To Live Plainly
The warm breeze flowing through the open doors of our great marble-and-brick library; the chill of the river’s water after a plunge; the slamming shut of books and laptops at an invitation to come outside, to wander, to create art, to talk with old and new friends. After four years, it is so tempting to ascribe some elaborate meaning to my personal Exeter experience, to create some monument out of the sum of my days and nights – each neatly penned diagram, each race through the leafy green trails, each traverse to and from the cinderblock walls of my room.
Yet I am stopped by a hint of unease. Dostoevsky once wrote, “Beauty saves the world.” I fell for this quote wholeheartedly when I first read it. Now I realize that I don’t know what he meant by the word beauty, and therein, within that distinction, lies the essence of my unease.
In one sense, beauty is artifice. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is some man-made quality with which artists and art-appreciators endow objects and experiences. Looking back on Exeter, I can easily become enraptured with nostalgia that is beautiful in this sense, accepting on the inside the words many have told me – that I am living now the best years of my life, that I will never forget the memories from this campus. My experience can mesh beautifully and seamlessly with those of so many others, and many parts of me want to be that smiling alumnus returning for his reunion decades from now and believing that Exeter transformed me and therefore the real world through my actions, believing that I am part and parcel of the culture here. Perhaps this nostalgia, this grappling for beauty, originates with the sense that we, as Exonians, are the elite, the writers, the academics, the visionaries and the virtuosos who see things in the unique light of our great education. We take nothing at face value, for every utterance and every glance at the world overflows with the potential for drama and beauty.
Convinced by this and partaking in it fully, I lost the ability to live plainly, to take things as they are, trading this ability for the tendency to see everything in shades of real or imagined meaning. Sometimes people like me will invest all our hopes and dreams in a class, in a teacher, in a dorm culture, in another student, in ourselves. I have stacks and stacks of notebooks in my room documenting my obsession with my own life and its drama, written down in long-lasting ink under the assumption that those thoughts and struggles would matter to me years down the line.
Yet by investing so much heart in grand expectations or false attributions and depth and beauty, we only set ourselves up for harsh disappointment and disillusionment. The friends we thought were so transformative and intimate drift away, betray our trust, or live their own secret lives. The acquaintances that had fit so neatly into archetypes are revealed to have unique differences that embarrass our attempts at generalization or characterization. The story of our lives, the path to the top, the necessary buzzer-beater or hall-of-fame times, the awards, the college dreams, are all liable to evaporate and leave us deeply alienated from what we thought was beauty. In vain we try to re-spin to story, attack beauty from another angle, but are met with the same result.
Doing all this again and again, I failed to realize that I had succumbed to a deep vanity that was viscerally averse to looking at a second type of beauty, one that is more demanding and more frightening but also more real. I believe that the world contains beauty just by merit of existing, without ascribing anything to it. Life has the right to be senseless, unexpected and unfair without being called ugly and having us give up on its goodness. Emotions may seem to beg to be written down, experiences may seem to form themselves into stories, but I do not wish to be preoccupied with the past. Knowing the first kind of beauty is helpful – it helps to get one’s point across, it helps to win friends and influence people, it might even help to give us a tremble or two in our old age. Yet I have seen more than one person have his life taken over by the pursuit of this beauty and the devastation of disillusionment; I have seen depression eat at people because to them, there is nothing possibly sadder than a crack in the story, than the world not pulling through for them.
So here I am. I still write things down, but not nearly as much and for entirely different reasons. I could throw away all those filled-up notebooks now, something that would have caused me great pain even a year ago. I want now to live plainly, and above all to give thanks plainly. I give thanks for the family that I was born into by pure chance. For the random events that led to where I am now. For the facts I remember from my classes and the people I met in them. For the great race where I felt like I had conquered my body and all its limitations. For the terrible one where I felt like I was nothing but a coward. For the interactions I have with people who drift in and out of my field of vision, people who defy conventional labels. For four years that I spent here because I happened to be here. Above all, I am thankful for the rest of the world that my classmates and I now go on to face, so unknowably different from what I have known here, so full of uncomfortable and trying moments, so eternally surprising with its reality.