LDOC
Monday, April 29, 2024
I had my LDOC in college today. My final class took place not in a classroom, but, by coincidence, ceremoniously—at a professor’s apartment, where members of a nonfiction workshop gathered in her living room. It was large, beautiful, encircled by books, artifacts, chairs, and so comfortable with the air-conditioning turned up, in the high, frigid way that reminded me of midsummers. Most gripping was the view. I sat on the floor on a pillow, and because we were on the tenth floor, and I was looking upward, I could look out at an unbroken, pastel expanse of blue. Light, diaphanous, dotted with fluffy white clouds.
I had always wondered what the insides of these buildings were like. Back when I worked at the school newspaper, and walked from Carlton on 108th to the church just up from 120th, I would pass these imposing buildings, Cambridge and Oxford Hall, and peer in through their doorways—security guards, marbled entranceways, lamps and carpets and gilded elevator doors, stunning in their grandeur. This stretch of Riverside Drive that was both so close and so removed from the hectic college campus, a place so curiously quiet I had always wondered who lived here. To have ended college by satisfying that lingering curiosity feels like a reasonable conclusion.
In the class, we read each others’ pieces aloud. I submitted an essay I wrote about coming to New York, the one that I submitted to the school newspaper some three years ago and since rewritten countless times, and a piece—if this wasn’t already messy enough—whose meaning to me has changed every time I’ve read it, in faithful Argonaut fashion. This draft, I hoped, would be the final version.
A classmate read my excerpt out. Everyone listened in silence. I didn’t feel much of a reaction, as though the piece had been written by a stranger. Afterward, my professor asked me if I had anything to say. Nothing came to me except: “Full circle moment, I guess. I wrote this as a sophomore and have written it again and again throughout the years. Now, I’m in my very last class of college.”
It’s hard to make anything of the fact that college is ending. Anyone who knows me—or who’s read anything I’ve written these past few years, really—knows how much my experience is colored by the mystical year of the pandemic. How the particular, unique circumstances of a global tragedy withheld closure from me and my high school classmates, shuffled us into the most strange year of online school, altered the way we saw ourselves—our positions in the world as vessels shipped between the US and Hong Kong, each one of us a cultural exile in our own unique, postmodern right. That it’s over now, and that we’re ushering in a new phase to supercede even this limbo? Unreal.
In September, when we first got back, I remember walking into one of my courses, Mythological Romanticism, and being hit by a very distinct feeling. Something about entering that wood-lined lecture hall on the fifth floor of Hamilton after working, that past summer, in a clean, cool office building, felt off-setting, like, after a taste of the “real world,” I had been granted the odd chance to step into a past life for a final time. Senior year had just started, and yet, with my first “real” working experience behind me, I no longer belonged to this classroom in the same way. It had to do with my realization that somehow, everything that was said in the room, that could have possibly been said in the room, had gotten smaller and less consequential. As though my world itself had expanded and left, in its wake, the innocent artifact of a purely academic space like a classroom.
It took a few weeks for the strange feeling to depart. Slowly, Romanticism and Milton began to supercede the distinctly disparate part of myself that had emerged over the summer—authors, poems, whose names I will surely forget, taking over the space in my mind once reserved for my job in consulting. As it happened, I made a note to myself to remember how it felt upon seeing that pristine, white light falling through the window on that very first day of senior fall, when I stepped into that Hamilton classroom for the last first time. That sweet, mystical glaze lathered across those storied, wooden benches. The excitement of seeing who else was in the class.
I can’t say I will miss all of my time in college, but there is one thing I know I absolutely will miss: Imagination. There’s a certain moment I have always loved in the beginning of classes, before anything really happens, when you walk into a new classroom and everyone is still a stranger to you. Those few pauses before you hear anyone say anything, before you even fully see what people’s faces look like, surrounded by total strangers, no idea of what path will be taken in the future. In those moments, especially in those moments, I begin wondering about all kinds of possibilities for who I might meet, what new friend I might make, as rapidly as a slot machine flickers through options before landing on one. And even, who these people are—how someone sounds, how someone acts, what someone does in their free time. Whether I could be friends with that someone. Whether that someone could unlock something new in me. Perception before knowledge. Life before consumption.
Having spent all of my life thus far in school, I don’t know if this is a feeling exclusive to students, or if it’s something I feel, well, because I am myself—but it’s something I hope I will hold on to in days to come. Desperately. I think one reason I think it will fade is due to the capacious nature of school, an embryonic space around many others with a common goal, to allow for possibility—whereas the working life, the “real world” of people who are five, ten, twenty years older than you has none of that directional ambiguity.
A second reason is that it’s just the nature of growing up. That growing up, itself, washes away romance. Someone posited to me recently that the feeling of exuberance, of that desirous drive that fuels imagination, becomes harder to reach as one grows older—so much that it can be attributed to the level of neurology. As the brain takes stock of new information, makes light of new experience, readapts its schemas to make space for a world that has turned out larger than what it once believed, the barrier to the pure, silly happiness that underpins imagination necessarily grows.
Imagination. How the mundane intersects with the extraordinary. How the everyday collapses into the impossible. How a sticker on a water bottle, the way someone holds a pencil, the wrinkle on a t-shirt, which wasn’t ironed well enough, so much so that you begin thinking about laundry, scents, the lavender that you’ve read about in that author you like—how all of this is enough to spur a total escape from the humdrum of Nerval, from Paradise Lost, from the history of epistemological thought, starting in the ’60s and onward.
