On graduating

This piece comprises edited journal entries from the week of my high school grad and is a spiritual successor to this essay, which probably is best read first.

1. On noticing

I'm starting to notice things I never saw before. Well... Maybe I saw them. I just wasn't paying attention. For some reason, everything has become a metaphor.
— Demolition (2015)

I spent great chunks of my evening yesterday sat in the forlorn hallway chair, gnashing my teeth and staring at nothing in particular on the opposite wall. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life right now. This last stretch is rife with symbols, as one would expect. But symbolism which I didn’t see coming was the encroachment of debris on hallway talks.

We’ve been doing those nearly every night for ages, and the location has never been worth noting. Like sure, maybe you turn on or off the lights, move the table, kick around a soccer ball. But the physicality has never been relevant to the conversation.

And now it is. Now strewn across the hallway: three fat suitcases by S.’s room; a printer, never-used; my wooden chair; a big X-ACTO cutter; scissors; F.’s bags; a three-legged table after N. ripped one off; an unplugged fridge; S.’s mirror which I shattered, in its contorted frame, with spiderwebbed glass across the floor. It’s like the bit with the astronaut moving out. Maybe that's too niche.

Last night, F.—the ashwagandha user of all people—sits down on my floor, crestfallen, lamenting how sad it all is. He commented that we should’ve started urbexing earlier, prompting me to respond that there’s so much I wish we started earlier. Oh sure, maybe this wasn’t possible back then because of, like, academics? But surely to an extent—surely—we could’ve been doing this all along. I am staying up till a million o’clock tonight. I have some things I need to say.

2. Goodbyes and Statues

After we got our diplomas, when everyone was already crying, D. was the first to leave. After he told me, I choked up and sobbed and hugged him and then sat down, and he went around hugging other people and saying more good-byes. H. saw D.’s diploma on the table, and sheepishly joked about hiding it so D. would have to stay. And then I thought of Dandelion Wine—it’s crazy how relevant that book has been in my life this year.

When I saw the houseplants on first floor Taylor or when W. pointed out the clock to me, all I could think of was the stained glass windows of the Terle house. Those little moments hit like freight trains. It’s so trite but unfortunately too true—life consists of realising cliches. I can harp on and on about the monotonous and quotidian, but it really is, as Nabokov says, the supremacy of the detail over the whole which speaks to us.

These past few weeks I’ve been repeatedly rereading the chapter where John Huff leaves. It always hits, but it was in this moment, when D. left, that it meant more than ever before. I was living an objective correlative. The moment those words left H.’s mouth, the moment I glanced at D.’s diploma, all I could think of was Statues, where Douglas volunteers to be it, to keep John with them a bit longer:

“Just one game,” said John. “Then I got to go home. The train leaves at nine. Who’s going to be ‘it'?”
“Me,” said Douglas.
“That the first time I ever heard of anybody volunteering to be ‘it,’ “said Tom.
Douglas looked at John for a long moment. “Start running,” he cried. The boys scattered, yelling. John backed away, then turned and began to lope. Douglas counted slowly. He let them run far, spread out, separate each to his own small world. When they had got their momentum up and were almost out of sight he took a deep breath.
“Statues!”
Everyone froze.

And in the end, John leaves, of course—he must. It’s all so tragic, isn’t it? The train left at nine; the school kicked us out at five.

3. At Tikhon's

All of us want to be understood, but we are, as Shrek says, like onions. Everyone knows this—this is banal as it gets—but, nevertheless, there isn’t much to be done about it. I’d like to believe that I am a very open person to begin with; I withhold very little—but that’s still nonzero, isn’t it? Because there’s performance on every level, masks on masks on masks. Streep’s Everybody Rides The Carousel (1976) encapsulates it well for me.

The distinction between common and mutual knowledge is relevant. I first learned about the concept when reading Tao’s solution to the blue-eyed islanders problem. Essentially, mutual knowledge is what we both know. It becomes common knowledge when we know that the other knows, and that the other knows we know they know, and so on and so forth ad infinitum—semantic satiation sets in quickly in epistemic logic.

In Dostoyevsky's Demons, there’s a particularly poignant chapter (the infamous appendix) wherein Stavrogin, whom it should go without saying I do not approve of, accomplishes in some sense his life’s mission when Tikhon intimately understands him. In particular, it is critical that he knows Tikhon understands him; it must be common knowledge. I must say that I deeply relate to that. There are broader implications I am grasping at here which I can’t verbalise; I suspect Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being says all this and more, and more eloquently, but I haven’t read the book, so I wouldn’t know.

At any rate, on Friday, I walked around the Loop with A. We visited our old room in Kravis, and we talked about many things, and in particular I had a little At Tikhon's moment, which meant a lot to me. I can only assume there are people who understand me very well of whom I don’t have confirmation—I assume E. and K. do—and it’s probably mutual (as in two-way and as in epistemic).

But it is far nicer to assuredly know that. To know that I—I as in I, as in not Zhang, a la Borges and I—is understood on a kernel level. It is nice to have kindred spirits. And it’s crazy I’ve never really had a moment like this before—the mutual becoming the common, that is. And it’s funny we needed an ending to dig that out of us.

4. What I got out of this place

Starting a few weeks ago and especially last week (after my waitlists didn’t pan out), I was often moping, disappointed with what I got out of this place. The feeling was driven by mostly regret and dissatisfaction—I would ask myself what did I get, for all that? Tuition certainly hadn’t been cheap, and this had been my one high school experience.

But that changed a few nights ago, when I had a crazy perspective shift which I had saw coming—I had known I was hyperfixating—but which nonetheless reframed everything. Because the answer to that question is everything. Nearly everything I care about I have I gotten from this place. It is my everything.

We had been sitting in the hallway, nonverbal, when F. piped up, saying that we were dealt a terrible hand dorm-wise. He was unequivocally correct.

Taylor—the only unrenovated upperclassmen dorm—is by far the shittiest on campus. We don’t have A/C, the heat barely works (and when it does, the radiators rattle such that the experience is not too dissimilar to being in trench warfare, artillery pounding around you), and we need to leave the building to do laundry. And the stairway to the laundry room looks like it enters a whorehouse.

But that wasn’t his point—he was talking about how lucky we were. That if you gave him the choice to repick his dorm, to give him a do-over, he would pick Taylor a million times. And he was right. We had had such a good year, such a good community. I wouldn’t give it up for anything; Taylor was truly something special.

Nietzsche talks about the eternal recurrence, a demon cursing you to live the same life over and over again. He asks the reader if you would “gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” On some level, my life is nothing but regret. But would I run it back? Without a doubt.

It’s been week since we graduated. I am home now. I hosted some Loomis kids briefly, a futile game of Statues. They are gone now, and I am nothing but bereft.