Besides the commonly acknowledged associations such as a lack of motivation and a tendency to experiment with new personal identities, senior spring, for me at least, entails a period of disconnected time, a rare opportunity to look into the past—now distant and marked with a stamp of closure—when you still conduct the same daily routine on the same physical landscape where it all happened.The grass has now turned lush and my dorm room on the third floor is slowly turning into a sauna room. It was on a similar humid summer night that I arrived at this small New England town from thousands of miles away almost three years ago. Like many of my peers, thefirst year of my Exeter career abounded with new beginnings, dangerous person- al paths, and painful regrets. Hasty and certainly imprudent decisions quickly gave way to relationship dramas, friendship disasters, and unnecessary sleep deprivation. I was rash, hurrying to act upon spontaneous whims as they arose, without much contemplation. Indeed,
I hold no one else but myself accountable for that tumultuous year and the mistakes that I continue to make today, but it was through the many unexpected turns of events—perhaps one could even look at their beautiful coordination in awe—that I met the friends and teachers who would witness my metamorphosis and, among them, an important mentor who continues to guide me today from afar. I was never perfect and will never be, but thank you all—whether you are the friend with whom I went on an ad- venture in New York, the teacher whom I perhaps disappointed, or the class- mate that I once attacked at a Harkness table—for pushing me to constantly progress.But memories, by their very nature, are not equivalent to a remembrance of things as they were, as Proust would say. We extract life lessons and grow from these experiences, whose memories only become more distorted, glorified, and refined as we sail away from this place. Our remembrance of Exeter will be an abstract and malleable collec- tion of events, slowly absorbed into our personal identities. A rash and hurtful conversation will no longer be the combination of pain and immature words uttered, but a new sense of serenity and sophistication. In this way, the remembrance of Exeter will evolve, wither, grow, and blossom as the clock of life ticks at an incredible pace. In this light, Exeter will cease to be an actual place, but a nostalgic past.Enough of this Exeter as an elusive remembrance—the physical place and its lofty ideals also have a sense of objective permanence too. So how exactly does Phillips Exeter Academy—as an institution—play into our time spent here? Foremost, Exeter provided the foundation on which we have been able to cross paths with each other, more than three hundred of us brought together from a pool of more than seven billion souls. What do we, then, owe to Exeter as an institution? Just like Fitzgerald compared his fellow Princetonians to “holders of apostolic succession,” we Exonians are but faithful guardians—a strange combination of insignificance and necessity—of this institution and what it has garnered to represent in the past two centuries.
When I came back from Boston last week on the Amtrak Downeaster, the twilight sky loomed over Exeter—its signature Georgian style buildings, the clock tower, the magnificent library in which we toiled for countless hours. Then it dawned upon me: after merely three years, I have come to embrace this place as the home of my adolescence, this bygone and timeless paradise called Exeter.
