Thoughts On The End Of The Semester

At this unworldly, busy time in our lives, when studying, papers, and graduate school applications infiltrate even our dreams, it may be worthwhile to reflect on what it means to study in the first place?  What can we do to save ourselves from collapse in a psychological movement that simultaneously asserts to ourselves and in our lives the real fact of our studenthood?  What are we trying to accomplish?  Why do we choose, every second, to keep doing it, and not, instead, to die, to move to Hawaii, etc.?

First of all, there is something communal about this experience:  Everyone is going through the same “hell,” and that makes it fun, or at the very least a solidarity-inducing experience.  Moreover, there appears in our minds that final moment of ending, of conclusion, that motivates the work at the same time that it appears (paradoxically) to deny its value through comparison.  Yet I want to argue that there is something beautiful about studying and writing papers; I think this “fact” is in no way obvious, and, on the contrary, is discernible only through the profundity of its disavowals.  We moan and gripe because it is the language of our community; I think what I am really saying when I say, “I hate writing this paper” is, in reality, “I am finding myself in its writing, which is terrifying and affirming, and I couldn’t be doing anything else for anything, but I say to you I hate it to prove my love”.  This is, diagnostically speaking, possibly symptomatic of insanity.

My point is, maybe, that this “language” is precisely what makes the circuit run.  The education system in which we participate (which itself must appear psychotic to someone somewhere) functions only by virtue of its obfuscation.  If we really acknowledged what we were doing we would become mechanical or, better-put, unambivalent – literally inhuman.

So good luck with papers and exams!

–Gabe Tourek