Forgetfulness is forgiveness and disregard is our only form of sanity, so it seems that I am cursed to remember, with photographic vividness and specificity, every detail of my visit to Pomona College. My father propelled our rental jalopy through the Central Valley at 90 miles per hour until we hit Los Angeles, at which point we crawled inland at a pace of 20. It was February 2006. It was 70 degrees. The campus was clean and verdant.
“Hello,” said my guide. “Welcome to Claremont.” We feasted at the dining hall and ran into several of his friends. “It’s not the weekend,” he said, “so it might be a little tame and … boring.” We had several drinks. A friend of mine from high school showed up. ‘Let’s go to the outdoors club meeting,’ he said. We did. We went to a school dance. Before it was over, we must have met six or seven different social groups. Then we stumbled back to the dorms—the palatial dorms with spacious singles and wide balconies and wisteria in the windows. He gestured to a beaded tapestry. “This is where the pot and Super Smash Bros. takes place.” And sure enough, there were three enormous bongs and a flat-screen TV. It was love at first sight.
And then I visited Columbia. An impromptu dinner, again with some high school acquaintances, was arranged. We ate at Amir’s. “So, is there a lively campus life at Columbia?” I asked, realizing with every chew how gross East Coast food was. ‘Yes,’ said a student, ‘I spent yesterday at an ESC retreat, last night chaperoning a formal, and today doing a problem set…” Even as the falafel turned to dust and gravel in my mouth, I tuned him out, answered “yes,” and decided to come to Columbia.
My point is that life at Columbia is, a) not like life at other colleges; b) a matter of convincing yourself that things are better than they are. This is less true during the first year, when dorm life passably mimics that at residential institutions. This kind of folk society precludes the possibility of the “long, lonely nights” a friend at Stanford described. It is close-knit and all-encompassing.
And then, when the year is over, it disappears like a puff of smoke. Old friends are scattered to the winds. You realize it may have been predicated on proximity over affinity. Groups persist, but rarely interact outside one another—why would they? What an unhealthy and extreme contrast there is between first and sophomore years! Claustrophobia gives way to solitude—there is little in the middle. College is supposed to be a time of unrivaled variety, but it is so hard to dabble at Columbia. Life more resembles a series of obsessions or addictions. Just as Morningside Heights has the convenience and culture of a suburb with the expense of a big city, Columbia has the inescapability of a residential college and the warmth of a commuter school.
Getting off campus is possible, but then what else is there to do? There isn’t the community of colleges that there is in Boston, nor is there the easy congeniality found elsewhere in the States. New York is a lonely, overworked city. Scraping together an outing is often more trouble than it’s worth—first gathering the crew, then getting to the subway, then watching the streets pass by in increments of six at 12 miles per hour. Where to go but downtown? But you had less fun and spent more money than you thought and it will take an hour and a half to make it back from Avenue C. Maybe the outer boroughs? Columbia is about as far from Queens and Brooklyn as is possible. A movie? Half the price in Hoboken—is it worth the trouble?
Many answer ‘no,’ which is why they seek community and meaning by going to work. How depressing is that? New York proves that making friends and having a job are at odds with one another. College ought to be a refuge from the real world, not an introduction to inuring yourself to it.
And yet this is what Columbia students learn to do, day in and day out: how to put up with requirements they hate, make friends that aren’t friends, ape passions that aren’t passions. There is something sick in how I’ve come to be grateful for perennial misery. But it’s taught me the same thing that people learn at other colleges, where life can be perfect—a true education lies in forgetting how to put up with toleration and learning how to complain.
Chris Morris-Lent is a Columbia College senior majoring in English. Politics, Sex, and Religion runs alternate Thursdays. opinion@columbiaspectator.com.
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