Manic delight

In an especially dark section of a letter to his younger brother Zooey, J.D. Salinger’s Buddy Glass writes, “I can’t be running back and forth forever between grief and high delight.” This sentiment is one I have come to understand in my final days at Princeton. I grieve that I am leaving this happy place, my friends and my life as a student — the only occupation I’ve ever known — but I am ecstatic to join the "real world."

Yet, I hesitate to call my post-Princeton life the "real world" because it implies that my Princeton experience was not altogether "real." While I fear that this sentiment somehow discounts my experience and pursuits here, I can’t deny that my time at Princeton has been enchanted. It is in its own way a fantasy — Princeton is a place of unnatural beauty where flowers and greenery are lovelier than they ought to be, where geniuses are holed up in stone buildings and where free food is abundant. In this setting I too have become enchanted, perhaps even maddened, from exposure to Princeton’s magic.

This magic has caused me to spend the past four years racing between grief and high delight. I have shed tears over my thesis and babbled excitedly about it over dinner. I became hysterical at times — I laughed at the Ai Weiwei statues outside of Robertson. I laughed at the Saint Jerome beards of my professors. I laughed at my inability to navigate the new Prox checking machines in Firestone. When a friend asked me what I was reading that made me giggle in the library, I blushed and responded, “The Medea.” Maybe I’ve lost it, but at least now I understand how reading, studying and immersing oneself in great texts has made some of my professors the way that they are.

I can’t help but think that the mania that I have experienced was precipitated, or at least influenced, by the insular lifestyle Princeton demands of its students. I have spent an unhealthy amount of time folded up like a lawn chair in my carrel with only my books. Maybe even more than insularity, it is the fact that a certain amount of self-promotion — and perhaps self-centeredness — is required to succeed here. This too is enough to make us all a little crazy, or at least neurotic. Over the past four years, I have been primarily concerned with myself and my projects, my friends and my goals and how they fit into the Bubble. Nearly everything else has been taken care of for me — I have not had to cook my own food or clean my own bathroom. This lifestyle, indeed, won’t be replicated in the "real world."

But at Princeton, an undergraduate education calls for this kind of focus and even egocentrism to motivate us to work hard and to put the pursuit of our betterment above other things. In theory, the education this yields will allow us to be more productive members of society in the future. So while in this mania I have spent a lot of time with only myself, thinking about only myself, I have also, hopefully, improved myself.

Despite my doubts, the more than occasional solitude and even misery, I think my Princeton mania was a good thing. I understood it as such when I read Plato’s Phaedrus junior year. In this text, Socrates tells Phaedrus not to fear mania because wisdom and some of life’s greatest pleasures flow from madness. Socrates’ case is convincing until he points to the cicadas in the trees above him as an example of the fruits of madness. He explains that the cicadas were once men who delighted so much in madness that they sang themselves to death and were reborn as cicadas.

If that’s what this madness has in store — delight to the point of death — it doesn’t bode well for me. But maybe it’s fitting that my final days at Princeton should coincide with the arrival of an onslaught of cicadas, a chorus of those who were driven crazier than me.

Alternatively, the nuisance of the cicadas might also serve as a reminder that Shirley’s weather machine can’t control everything. The cicadas will be a portent from the reality beyond the Orange Bubble that will require us to look beyond our self-interest and self-betterment and to contribute to a larger community. We will discover that the problems we face on campus — inequality, mental health issues and discrimination to name a few — exist in far more severe forms beyond FitzRandolph Gate. I only hope that the mania I experienced here has somehow prepared me to confront this reality and, more importantly, to better it.