Jaxson Floberg is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
We are not “only interested in Duke basketball if we are undefeated.” There are several hundreds of students sleeping outside on this crisp thirty-eight-degree night that would be (and have been, trust me) rolling their eyes in response to your letter.
I guess we Duke students are supposed to always get what we want, no matter what’s in front of us. Even if it’s other Duke students.
Art—specifically, the art of film—is a powerful outlet for emotion. For this reason, I call myself a cinephile. Film can make me experience what I normally wouldn’t, stirring an entire spectrum of emotions within me, from deep despair to unadulterated joy. The emotion I get most from film however, is anger. Pure. Raw. Passionate. Anger.
But then it hit me: I was supposed to read all five acts of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that Friday. And I didn’t. Because I was busy seeing John Mulaney.
College is supposed to be hard. But college isn’t supposed to be that hard. Rather, it’s not supposed to be hard in that way—not hard enough to mentally break 20-year-old kids. And the more I hear about the unreasonably difficult experiences of some students, ironically referred to as “the real Duke difference,” the more jaded I become about Duke’s flaws—those that I was never aware of as a kid.
It’s scary to realize that I will never find the “answer” to these problems.
There is an inconsolable longing that exists in all of us for a home to which we have never been, Home, an amalgamation of feelings and images of some place far away where we truly belong. It is the future we idealize in our present, the way we wish we could live our lives and the way we still hope to.
We understand that tragedy is always more interesting than comedy and always more important because only in tragedy do we approach the greater questions of life. We want to feel complex and nuanced, and because we see sadness as the doorway to deeper thought, we derive satisfaction out of our own unhappiness.
I, an eternally practicing member of the Reformed Church of Satan, can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that listening to rock music turned me away from the arms of God, straight into the arms, and fiery wings, of our Dark Master, Lucifer.
If you have never heard the name Saul Williams, you have been missing out on one of the most important legacies in the history of modern art.
