A splendid failure

Some days I sit down to write my column with ideas flying through my head.  Other days, Word's pulsating vertical bar seems to mock my efforts as my first sentence accordions across the screen, only to be sent back from whence it came by a vengeful delete button.

My last effort clearly fell into the latter category, resulting in a column that switched topics, style and quality about four times. You can imagine my frustration right now as that same vertical bar mocks my whining, uninspired effort at a column.

It all started about three weeks ago.  See, in high school I had this brilliant idea for a graduation speech composed completely of famous quotes ordered into a coherent oration on life, change and all those nicely worn out topics of graduation. It never happened. My idea three weeks ago was to revive that topic in column form.

The result makes absolutely no sense.

I was disillusioned. I had failed again in the same task I set for myself around this time two years ago. I decided this artsy-fartsy waxing poetic stuff wasn't any fun.  I wrote the most topical column I could.  And it felt awful.

But I think that is what we do when we cannot live up to our vision of ourselves. We take the advice of others, try to imitate their works and lose whatever made us decent to begin with. It's like William Faulkner said, "All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." (Yes, that was going in the aborted column, and yes, I realize the irony of quoting someone else in this context.)

But did I ever have a vision of perfection? I try to think back to my high school self. I want to say that I don't know him-that I have changed and grown so much at Duke that I can't even recognize my former self.

But that's a lie. I remember viciously wanting to close the book on high school by doing all of the things I wanted to do but was too afraid even to attempt. The summer after my senior year even had a theme song, the ever cheesy "Live Like You Were Dying."

I wish that that freedom of action, so present at the beginning of freshman year, had not faded. We have built a myriad of walls separating our social community, and no one has the power to break them down.

Instead we reinforce groups with brutal stereotypes. The obvious danger comes from outsiders judging individuals based on these stereotypes. The real damage, however, comes when the actual members start buying so far into the image of the people around them that they forget who they once were, and who they wanted to be.

Kurt Vonnegut said: "We are what we pretend to be. So we must be careful who we pretend to be." He got the second part right-we must be careful who we pretend to be. 

But our caution does not come from the fear that the façade we put in front of us will become us. It comes from the knowledge that the façade will eventually fall, be destroyed or destroy us.

That is the great realization of the first two years of my college career. Not that I can change and am perfectible, though I know that I can change and improve parts of me, but that I-no-we will always be, deep down, the same person we were back in high school, slamming our head against the computer, yelling at that odious, blinking vertical line, desperately hoping that there is something inside of us to fill the blank page in front of us, only to realize that after each blank page lies another.

Jordan Everson is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Friday.