Return to Campus by Victor D. '27

I don’t know how to feel. “How do you feel about your last FDOC⁠01 First Day of Classes ?” Great question. It (graduation) doesn’t feel so imminent unless I psyche myself to believe so. I can barely surmise what my life will look or feel like in a month, so how am I supposed to locate this day in my life relative to an event in June? It’s too far. I think thinking about it worries me more than it excites me though. So I’ve chosen for it to be remote, distant, but every “I’m a 4th year senior” incants the inevitable end.

I can scarcely recall my life before college now that I think about it. I remember it conceptually—names, events, classes, places—but seldom does it evoke real emotion in the way that my recent memories do.

So I can lean on my experience graduating high school only to fall through it, a phantasmagorical mist without physicality, only image, an image that feels to belong to me as much as a story I watch on television—which is to say, it no longer belongs to me, it belongs to an otherperson me who I’m not quite sure when I broke from them, lost them, when they died.

So I’m trying to imagine the image of my impending graduation and really I can’t comprehend it. I recently read They Both Die at the End; I wonder about the major theme, carpe diem to the utmost everyday; no kicking the can down the road indefinitely until it’s too late; when death wielding scythe already claws at the door.

So then I think about seizing my days to the fullest and I encounter a library stretching beyond the clouds and into the depths of the Earth, a bookcase of what to me are essentially innumerable combinatorial books upon bookshelves and on an infinitesimal minority I may glean only their title spines, and in their pages when I leaf through another book coalesces in its place while my eyes adrift, and the library itself grows the more I pull from its shelves and read and pull and read…

More done, and less is the proportion complete. If I were to live as though I were to die at the end of each day, I’d be frozen in place as Matteo in They Both Die at the End, unable to leave his room, terrified by risk and choice and combinations thereof.

It’s really a gift to have an inexhaustible library to discover… but alas I won’t be able to do everything, as the more I do the more it feels as though I haven’t done anything. Anyways, rather than fixity in fear, I’m just doing what I want to do now without too much concern of that-which-I-want-to-do-but-don’t-have-time-to-do-now.

Although I can’t do everything, anything is something. So everyday I do progress and exercise something I like: reading, writing, music, studying, walking, playing soccer… none are commensurable, and so I’ll do what I enjoy—shun the Opportunity Cost Demon!