A note to new undergrads
I never really get any better at the full-court press of a new fall semester. The act of actually going out to buy my textbooks always seems to throw a thoroughly cog-stopping wrench into my entire schedule. Pile on the fact that this is, in all likelihood (let’s keep our fingers tightly crossed on this one) the year I graduate, and I would say that I haven’t been this stressed since my freshman year. Now I could sidestep this anxiety entirely by gorging down a season or two of some fantastic TV (I still haven’t watched Breaking Bad ((I know, I know, please borrow some of the surrounding to bracket your contempt, I’ll get there eventually)), but like any good masochist I’ve chosen instead to channel my uneasiness. This is mainly because after four years of university I feel like I have a duty to throw some of my hard-earned knowledge back at the little whelps walking these hallowed halls for the first time.
And if there’s one thing that I wish someone had said to me, or at least acknowledged in a gruff avuncular kind of way, it’s that there is an express lane to this whole process. That just to the right, two blocks away from our gridlocked four-year academic street, where the cars sit bumper to bumper, and life can be a living hell at times, there is a smooth country road that you would only have to share with the sunshine, and by which you could get where you’re going with half the effort. On this side road you become a chameleon, your cognitive independence disappears the moment you step into a classroom and you drift through to a diploma with the least amount of push back possible. You show up to class, you get good grades, because good grades are what you get. It’s who you are. But as far as soul-searching goes (and I think that self-interrogation is still a major part of this stage in our lives, however much the idea has been satirized), this process is a dead end. And so the daunting task that I’m going to try and set for myself here is that I’d like to convince you to stay in the traffic, even while being fully conscious of this infinitely more comfortable road, so close it’s like, in your peripheral vision.
And maybe the toughest part of sticking to this rougher life is that you absolutely cannot write papers that you don’t believe in. Now, many of you probably already have friends who boast of how they can fake their way through any essay by hog-tying together wisps of theory, some political self-righteousness and a basic understanding of semiology. But what this process discounts is that you are actually just cheating yourself. One of the main skills that this major can teach you is that it is entirely possible to feel a part of the struggles of other minds, from other times. And if you are constantly holding yourself at arm’s length away from the text, you are being deprived of the chance to recognize yourself within them, which in itself make it almost impossible to put in the real blood, sweat and tears that this work deserves. And this fact orbits what is really my main point. This is essentially a DIY major, the entire infrastructure of the English department exists primarily to get you in the ring with your own personal demons. But that’s about as far as we can go. Once you’re between the ropes it is on you whether you’re willing to bring to bear the courage, self-awareness and straight up effort required to go nine rounds. Don’t argue points because you think they’ll sound smart, or because nobody will know that Barthes said it first (who reads Barthes, anyway?). Argue them because they address issues that make your guts queasy. I want you to feel your writing jitter down your spine, and send sparks zapping out your fingertips. I want your relationship with your work to be almost bodily disturbing. If the stakes aren’t that high you are depriving yourself of a chance to expand your experience of the world. My warning parable of choice for this is the work of Hemingway, who started his career with a bullshit detector so fine he could snipe red dots on the sweaty forehead of his own arrogance and anxieties, but who, by the end, acted as kind of custodian, polishing the smiling face on the statue of his persona. I know this may seem like all too many peanuts in the grand scheme of things and if I seem overly precocious or melodramatic on this issue it’s only because I know myself well enough to acknowledge how available I am for these perversions. My ego is large enough to contain the rationalizations of a pseudo-artist, and it’s a goddam daily struggle to force myself into taking the harder (if eventually more creatively fecund) path. In summation: any time you lie to yourself, you inhibit your ability to recognize a crucial, life-and-death type truth later on.
And the first thing I’d like you to admit to the mirror is that you’re not nearly as clever as you might imagine. I come from a small town in southern New Brunswick where reading is seen in the same light as, say, a prostate exam. Yeah, it’s probably a good idea to do it every couple of years or so, but if you start to enjoy it – well, then, we’ve got a problem. As a result, I am well versed in the experience of being the big fish in a little pond. But let me assure you – there is a howling, intellectually stratified, ocean out there, and it likes nothing more than to shove little-pond-big-fish down its massive gullet, as our hopeless victim screams: “But I get HBO!” while hanging precariously from the beast’s uvula. And speaking as a dutifully retired brainy-prick I know how unwilling you might be to receive this information. To tell a smart kid that they’re not smart enough is always dangerous. We neurotic schmucks have had to shore up the minor intellectual differences between our peers and us in a desperate (and altogether useless) attempt to brace ourselves against some guns of Navarone sized self-hatred.
But coming to you as someone who’s at least in the process of showing his ugly mug on the other side of this struggle, (and if I have any authority in this weird screen-to-screen conversation that I’d expect/want/ need to have with you younglings, it is as someone who has been in the same brain space as you might find yourselves inhabiting at this very moment) I promise you that once you abandon your pretensions of exceptionalism, rather than being alone, un-special and unloved, you will instead finally be able to do the kind of nose-to-the-dirt level work that is really meaningful. The kind of work that grounds you in the realities of your situation and actualizes you as a living, breathing human being in the process of growing intellectually, emotionally and interpersonally. The kind of work that makes pregnant women jealous of your glow. And, if you check in for the daily nine to five, the kind of work that ties joy and pain together so irreparably that you begin to realize not only are they deeply, almost incestuously, related, but that they are actually coterminous. And you know that wound that you hide under several layers of steel chest-plate armor, that insecurity which you go to such dickish extremes to camouflage? Well it is your struggle with exactly these indelicate situations that is the source of some of the most noble and admirable qualities of your personality. So don’t disappear. Don’t hide yourself away for fear of being judged harshly, or because there’s less friction that way. I want you to be seen, make me know you. Please.