We are always tired, here at Princeton. Whether I run into a professor in the street or a friend in the dining hall, and ask “How’s it going?” the answer is inevitably “Tired.” I have some friends who are so unremittingly tired that I can complete their complaints of exhaustion for them. Even the Dining Services employee who swipes my ID card when I enter the dining hall tells me every day that she’s tired. And I always respond in kind: I am downing cup after cup of coffee, taking off my glasses and rubbing my eyes in precept, writing this blog post, even, because after a succession of long days I am still trying to find the energy to engage with this essay I have to write about the Arabs and Turks in the early modern period. It’s a punishing world, this place, full of overscheduled 20-year-olds with bags under their eyes, all trying frantically to turn out the pages and pages of work that we’re expected to produce. I was talking to a friend last week about how little time two years is in which to turn out three pieces of original scholarship in our disciplines, and how difficult it is to write original scholarship under the constant pressure of exhaustion. At times, it seems as if Princeton is setting us up for failure: particularly as I look down the two years ahead of me and worry that even getting a year’s head start on my thesis will not permit me to turn in work of which I can be proud. It is difficult to enjoy college, or to enjoy being young, under these circumstances. Every day I find myself more becoming the monastic scholar whom I thought I wouldn’t resemble until I had a couple more degrees behind me—because here I am, reading and writing as best as I’m able under the circumstances, and always putting that first. You can’t have fun until your work is done—but at Princeton, your work is never done.

I write this not to complain, per se (yes, I am full aware of how overprivileged my life is), but in order to encourage myself to sublimate the constant pressure and constant rushing from place to place and constant high expectations into something intellectually useful. Were it, I think, not for the problem that you can’t think when you haven’t slept, I’d be fine: I have long sworn, if someone sardonically, by the intellectual benefits of a sort of masochistic impulse towards guilt and self-loathing, and this has been my route to self-satisfying output for nearly two years now. And yet I’m realizing that this can’t continue to be enough: the work is getting harder and the stakes are getting higher, and I wonder if I can continue to do good work when doing good work is such a balancing act. Like so many other students, all of us at our desks or in our carrels thinking the same thing, I feel as if I work so much harder than anyone else I know, and that it will never be enough to earn the professors’ accolades or my own self-respect, or—increasingly urgently—the professional success I crave. Because now, when I last-minute a paper, I have begun to tell myself that doing this won’t fly in graduate school, and now I have begun to sweat with terror. (Though mind you, graduate students of my acquaintance tend for whatever reason to be some of the least exhausted people I know.)

I am sure this conversation has been had many times on this campus in the intervening years since 1746, but I’d welcome a dialogue about the degree to which Princeton sets its students up, if not for failure, then for mediocrity. We all know that no one who turns in a thesis receives a failing grade, and that in fact 55% of seniors receive As on their independent work, but are we also providing circumstances in which students can healthily do good work? Or are we as a community rather asking them to sacrifice their friends and their free time for the sake of the original research we so touted as a reason these self-same students should study here instead of Harvard? As I hear about seniors turning in their theses these next couple weeks, I wonder about the degree to which an 80-page paper is a formality, and what the point is of requiring an 80-page paper as a formality. It seems a little ridiculous for writers and readers alike, and indeed the same logic can be applied to junior independent work, or to the shorter essays I write without the time for care and attention every week, or even down to the Blackboard posts we all last-minute or the reading we don’t do for precept. Is this the cruelty of our academic institution, the cherry on top of our own high standard? Or is there just something I’m missing? Is there a way to do it all and well, and still find time and energy and verve to embrace time languidly wasted in the onset of spring?

I know this is all on some level training for the rest of my life, when—if I hope to succeed in my profession—I must write many more pieces of scholarship and read many more pages and keep myself to a more punishing schedule of output than the one to which I am held now. But my mind still comes back to the same question, the question which I ask myself several times a day: in what time-bending universe is it possible to do well in six classes and write 80 good pages of original research in a single year?

Time for another cup of coffee. I haven’t prepped for class tomorrow.

Those of you who are Princeton students are no doubt aware of a certain Master of Rockefeller College given to holding forth to a large Facebook audience on life and literature and a combination of the two. A fan of his notes since I first became a member of his college 18 months ago, I’ve had particular reason in the past several weeks to slowly wade my way through his backlog. I’m just getting now to the ones he was writing my first few weeks here, and it’s quite strange to be reading these again in quite a different frame of mind. I remember, then, not understanding why I couldn’t understand what he was writing, why its meaning wasn’t immediately apparent to me. I remember feeling lost, as lost as I felt in my French class, when I didn’t understand the teacher; in meetings for the student publication I briefly wrote for, when I wasn’t as charismatic or articulate as the other writers; and out at Terrace on Saturday nights, when I sat alone in a corner and played with my iPod. I loathed myself: for being so stupid, for failing to integrate seamlessly into a foreign culture so far removed from my California public high school. I phoned my parents in tears and begged to come home for fall break.

