A Portrait of the Artist as a Harvard Student

I seriously considered taking a gap year before starting college, exhausted after the grind of high school. Perhaps to do a bit of community service in my hometown. Or a temple stay in South Korea to clear my mind, look back on the four hectic years that had passed, and put priorities back in order. But these plans were met with a curt “no” from the parental department, so I started my freshman year and continued on the “normal” track.
But is my life as a Harvard student “normal”? In our world of back-to-back meetings that are apparently in the pursuit of the “greater good,” we neglect the bonds that tie us together.
Our identification problem is much the same as Stephen Dedalus’s—the protagonist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the book, Dedalus identifies himself in one of his geography schoolbooks with the following:
Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe
While Stephen’s self-identification shows that he is able to situate himself in the context of a larger world, he never wakes up from his intellectual ponderings to physically take in the world around him and apply his sense of identification with the rest of humanity. He is indeed the “Artist” in the title of the book, but he never quite moves on and jumps down from his floating cloud.
Harvard students are much like Stephen Dedalus, and that is an unfortunate fact. While we can study and comment on his flaws, it is much harder for us to step back from our own lives and consider how we fit into our communities. One of my roommates once said to the rest of us that we’re “totally going to save the world one day.” But her comment was based only off our busy schedules and lack of sleep. “Saving the world” requires more than just hard work and an impressive résumé. It requires a sense of compassion, respect, and service to each other.
Events with the tagline “Think Big” have been a recent trend on campus. These certainly show that members of the Harvard community are able to see themselves as potential change-makers in something larger than their own lives, but these big ideas also have poisonous effects on our day-to-day human interactions. Taking this back to Dedalus’s identification list, we see the immediate jump from our name to “The Universe,” but barely have the time to consider and truly inhabit anything in between.
Thoughts like these and the HPR piece about Harvard culture by Zak Lutz, “Surviving in Oz,” have led me to look back on my first year at Harvard and repent. As Lutz states, I have rarely had time to attend friends’ events and activities because I poured energy and dedication into my own. I was too focused on doing well in my own classes to realize that others were struggling. My ambitions left too little room for those around me with whom I can share the most quotidian sorrows and joys.
Joyce’s writing reminds us that genuine contact with those around us is necessary to avoid losing touch with the natural and down-to-earth things, desires, and passions that connect one human to another. The threads that make up social fabric are strained as we run from one meeting to the next.
Junot Díaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, said at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation that today’s students operate under a “customer logic”. We fear our professors and teaching staff, worrying about our grade on the next paper or exam, the effect that grade will have on our GPA, the effect that GPA will have on our internship or job prospects, and the effect those internships and jobs will have on our overall life. At Harvard, self-motivation from each student drives the push for excellence, and we end up in a situation in which we have competition instead of collaboration and interaction.
This article does not necessarily advocate for taking a gap year, for putting less effort into work and extracurriculars, or for pursuing only idealistic activities at the expense of taking practical steps to where you eventually want to arrive. But we must remind ourselves with frequency that we are nowhere near “normal” in the ways in which we lead our lives now. And this is not only by virtue of the fact that we are Harvard students or that there might be less white space than colored space on our iCals, but also that there is no real rule that says spending 16 consecutive years in a classroom is the best or right thing to do.
As long as we have decided to be here, we should take every moment and make every effort to embrace what it means to be human. Sit back for a second. Unfold your body from the study position you’ve been in for the last three hours. Give your eyes a quick jog about where you are and the people you are with. And then, rather than “take a deep breath and let it all out” like they always tell you, make sure to save and carry a piece of it in yourself and on your mind everywhere you go. It’s a snapshot of an exciting and, at times, overwhelming place. And it is our job, as members of this community, to blow life into it and create the story behind it. Who knows what unfound fabric we might be able to sew together?