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Graduation: A ‘Last Column’

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Cosmology on the Rocks

This could be my last column. (!) I don’t really know if it will be. I might write one next week. And I’m not graduating — just heading to Egypt for a semester. But an air of finality is in … the air, as we near the last week of classes, charging forward to our sloppy, Slopey, memorable yet strangely un-memorable pinnacle of the academic year, Slope Day. And then, graduation.

For underclassmen, this uncanny phantom of our own graduation, our own last concert or last lecture, hangs precipitously over us for our first three years. It meekly pokes its head out around this time of year; sort of the tip of the iceberg, a return of our most repressed thought of all—that of leaving. I’ve felt this since freshman year, sitting at the spring show of the Class Notes a cappella group as they said goodbye to their seniors, and then when I’ve said goodbye to a few of my own.

When it’s someone you don’t really know, the finality just hangs there in the abstract. “I guess four years will pass eventually,” you say to yourself, “but for now, it’s all good. Let’s get drunk.” Or something like that.

And not to knock drinking or drugs or anything, but do notice how those things allow Time — which, taken at its full meaning, can be a rather difficult, dreadful, but also sublime thing— to pass quickly, inconspicuously with its head down, not bothering our distracted brains much. The night begun with sake bombs always has to be a blur, not in the sense that you couldn’t see, but in the sense that you simply don’t feel time. The hours seem to be passing slowly and happily as you make your way from Plum Tree to House Party 1 to House Party 2 to CTP to wherever you end up; but in the morning, that’s all packaged up in a few Facebook pictures, labeled “Good Times at the ’Nell” and all of the sudden this past-time seems to have become “past” in an instant, and you don’t know how you got to this present. It’s as if, in this weird culture of hyper-photographing everything we do, we become (jaded) spectators of our own lives, enjoying each moment once it’s passed, but never accessing it in real time.

But like the ultimate stopper of time, death, graduation hits everyone eventually … only we don’t mourn graduation — we celebrate it. It’s a strange paradox: if graduation is death in microcosm, the microcosm is a hell of a lot more celebratory than the big show in the dirt. And celebratory it will be.

As I sit writing between the libraries, some senior friends stroll by. “Oh, ’08!” I address my muse. Or should I say, with the Class Councils’ giveaway cup, “Oh, ’08! Celebre08, Participe08, Gradu08!” I probably shouldn’t say that. I would do better to apologize to anyone graduating anything this year, for they fall victim to this terrible cliché we should have seen coming all along: Gradu08. Oh man. And to think they would ask you guys for money before you’ve even graduated! (That’s the Particip08 part: participate in the fundraiser.)

So these strange specimens of homo seniorus — reflectors of what we’ve all got coming to us — are walking through campus, trying to take it all in. They’re the ones sitting in the sun and really enjoying it, perhaps finally accessing it in real time. It’s the ends of things that let us access time, and that’s why I think the end is always tragic but awesome.

Analytically, we’d have to say that the ends of things like educations, relationships, or wars tend to be sort of a lie, for better or for worse: you think you’ve stopped learning but you haven’t, you think you’re alone, but then she doesn’t leave your mind, or you think the war is over but you just can’t seem to get those occupation troops out of the desert … because multiple histories have now been intertwined. You and traditions of knowledge; you and her; you and Iraq. On that more morbid point, shouldn’t it have been a bit more predictable that the ‘Mission Accomplished’ spectacle aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln was a Complete Lie? And most depressing are the Democratic candidates’ promises to pull the troops out at auspicious times like “day one”— promises the candidates know the Pentagon and the hawks won’t let them keep. But graduation is happier than that; these seniors sitting in the grass are finally getting it, whatever “it” is. Maybe.

“Some people graduate, but they still stupid,” Kanye West tells us, in his latest album, “Graduation,” which you must check out, seniors, to see that his cynicism is not the whole story. The melancholia mixes in with the celebration.

“Good Life,” is the one the culture industry prefers to play. That’s Slope Day, I think. “The Good Life,” Kanye says, “where we like the girls who ain’t on TV, cause they got mo’ ass than the models,” which, for us, must mean the Cornell Design League’s fashion show this weekend — where the girls are both models and not on TV! “So keep it comin’ with the bottles, till she feel boozed like she bombed at Apollo.” And I always think not of the theater in Harlem but of Apollo Chinese Restaurant in Collegetown, which will make your Slope Day with a solid portion of Lo Mein.

Kanye’s “Graduation” can be about Cornell as much as it’s about Chicago, and not only because Last Call will be performing a version of that album tonight at Statler. And I think no one puts it better, simpler, than Kanye, when on graduation day he says, “after all of that … you receive this.” The diploma, that is. It seems so absurd to stuff all of that — experience — into this. But precisely because graduation is about way more than just the paper, because in it we can finally feel time, graduation is probably the awesomest thing around.

And in a column that is probably not my last, a whole month before you seniors graduate, just talking about it makes you feel sort of … real.

Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appeared alternate Fridays this semester.

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