“A story has no beginning or end: Arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead,” Graham Greene once wrote.
It’s an appealing thought. But is it true?
Greene’s quote is like so many seemingly poignant passages I’ve read during my four years of studies at UCLA: it comes across as deep and profound upon initial reading, but then once I play with the words I am less impressed. Surely I feel happy, content and even somewhat relieved to be graduating from college. Yet one question lingers in mind. It’s an offshoot of Greene’s nice little aphorism. I suppose this self-indulgent column is as good a place as any to articulate it.
If one can choose any time or place to start anew, then what is it that makes college such a life-shaping time in one’s life? Will I be any more or less enlightened in September, when I am no longer in school? And more importantly, do I know myself any better upon leaving UCLA than I did four years ago? I cannot really say I know more ““ any more than anyone knows from one moment to the next.
What I do know is that I’m graduating from UCLA with the same anxieties and quixotic fantasies as just about everyone else who has ever graduated from an American university. So there’s nothing new there.
Am I going to face generation-defining challenges in the years to come? It would be nice to think that those of us leaving college are being forced onto the treadmill of life at a faster pace than anyone before us. This is what my mother keeps telling me. But I cannot really expect anything less out of my mother. She would say anything to make me feel unique.
The truth is that every generation feels as though they must adapt to an environment a little more competitive, a little more demanding and with a smaller safety net than the previous generations. But I don’t buy it.
It’s not all so typical. We are certainly living in interesting times. The majority of the class of 2008 had its eight years of high school and university life overshadowed by the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency. So we must be forgiven if we are a bit more glib, cynical and ironic than our elders find palatable. To have those critical years of psychological development overshadowed by W. is enough to excuse the soon-to-be-thousands of former history and political science students scouring the streets in search of their next fix.
So I can explain how the world, and my understanding of it, has changed while I’ve been at UCLA, yet I cannot really explain if and how I might have changed. That’s annoying. But that is what makes time so illusory. I feel as though time stood still so I could be nurtured for the last four years.
Despite so much history written before our eyes, I cannot definitely say what exactly I’ve learned about myself over the last four years.
What I can say is that my time here, as wonderful and everlastingly memorable as it has been, is an unavoidable cliche ““ much like this column. If there is one thought that makes me downright giddy, it is the notion that once we leave UCLA our lives will no longer be doomed to be compared to John Belushi’s performance in “Animal House.” Once college ends, nobody provides us with a road map anymore.
If it is a cliche to say that the past is prologue, that’s fine by me. It is no more of a cliche than what Greene wrote, and he almost won the Nobel Prize.
After four years, all I can say is that I know myself well enough to know that I don’t know a damn thing. If you, my fellow graduates, think you know better, then you know even less than I do.
For those of us parting ways, unsure of when and where we will meet up again, cheer up. The past is prologue, and tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Alright, so maybe I ripped that off of Fitzgerald. But if there is one thing I learned at UCLA, it is that success in life is often measured by how well one is able to steal from the greats without ever getting caught.
De Jong was the 2005-2006 Sports editor of the Daily Bruin. He was a Sports and Viewpoint columnist in 2007-2008.