I've never run into a shortage of advice on how to get through semester's end. Most of it sucks. With as much time as I've spent listening to "wisdom" such as "Oh, the work may be bad, but it only lasts about a week, and then you're done," or "Just take it day by day," we might as well be talking about the few hours of sleep between fatigue and exhaustion. There's nothing factually wrong with these suggestions. They just don't help.
Yes, it all may be done in a week. And I can only think of what I have today-or risk collapsing in panic. But we don't work in the scope of weeks or days. Work is an excruciating collection of seconds divided into half-seconds into fourths and eights and so on. It's being imprisoned in an agonizing "now," and knowing exactly how many more "nows" you're going to have to slog through before the end. The best I can hope for is an inspired moment that makes me forget. But they never come often enough.
Sooner or later, I'll have to get up for a break. As I walk away from my chair and see everyone else still at their books, I feel unstudious guilty and check to see if it hasn't been too soon since the last interruption. A few minutes later, coming back, I see dozens still typing away, buried in their screens, and I wonder how it's possible to concentrate like that yet again. And then I'll probably wish that I could live by the week.
Wouldn't it be neat if, when life got hectic, I could just run to my own little timeless panic room, come up with a list of what I'd like to accomplish for the next seven days, and then watch a very busy me run through the assignments? I'd meet up with myself a week from today, when Winter Break was in full force and the semester just memories.
But I couldn't be trusted with this machine. Soon I'd begin to use it for a boring class, or a hard thirty-minute run, or an ordinary week with something wonderful waiting at the end. I'd know exactly where in time I wanted to be; only, when I got there, nothing would be as great or last as long as I'd like, and I'd just keep skipping ahead. Years would go by. Right now, I am 21 years and 21 days old. I'd probably run out of time by around 21 years, 25 days.
Near last week's end, I found myself in the library, brooding over multiple 15-page papers due the next day. I think it was after 3 a.m. And though I really couldn't afford to stop working, I hadn't the willpower left to resist, so I left my nest in the small stacks of Perkins and went out questing for who knows what distractions.
Ten, 15 minutes later, I plodded back up the stairs, opened the door to my floor, and choked-astounded-at a gigantic set of thick wooden boards pulled all the way across the stacks, dividing them in half, and dividing me from my belongings. What in the hell is this?!? Only extreme panic could have sent me leaping and scratching at this wall from hell, trying to fit my head through an opening between it and the ceiling not more than a few inches wide. It was extreme panic. But as I steadied my head enough to get my first real look through the slit, I paused. What, what, what... what are all these boxes doing in here? Where are the desks? Ahhhhh. Wrong floor.
If, somehow, I had managed to shove myself into that demonic vault, like all prisoners too tired to escape, I would've had many, many "nows" to chew over. Just darkness. And now. And now. And now. And maybe, with no cafes to entice me, no friends talking to me, no bathrooms calling me, no IM flashing at me, no internet to sidetrack me, I'd have remembered what it's like to love the "now."
I remember the final hours of last semester's exam week. By late afternoon on that sunny spring day, you just knew that the people passing by on the quad were smiling back because they, too, had finished. Some gradually reached the benches across campus, sitting quietly, saying nothing, their glazed-over eyes and untroubled faces saying everything. You could sit between two strangers without speaking. And you'd never understand each other better. Exhaustion and relief are an ecstatic mix.
"This is the present, at last. This is the now, this flickering, broken light, this air that the wind of the future presses down my throat, pumping me buoyant and giddy with praise."
-Annie Dillard
You can't stay in moments like that for long. Too soon, you start thinking about tomorrow or next week or next year, and the entire payoff is lost-you might as well be living any other day. But I remember being on that bench. I can't remember how it ended.
Philip Sugg is a Trinity junior. This is his final column.
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