As I sat in my professor’s living room, under the brightness of the sun beating down on New Jersey and Riverside Drive, what came to me unannounced was, of all things, a long, well-lit main street somewhere in the China of my childhood. Shenzhen or Beijing—I am sure it was one of these, but which exactly could be anyone’s guess. Neon gauze. The dimming lights of sneaker stores, about to close. I was with my family. We had just had lamb something at a dinner to which I and someone else had run late, at a restaurant which I know, even if I tried for the rest of my life, scoured every directory and photo and map I could get my hands on, I would never be able to locate. Later, my dad dragged us to a bar, a karaoke bar, in which we begged the managers to let us in even as they were closing soon, and had a table for a while on the second floor. We were all younger then.
A certain instinct told me to probe the memory further. To unpack it for romance. It’s what I’ve always liked to do, since I was young and I began to write.
But, of late, I’ve begun to feel something new. I look at the image more and more in my mind—try to make it come alive more, try to recall any further details—and I run up against a wall. Much as there’s curiosity to these memories, there’s also a kind of exhaustion. Something tired. Something like surrender. As though, at the ripe old age of twenty-something, my memory is beginning to fail me. Memory is futile, and the project of salvaging it is even more so. I can’t find the name of that street. I can’t remember what it looks like. Who cares, really, as to which night, in which year, on what occasion. Even if I did—even if I could go through my memory in its chronology, and tell you everything down to its coordinates—does it mean I could go back?
Growing up, I always resisted arguments against nostalgia. Friends have warned me against my sentimentality—that it distracts, that it takes away from the present and the future. I’ve always disagreed. Some part of me always insisted on believing something inherently valuable existed in memory.
But part of growing up, I think, is, if not to discount memory, then to accept its finitude. I ask myself: What’s important about these memories? Where does their value arise? The meaning they convey, the images they evoke, or something more simple? Not the questions of what, where, or why that underpin these floating images, in their Platonic, embryonic indescribability—not what they were, not where they happened, not why they’ve lingered. But, maybe, the very fact that they happened. Because I won’t go back, won’t recover it, won’t ever fully recall it. Even if I did, it’s not as though there exist the words to bring the idea back fully. All I have is this: At some point in my life, some anonymous fragment within twenty-two years, I was on a large, wide street with my family somewhere in China.
College will be like that too, in due course. Right now, New York City is fresh in my mind. It’s still yesterday, that morning light, the staggering roar of an approaching train, my friends’ laughter echoing through the bustle of hot pot restaurants. But even these, these images that feel so close, will become abstract one day, too. Disconnected. Old. Now, on the cusp of immeasurable transition in just about every facet of my immediate life, I can already see a future version of myself trying to process these memories—safeguarding them somewhere, readjusting myself according in light of them. Just the same, I feel a nagging awareness that these efforts will be in vain.
Thinking about my time at Columbia, all I realize I have are these images—so many of them—and no direction on what to do with them. It seems that we go through life collecting these images, consuming life at the constant rate of moment-to-moment. And we’ve gotten so good at preserving them, too—cameras, media, influencer culture. But how do we make sense of them?
The occurrence of an event and the acknowledgement thereof are, then, never guaranteed to be concurrent in time. (“Acknowledgment” is a vague word here, but I can’t think of one much better one. Other options: “Dealing with?” “Disposal of?” “Process?”) That we “process” an event, only much later after it happens. If at all. It might be a long time before what any of this means will come to us. Maybe it won’t at all.
Time is such a faulty machine. As consistently as it passes, so unequally does it distribute its weight. How most of these few months have passed in the solitary limbo of my final semester in New York, without much recognition whatsoever of their significance. My friends and I began filming these countdown videos starting at Day 100, marking the days when we could—99, 98, 97. We just hit 17. But, though we’ve been keeping track, that doesn’t change how day 80, day 70 still feel like yesterday. I suppose sitting idly with the existence of time—and stoking with it, necessarily, the arbitrary upkeep of memory—doesn’t entail coming to terms with it.
And what’s dangerous, I think, is when we fail to make this distinction. I don’t know much, but I’m pretty sure of at least one thing: I have no idea as to when this time will solidify itself in my memory, and certainly no clue if it is to mean anything to me. When will it take on the meaning we associate with our pasts? Will it? My time in college. I hope it does.
A memory was suddenly unlocked. One of those afternoons in sophomore year. I remembered: before I had discovered the park, I would exercise in the gym on the top floor of Carlton. It was a small, decrepit room. A few treadmills and machines, a water fountains. Miserable, cold light. The only good thing was the view. It was the same view as the one from my professor’s apartment on that very last day, and it was the abundant air-conditioning pumping through the room that ultimately recalled it—that same room in Carlton was the only one that had cooling, so much that I would go to sit there in the room when that stuffy double in Carlton grew too hot. These two rooms are some ten streets apart in distance, three years apart in memory. I might be the only person in the world to have stepped into both.
But just because I remember it, does it mean that it means anything to me? How do I make meaning from these images? How to imbue them with substance? Even as, at every moment, we are in the middle of processing countless experiences of reality into memory—into abstract images that we may, or may not, revisit one day—that doesn’t guarantee that it will be meaningful. The task of placing every image on the right shelf in our minds is important. And often overlooked.
And perhaps these meaningful things to us need not have happened at all. What if it didn’t happen? That we dreamed it all up? Does it make it any less real? Life is just the experience of images, one after the other, put together so closely it resembles the impossible abstraction we label as “continuity”—and if we can simulate these images, then why does it matter whether anything really happened? What is the difference between the memory of something that did happen and a false memory, or a dream, or a fantasy, just the same, of something that did not. Might not have. Who cares how these images—these scattered, wispy images, doused in longing and confusion—get into our heads.
When, in other words, these days will be placed into the past. And how they will be. Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine. A boy wandering through Riverside Drive. Swept up in the sirens and the engine sounds, slowly turning translucent, then gone entirely.
From a morning in Busan when I couldn’t fall asleep. It reminded me of Riverside.