By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: April 11, 2012
I must admit that with only a couple weeks to go in the semester, I’m beginning to feel a strong sense of familiarity. Not that I’m really tired, or sick, or frantic in the way these times often inspire, I just feel that I am perhaps lost in the Emyn Muil, and Frodo Baggins has just turned to me with his moon-sized baby blues and declared “We’re going in circles!”
“Aye, that we are, Mr. Frodo,” I would reply, “that we are.” Not that my cyclical motion implies a lack of direction, or the possibility of mortality through starvation or the twisted schemes of a schizophrenic, subterranean morlock. I just feel that, like certain hobbits, the surrounding rocks are starting to look mighty familiar.
Ecclesiastes, easily the most depressing book in either testament, would put it this way: “What has been will be again, / what has been done will be done again; / there is nothing new under the sun.” (1:9 NIV)
Final papers? The sun has seen them before. Exams? The sun’s sick of them. Taxes? The sun just finished his (yellow dwarf filing separately). This was the first year he got to include his work as a volunteer firefighter, but frankly when you have seven billion dependents you don’t need many other deductions.
At times, it seems like academia is a circle of final papers and final exams, ad infinitum and ad nauseum. The late-night, back-to-the-wall, due-in-12-hours tenacity which is so important to the university student begins to feel remarkably familiar. The topics, equations, procedures, and operations change, but the pure desperation is an old friend, sweet in his clarity, and bitter in his urgency. He is not new under the sun.
At 2 a.m. on a Monday night, three-quarters of the way through page four of 10, it becomes easy to imagine circles that start with syllabi and end with exams and create disturbingly little progress. It can become increasingly easy to return to Ecclesiastes (vanity of vanities, all is vanity), and discover that the Hebrew word from which “vanity” is derived (“hevel”) actually translates as “vapour,” which, if possible, seems even more transitory.
It seems that 2 a.m. is a bad time to do existential thinking.
Yet there are bright spots of course, and once again, they start with hobbits. The fact that Frodo Baggins recognizes he is going in “circles” is already a step in the right direction; an irregularity in the vaporous elliptical. And of course each exam complete leads (hopefully) to another handful of credits towards that pivotal 120. The repetition is actually a solidification of necessary skills, the “circles” an academic training regimen in which “vanity” has very little traction.
So hang in there, think of summer times at the seaside, or perhaps the start of tennis season just around the corner. You can do it, you know you can, after all a life “under the sun” is sounding pretty good about now.
Enjoy the break,
Paul Esau
