed out to all of the actors (us) beforehand. They not only diagram our patterns of conversation usually connected to the Greek houses or pong but give us those patterns as well, prepackaged for use. And yet, the overheards manifest a strangely "knowing" quality they seem to understand the fundamental core of absurdity and futility underlying all modern collegiate life, even if the actual people speaking the overheards are totally oblivious to it.
It is crucial that most overheards keep repeating the same Greek house stereotypes over and over again. This is the essence of the overheard. By reading them you come to a better understanding of yourself as a frat boy or sorority girl or unaffiliated person. For example, if you are a Sigma Delt, you come to understand that you wear flannel and do bench presses. If you are a freshman guy, you learn that you don't know anything. (There is usually at least one example of an ignorant freshman who betrays catastrophic ignorance of the Greek scene, thinking that Tri-Kap is co-ed or that Sig Nu is a sorority.) But the overheards seem to expose the falsity of these things even as they reinforce them. They show how we endlessly satirize ourselves.
The overheards are best when they come to documenting morals, manners and mores. A Bones Gate member desires nothing more than a simple, naturally exfoliating facial scrub, but is unable to enjoy it because he is surrounded by drunken maniacs. Frat brothers anxiously look forward to the prospect of being challenged to drink until they vomit. A girl casually (or not so casually) jokes that she will start "skanking around at Tuck" unless she finds a job opportunity by the spring. All of these incidents convey a light-hearted attitude on the surface, while hinting that the truth of our experience here is defined by confusion. We don't know how to live, and scramble desperately to take refuge in illusions. We distract ourselves from the emptiness of life by assigning excessive importance and significance to pong, Greek stereotypes, etc. In so strongly bringing the reality of futility to the forefront, the overheards are as strong of an inducement to monasticism as any Catholic or Buddhist tract on the subject.
The overheards expose all our Greek scene conversation as an attempt to create something to talk about in order to ignore the void. Rather than develop interests in reality as it is, we invent something that we can be interested in and about which we can propound convoluted theories: all ADs are squash-playing pseudo-Zen beatniks, or what have you. We need to add some coherence to our confused sphere, but the attempt at coherence really only gives us a scheme to catalogue the incoherence. It does nothing to give life a plot.
What lessons are to be learned from the all-too-revealing satire and harshly purgative light of the overheards? They evince so vast a knowledge of the emptiness of life and the hollowness of worldly values that they can lead one only to dare I say it? a religious or spiritual alternative. They scream for you to detach yourself from all of this and go go seek shelter in the confines of a Trappist monastery and take a vow of silence. But obviously, this is no option for most of us. We would get restless. What other alternative is there?
The only alternative is to be in this world and yet not of it to regard it both with detachment and with proper respect and awe for its spectacle, for the musical play of its follies and its dead-end desires. The writer Italo Calvino said that the only choice we have in this inferno of ours is either to become so much a part of it that we cease to see it, or "to seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." Such an attitude is the only humane response to the challenge presented by the overheards. Thanks to The Dartmouth Mirror if properly read we now stand a better chance of regaining our long-lost human and spiritual dignity.
