Winter invokes even in the best of us a dark sense of solitude. For some, these long months of smothered greenery and white heatless sunlight provide peaceful serenity and time for meaningful introspection, but for others like me, they serve to drive us into a mindset of lonely introversion and serious reflection.
It comes as no surprise to me that the Ivy League schools are all in towns or cities with relatively brutal winters. I'll be honest, although we love to remind our dentists' assistants that "it's an Ivy," the distinction is little more than the bluff and bluster of stubborn pride in a largely arbitrary tradition. But I still think there's a reason that the bulk of intellectuals from generations past chose to hole themselves up against the harsh and howling cold for months on end while pursuing an elite education.
Intense introspection allows for the honing of one's inner life in a way that privileges mind over body and cultivates intellect over amusement. The winter makes us serious people, imbues us with a sense of purpose, reminds us how feeble and vulnerable our bodies are and focuses us sharply on survival.
One of the key struggles of being human is navigating the disconnect between our obstinately animal bodies and our civilized intellect, which is constantly at odds with our instinctive tendencies. We are embarrassed when we can't keep the animal in check; anyone who has had bad gas at a dinner party or an itch in the wrong place during a job interview knows the humiliation of remembering that poise is little more than a thin faade.
Here at Dartmouth, we all know the demanding pressure of ambition, and living a life of the mind only serves to exacerbate that drive. Ambition is the external expression of the desire to quash the baseness of the animal and to transcend it by becoming respectable a way of evading the hard reality of our shared mortal fate by creating a false sense of lasting importance despite our bodies' expiration dates.
But our machine-like ambition is not sustainable. We need a release at times, a release that relentless winter does not readily allow. Giving into those animal tendencies can also be fun, if we ignore all those implications of doom and stop taking ourselves so seriously. I think that this is the point of Winter Carnival, underneath it all. Yes, I know that the initial point was to commemorate the termly shipment of fresh women for an extended weekend, allowing a necessary release for the stir-crazy Men of Dartmouth, but it all goes along with a larger kind of physical release. Drinking is a celebration of the liberated body of an uninhibited mind; "spirits" are so-called because they lift your spirits. The marathon of socializing that goes along with the big weekend brings us the comfort of a sense of community that is otherwise suffocated by the oppressively isolating and silencing snow.
Most of all, alcohol makes us warm. Warmth makes us lazy; it makes us animal again. I have this inexplicable welling-up of excitement whenever Atlanta springtime starts creeping back in early March, and I drive by Piedmont Park and see people out in droves, on walks or picnics or simply basking in the sun's renewal of our sense of being alive. I love seeing the individuals in a community existing together, and I have long held a theory that the famous reserve of New Englanders comes from their nearly half-year sabbaticals of having no common town, no communal gathering place. They are subject to the solitary introspection that comes with staying indoors. Their living condition and sense of self becomes primarily internal and individual. But when we give ourselves over to drunkenness and debauchery, that cold clench of ambition and serious purpose is loosened, and we remember what it's like to be wild and purposeless. It's as freeing as it is irresponsible, as exhilarating as it is deadly.
I have always heard that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous was a Dartmouth alumus, and guess what it's true. In fact, both founders hail from Vermont, and Dr. Bob Smith was a 1902 grad. Though anecdotal evidence is hardly proof of anything, I still find this oft-overlooked tidbit of Dartmouth lore to be striking, at the very least because we intuitively understand that there is some relevance to its repetition. We recognize that we're a drinking school to an extent that is very unusual for an institution at the top level of academia. We pride ourselves on drinking, but what's more, we rely on it. Some of us become entirely consumed by it, finding it impossible to repeatedly return to the stifling routine of being civilized after a night of bodily excess and complete loss of inhibition. But for the most part, the weekend is enough to remind us that the temporality of youth can be thrilling instead of daunting.
What I'm saying is in essence an overly verbose exploration into our beloved mantra, "Work Hard, Play Hard." We can never entirely abandon the ambition that has been instilled in us at least since high school (which is a fair presumption given our current privileged place at this institution), but we are tempted to. When our days are routinely interrupted by the momentarily terrifying sound of massive mounds of snow and icicles falling to the ground below, and our nostrils freeze as we try to trudge through the thick frozen ground of snow and ice, we want to rage against that pervasive sense that mortality is lying in wait, warm-blooded creatures that we are. And rage we do. Rage we will. WC oh-leven: where the jungle meets the tundra.
