A Trajectory in Pictures

Recently, I've been spending a considerable amount of time paging through the 25th Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class of 1961. The large, hardcover red book published by the University, contains a short, self-written profile of each matriculate in a given class. I found it, by chance, lying in the clutter of one of The Crimson's many desks, during one of my frequent moments of idleness (read "work evasion").

It seems I am not the only one interested in this book--the cardboard cover is duct-taped in a way that suggests frequent use, consultation and study. It might be of service in harassing alumni on behalf of some Harvard fundraising organ, canvassing for a job, or doing research for a profile of a now-famous graduate. None of these legitimate reasons pertain to me, however. I'm in it for the pictures.

It's the photos that make this exercise in fake nostalgia so surprisingly absorbing. So far, everyone I've showed them to has professed a similar fascination. Beneath each matriculate's name are printed two photos, side-by-side: one of the person as a 22 year-old Harvard graduate, the other of the person as a 47 year-old man. (This was in the days before coeducation.)

Taken in themselves, the pictures aren't anything remarkable--two standard, blazer-and-tie portraits, the chins angled in similarly unspontaneous angles. It's in the juxtaposition that the truly mesmerizing effects emerge. Different people offer different explanations of what they see, just as they would of some bizarre atmospheric event.

My take on these pictures is this: they force you to confront disturbing questions of a metaphysical variety. Is this young man, not noticeably different from anyone else I see in the dining hall, really the same person as this middle-aged man, who himself is not noticeably different from any of my parents' friends? And what happened in those intervening years? How does one metamorphose out of a gangly 22 year-old, posing with an awkwardly self-conscious smirk, into a stolid 47 year-old whose smug grin is nothing if not genuine and unaffected?

It's something of a sport to look at the younger picture and compare it to the older. In most cases, the postures and poses (the tilt of the head, the half-smile) are uncannily identical. It seems like the transformation could be effected by nothing more than a thorough stone-washing. In other cases, the resemblance is strong enough but not striking; are we looking at the middle-aged man's younger self, or his son? In a minority of cases, there is hardly any resemblance to speak of. Throughout, tough, meaty fellows seems to have aged into sober, tender dads. Awkward introverts are now captains of industry.

So, which transformation would you prefer? At age 47, would you rather be a linear extrapolation of your present self, or a radical discontinuity that no one but your family could trace? It would be nice to think that we have some choice in the matter, but the signs of success in one pursuit or the other come all too late. A friend of my father's once intended to take a still-frame photo of his face every day for 50 years using a movie camera. The idea was, as I understand it, to eventually play the entire reel from beginning to end, and thus watch oneself age a half-century in several minutes. I'm not sure if he ever carried through with the plan, whether in fact he is dutifully snapping a picture of his face every morning.

A good short story writer could probably think of an ending to this anecdote. What would happen when he finally watched the film, as an old man, when the final frame flickered and then disappeared on the screen? Personally, I can't think of a punch-line for his story, any more than I can think of a punch-line for a life.

I remember returning for a high school reunion during Thanksgiving break freshman year, and hearing similar questions flutter about in conversation. Had X or Y or Z changed? Were X or Y or Z different people from the ones we knew in high school? I suppose that people approach college with different sets of expectations or hopes of change, in much the same way people debate what kind of haircut to get. "Just a trim," or "take it all off?" There's a kind of self-discovery or self-destruction that comes from shaving your head--a decision that unfortunately too many of my friends made during freshman year--which is probably analogous to subjecting yourself to radical personal change. The most frightening aspect is that despite the alteration, your hair more or less grows back into the same mop, flattering or unflattering as the case may be.

If angsting over these issues is such a common phenomena, then why are Harvard undergrads seemingly unconcerned with present change, and instead obsess over their future goals? This is perhaps the first time in our lives where time accelerates palpably; for some reason, undergraduate life at Harvard makes it feel like a suture being rapidly yanked out.

College presents so many possible paths to cross off, so many choices to disregard...when it's all in the service of some distant ambition, diamond-hard or ill-defined, one loses track of where one travels from day-to-day. We're instructed to button the change down under our shirts, force it to work for us. But who is this us we want it to work for, and where are we going with it? The expectation of a life without any unseen dramatic change is unrealistic and even damaging. Read through the bios of the Class of 1961: no one really ended up doing what they planned, and those that seemed to have the most interesting and rewarding lives were most surprised at where they stood, 25 years later.

The photos in this book don't quite resolve any metaphysical conundrums, or tell us how to live our lives. They remind us of something we already knew, but have been taught to forget. There's nothing worse than living somebody else's life--it would be a tragedy to look at your photo 25 years from now and feel that you were staring into someone else's face.

Joshua Derman '99, a Crimson editor, is a philosophy concentrator living in Quincy House.