The silly thing about senior columns is that they’re supposed to somehow be a coda and capstone on four years spent learning to be wise and mature. But at the end of my own four years at Columbia, the only thing I’m more convinced of now than I was when I started is that I know very little indeed, and that I was a fool when I thought otherwise. Granted, I know many more facts and am much more intellectually agile than before. But the primary effect of these enhanced capabilities has been to explode the certitudes I once held dear. This is called the Elenchus process, I think.
But despite this, I have managed to arrive at a few observations that I think are more or less well supported by the evidence available to me. I’d like to share them now, if I may.
I have observed that the world is a complicated, challenging place. This is not a trivial observation. It’s hard for us undergraduates to understand the degree to which this enormous institution we temporarily call home buffers us from the circumstances and calamities of the so-called Real World. Most of us are untested by the full pressures of independence, even living as we do in New York City. As a direct consequence, we often lack the ability to effectively distinguish preventable, and therefore genuine, moral offenses from the lamentable but inescapable vicissitudes of the human condition at its present level of development.
I have observed that we human beings make mistakes, and that we do so astonishingly often. Sometimes, the complexity of the world leads us to choose poorly, but more often our own primal fears and baser natures get the better of us. I have made such mistakes myself. Most of us have. Correcting them does involve mitigation through moral codes and upright conduct, but this, while necessary, is inadequate, because complete prevention is impossible (“if men were angels...”). As important, if not more so, is dealing effectively with such mistakes after the fact. This last observation involves acceptance, forgiveness, and regret, and these are learned skills, not innate instincts.
I also have observed that we are a remarkably inventive species. Where we have problems, we often create solutions. We are capable of the counter-factual—of imagining what might be, of thinking, “what if?” This capacity enables us to eke out some modest security against circumstance and primal strife and to bootstrap ourselves up to a state of something like prosperity. It undergirds our greatest wonders, our vilest atrocities, and everything in-between. It enables our aesthetic sense and our ability to hope.
These observations are not original. They are at least as old as civilization, and likely as old as mankind. But they are simultaneously as new as each new generation, imperfect yet perfectible, much like the world it inhabits for a time. I am reminded of one of my favorite passages in that old Lit Hum mainstay, the Iliad:
As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity.
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another
dies. (Iliad VI:146-150, Lattimore translation)
Often clichés are clichés because they express important truths about humankind. But they are not true for us until we have understood this fact and the reasons why it is so.
Trying to encapsulate one’s college career in a newspaper column is about as hopeless a task as there ever was. So much happens in the time we are here, both in our official lives as students and in the interstices in which we create our true selves, and here I am stuck with prose, this clumsy tool, and this space on paper, at once too tiny and too huge for the vivid reality once lived. I could fill a book with the mundanities of a week. But can I convey the essence of my own four years here in 800 words?
I have done my best. I have not talked about specific events because, well, who other than my friends and I would care? But all that was said and done by us and by others lies implicit in these comments. Nearly all that will be said and done by those who will take our place is so implied as well—but not all of it, at least not necessarily. Our capability for the counter-factual means that our future need not recapitulate our past, if we so decide and so strive. As is the generation of leaves, so is that of the students who come here. One generation enters afresh while another passes forth into the world.
The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in political science and philosophy. He was the online editor and deputy editorial page editor for the 131st Managing Board.