A little background: I received my Master’s at the Delaware Advanced Institute for Unreality Studies, located in Rasenna, Delaware, a semi-sylvan little town with a budding urban district. Rasenna was founded in 1809 as a pit-stop on the Great Maple Line from Montreal to Washington D.C., before the National Highway Act shifted commercial routes west 10 miles, effectively asphyxiating the town’s thru-traffic economy, leaving it a fertile wound in which academic gangrene was guaranteed to sprout. The tranquil environment and gasping labor market made it the perfect site to found a small college. So in 1945, Dr. Martin Graf successfully established DAIUS, moving himself and his peers in the “Black Forest” circle from the Freie Universitat of Berlin to a sleepy little pocket of Delaware.
DAIUS has no undergraduates, except for a few exceptional cases on exchange from University of Delaware, University of Iowa and sometimes Princeton. I graduated in 2010 with very little knowledge of what a typical “undergraduate scene” could be like, though I had my hopes and prejudices. In 2011, I arrived incognito and naive upon the steps of Russell Sage with the three cardboard boxes containing all my essentials and memorabilia, not knowing quite what to expect but still harboring a few presumptions.
For example, I anticipated that my fellow classmates would look a lot more like me — tortoise-shell glasses, tight-fitting jeans, cable-knit cardigans, button-down plaid fleece — all the outward symptoms of a searching mind and a true intellectual. I cannot articulate my disappointment at the storm of yoga pants and “lax pinnies” that greeted me. But my contract with the NEA (the institution, you’ll remember, that funded my project) was hard, and there was a strict “no backing out except in case of emergency” stipulation.
When I recovered from this trauma, sometime around my 27th birthday in mid-September, I summoned the chutzpah to go knocking on my floormates’ doors, hoping to initiate some vigorous late-night dialectic. “Sarah!” I’d cry, “Bradford! How would you like to join me out on the fire escape? We can smoke clove cigarettes and read Camus to one another!” But Sarah and Bradford were too preoccupied with lemon vodka shots, complaining about Econ 1 and a engaging in a thunderous sing-a-long of “Wagon Wheel.”
The final blow came about of my own earnest proactivity. I reasoned that all these more external trappings were but Sirenical distractions against the possibility of finding common, brain-based ground with someone. It would be enough to “meet people where they’re at” by asking about favorite books and taking it from there. Russian literature, German literature, American, English, Greco-Roman, any branch of philosophy — I could talk about all of these excitedly and with ease. Asian literature — not so much, but I was willing to listen!
“So what’s your favorite book, Kyle? ‘Harry Potter’? No really. Really? Uh, what’s your take on David Foster Wallace? Love to hate him, hate to love him, right? No? Katie? Also ‘Harry Potter’? Rachel? ‘The Kite Runner’? Don’t they sell that book at grocery stores? No, no, no, ‘pretentious’ is when you don’t know what you’re talking about. I just have Good Taste.”
The ensuing alienation was crushing. It was doubly harmful because whenever I did discover someone who fit the DAIUS-form, I latched onto that person without any regard to that person’s morality, capacity for empathy and kindness, sense of humor, emotional stability or loyalty. Those relationships are more poisonous than pleasant, but the decades-old mentality that nurtures them is unspeakably painful to uproot. After a very large amount of time alone in Germany during my sophomore spring, many hours of which were spent wordlessly sitting in bars and graveyards, engulfed in a kind of helpless loneliness, I think I managed to make myself aware of and partially erode this problematic attitude.
Speeding up to the moral of the story here, I have to say that I’ve learned something rather greater about myself than about Dartmouth, though without these three-and-a-half years at Dartmouth I might never have learned it. Reading a book like “Infinite Jest” cover to cover is no easy feat, and I deserve to be a little proud of myself for doing it. But what is extremely easy (and extremely dangerous) is spending the rest of my life being a self-obsessed git about the accomplishment and judging and testing others in ways that ensure mutual destruction, estrangement and sadness.
Any criterion-based approach to self-esteem, no matter how cerebral, is just as awful and shameful and superficial as any other — e.g., one based on money, social status, academic performance, et cetera — and it promotes a toxic way of viewing oneself and others. I know that this is something really wrong with me, though it’s gotten a lot better since 2011. Instead of browsing my thousands of books for hours, and feeling ashamed at how little Shakespeare I’ve read and understood, I should re-dedicate that time to asking, “Have I been a good friend this week? Have I appreciated my blessings and health and family? Did I lie to anyone I love?” What progress I’ve made has resulted in explosive improvements to my self-esteem and friendships.
There’s some pithy and ironical statement to made here about not judging a person by the covers of their books, but I can’t figure out how to make it work. It’s unlikely that it’d be very clever anyway.
P.S. For those of you paying attention — I stole my bicycle back and I’ve felt like a champ all week.