But now it’s the second time around, the second read. I quit the publication; I stopped going to Terrace. I never stopped feeling stupider than all my classmates, and sometimes it still drives me to tears—but it’s all redeemed when I get good feedback from a professor, as occasionally I do. I have friends, good ones. And far from sitting in a corner in a well of shyness and discomfort and fear, I’ve discovered that what I do best is talk. I talk in precept, I talk on this blog and on Facebook, I talk in committee meetings, I talk at parties and study breaks, I talk when I’m at home—in the Rocky dining hall, that is. I talk about eating clubs, about how it seems like everyone at this university is in the closet, about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, about why the American political system is going to hell in a handbasket. And I’ve found out that when you talk enough, people expect you to do things. I’ve been asked to help start organizations and publications, to make things happen, to change the world.

When I talk on this blog, more often than not, it comes back to haunt me. I am not democratically (little-d!) impartial; I do not withhold my political views about my community or about the United States. I get pushback for being one of them legacies, for example, and a post I wrote back in September about dominant Princeton culture has gotten a disconcertingly large amount of mileage. I have tried, as a result, to write less about my life, to bitch a little less, to engage more intellectually with my world. I have tried to make myself think and to make other people think—and if I am going to bitch, I try to bring a method to my bitchiness. As I have learned to write about history, I have blogged about history. As I have learned to write about literature, I have blogged about literature. And as I have learned to engage with the world as an adult, I have blogged about that process too.

Sometimes I think that to an outside reader, my posts must seem as impenetrable as a certain college master’s did to me 18 months ago—except that mine are not impenetrable in a way that makes the reader want to learn how to read them properly! And sometimes I wonder whether the ethics of my blogging are appropriate, whether I do the right thing to mix the academic so inextricably with the personal, whether I do the right thing to be so forthcoming about the private angst that dogs my days. Does the world need to know that I am still, after 18 months, resolutely tortured by insecurity and guilt and shame at my failure to perform to academic heights? Does the world care how terrified I am that it seems as if my entire life hangs in the balance of one single professional goal which has become near-impossible to achieve?

Reader, I think all this angst must serve some instrumental purpose. It has to. It has to because writing is the road through angst, and has always been—but it also is a declaration that the rhythm of weekends (Thursday night drinking, Friday morning hangover, Saturday night drinking, Sunday morning hangover, Sunday night spent catching up on the weekend’s work) is meaningless to those who have spent their whole weekends in the library. It is a reminder that if seeking validation and self-worth in a dominant social culture that alienates you isn’t working out, you can after all these years of insecurity and self-loathing find a reason for being in books and in words, in writing and in talking. Of course, there are perils in this approach, the foremost being that now if you feel as if you’ve turned in sub-par written work, or if you gave a strange professor a first impression of stupidity and inanity, you’re disconsolate for days. Now you risk being formed only by what you have done, and thus it is imperative that you do Enough, and it is never possible to do Enough. And no matter how well the life of the mind works out, that much time spent tracing the same path between bedroom, dining hall, library, and coffeeshop, and pacing back and forth across 120 square feet of life above an early-20th-century Gothic-revival archway, can get just a little claustrophobic.

But do you know why it’s okay? It’s because you’re just twenty years old and you know that you’ve already discovered your reason for being. You read and read and talk and talk and slowly the secrets of great texts are unlocked; slowly you permeate the surface of those once impermeable Facebook notes. You read. And you talk. And most days you go to bed exhausted, depressed, dissatisfied with yourself. But some days, when the sun shines just right through the windows of your mostly-subterranean library refuge, and you’re listening to Tchaikovsky and drinking your coffee and suddenly the blank verse you’re reading makes so much sense that you have to scramble for pen and paper to note it down—then you remember why you’re doing this, why the greatest and lasting joy is to be found in what you do, what you were—in some sense—fated to do. What you’ve known since you were thirteen that you would do. It’s then, in those single, singular moments, that you know beyond any reasonable doubt that you’ve sold your soul to the ivory tower—and that you never, ever want to leave.

Updated my about page, again. Trying to find the right inscrutability-to-information ratio.

And for stalking and documentary purposes, here’s my schedule for the new semester, which starts next Monday:

There’s just one precept missing, which I’ll try to squeeze in… somewhere.
Key:
ENG 301 – Old English
ENG 335 – Children’s Literature
FRE 207 – Studies in French Language and Style
HIS 280 – Approaches to American History
NES/HIS 245 – The Islamic World from Emergence to the Beginning of Westernization