Let the Nostalgia Begin

In my prep year, I often found myself in an interesting conundrum at which my conscious found itself split into two, diverging, Frostian paths.  Everyday, I would go through the trouble of all my classes as all Exonians do, and consequently, exhausted and with ghrelin pumping through my veins, I would have to eat.  Now, the dining hall is our archetypal space for said consumption, but prep year Michael would argue that Szechuan functioned just the same.  Thus, I found myself having to make an (in the given context) impossibly hard decision each night: would I have the courage to summon myself to walk to the dining hall?  Yes, I understand, easy material for ridicule.  But as many of you well know, the oft mocked state of “crippling social anxiety” is quite real, and while my credit card certainly ensured that this anxiety would never become fully crippling, I would find myself eating out days at a time, taking the road that was grassy and wanted wear.  I am, in fact, now aware that numerous students at Exeter have faced this same problem, which interests me, because I find it unfortunate that we never formed a commune to eat our take-out together, albeit in silence, so at least we would know that we were not alone.   

Of course, all it took for me to was to learn that nobody was judging me for what I was wearing everywhere I was going and that not everybody was always forming polarizing opinions about me at every possible chance to enable me to go to Elm Street.   Now, like most people, I am more engrossed in my cellphone, the guy across from me complaining about her test scores, and the lukewarm condition of dining hall soup on my palate than anything else.   It’s okay to sit alone too: as long as you just remind yourself that you are only eating food for sustenance.  The previous sentence was sardonic: I have found it more often than not that someone will likely come sit with you.   But at the same time, I have found that the dining hall, whether it be Elm or Wetherell, like most other dining spaces, also functions as a microcosm, where information, sometimes asymmetric, sometimes symmetric, but mostly trashy gossip about who hooked up with who, is passed from person to person.  As I began to involve myself in speechmaking activities and clubs and came to lead some of the biggest ones on campus, this aforementioned issue became null.  But I guess what I’m trying to say is that at every level of Exeter, at every grade, we are forever ruined yet humbled by inexperience.  There will always be something that we will learn about ourselves, some set of convictions and opinions that we will develop and deem to be subjectively superior, some people that we haven’t spoken to and that now we have we wish we had spoken to earlier.  There will always be someone who will change your opinion, who is smarter than you, who will help fill this academy with dynamism and prevent it from becoming that tepid bowl of soup. 

Voltaire’s Candide tells the story of a young man, namely Candide, who lives a life of sheltered optimism.  His professor Dr. Pangloss, a teacher of “métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie”, tells him that this world is the best of all possible worlds (the work depicts this with blistering mockery), which Candide accepts and is indoctrinated as such. For example, when Candide witnesses the earthquake of Lisbon, and the subsequent deaths of some 50,000 people, he accepts the reasoning that the earthquake must have been for the best, for if the earthquake happened in Lisbon, then the same earthquake could not have happened anywhere else.  Candide’s love interest, Lady Cunégonde, is also subjected to the ruminating experience of watching Dr. Pangloss “giving a lecture in experimental philosophy” to a chambermaid, which is much more lewd than it sounds.    

I trust that when I was a prep, I was just as optimistic as Candide and just as sexually incognizant as Lady Cunégonde.  I truly, truly believed once that I would never receive a single dickey during my time at Exeter, and fell prey to the mythos that there was some prize at the prize assembly that rewarded perfect attendance.  I also supposed for the longest time, as a prep, that the senior proctor who lived in the room next to me enjoyed using his bed as a trampoline at the most obscure, most obnoxious hours of the day.   In the same way, unfortunately Exeter has made me cynical, something that I feel is due process with the loss of innocence.  My senior quote reads from H.L. Mencken, “The cynics are right nine times of ten.”   Cynicism truly seeps into us all inevitably (what a cynical thing to say).  The annoyance and disgust at which upper classmen often use to denigrate lower classmen is beyond well justified: there is something about this place that really cracks and shrivels optimism.  Ironically so, a place where the best and brightest students are fashioned and shaped to lead the world down a supposedly bright path is also the one who graduates seniors who leave more jaded than a Buddha pendant.  I find that we would all agree with Voltaire: which one of us honestly believes in Leibniz’s theodicy?  The very fact that we are forced to go to assembly over the course of four years is likely to convince any Exonian, in my opinion, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.  Include some of the injustices we see going on not only in the world, but also sometimes at Exeter: most of us would find Candide and Dr. Pangloss fools, incapable to seeing the truth.   

Cynicism is good: it keeps us away from deception, from the snake-oil salesmen who peddle their wares, from too easily looking towards the ceiling for the word gullible.  A cynic is the man who looks for a gravesite when he sees fresh flowers.  Being cynical has prevented us, although increasingly less so, from accepting socialist economic institutions that ravaged Eastern Europe only thirty years ago, which seem to have already been forgotten. 

But in this Hegelian type of development of consciousness, its also valuable to remember where we first started: the first consciousness, the starry-eyed freshman who has set foot at Exeter to being their journey with no boundaries set up, with no fight to the death between man and slave that we know as the competitive nature of Exeter.  It’s so easy to take this all for granted, how Exeter has changed each and every one of us to become better people and to become more mature, more thoughtful and more intellectually diverse.  When I am left here reflecting, the things that come to mind first are not the unscrupulous parts of Exeter, which I don’t think any of us would doubt exist. The things that float to the surface of my consciousness are the times that I have spent with my friends and all the stupid (but not too stupid) things that I have done with them, and the incredible teachers that I have had the pleasure of being taught by and their respective classes. So when we, seniors of the class of 2016, look to the future, let us not be bogged down by bemoaning and grumbling as we have been conditioned to do, and simply remember that we once had a grand old time down in New Hampshire at an old, wonderful, boarding school, called PEA.