What I Saw at the Senior Bar

Someone has taped a lime-green slip of paper to the door of my New Quincy suite, redeemable for one does of nostalgia, annoyance or general indifference, depending on one's mood. The paper is, of course, a schedule of Senior Bar events for the month of April, those much-hyped occasions when the class of '99 descends en masse upon a local bar or generously provisioned common room in search of drinks and chatter.

Depending on the locale, these affairs can range from sumptuous to spartan. At some senior bars, I've been offered more free drinks than I could possibly consume over a semester; on Wednesday night's sparsely attended gathering at the Bow, not only did I have to shell out change for Lilliputian-sized packets of potato chips, but my roommates and I discovered that the gaming policy was strictly BYOD (bring your own darts). Who walks around Cambridge with his or her own case of steel-tipped darts? Not anyone I would want to meet at Senior Bar.

When the season kicked off at the Kong last month, I felt a strange combination of amusement and trepidation. As a city boy who hasn't (yet) learned to drive, I always feel a bit uncomfortable when I get carded at a bar: I have to flash the bouncer my only legitimate form of I.D., my passport, which makes me seem like either a total wanker or the youngest member of the visiting U.N. delegation. But petty embarrassments aside, I wasn't sure how well I would relate to my 1,600 peers, many of whom I hadn't so much as laid eyes on since convocation our first year.

Would this be a time of class bonding, of making new friends and refreshing acquaintances with old? Would the glossy portraits of the first year facebook suddenly spring to life and fill a room.

I waited in line for a quarter of an hour outside the Kong to find out. Once inside, I pressed up three flights of crowded stairs, downed a beer, talked to a few acquaintances and left feeling somewhat disappointed. It was a strange replay of first-year orientation. Instead of asking the proverbial three question, "Where are you from? What dorm are you in? What are you going to concentrate in?", we exchanged three new variations: "How was your thesis? What are you doing next year? Where are you going to live?"

The range of people I chatted with at the Kong was no different from that at any other Harvard party: good friends, acquaintances, freshman entryways mates, random friends from classes and extracurriculars.

The same scene could have been played out as easily in a fogged-up Winthrop House common room as in a packed Chinese restaurant. I don't think anyone felt a strong affinity for their fellow party-goers simply by virtue of their being seniors; either they were your friends, or they weren't.

I've experienced a similar sense of forced amiability at other Senior Bar events. This is no fault of the kind people who organize and publicize them, but more the product of my own inflated expectations. Perhaps I was imagining something more along the lines of the 50th reunion of the French Resistance: We'd sit on the terrace of an old cafe, trading war stories and examining our scars, laughing about how we'd beat the odds and made it out alive. To my disappointment, I found no such sense of esprit de corps at Senior Bar. Our shared destiny was our diploma, and that was all.

Our class affiliations haven't always been so tenuous. There was a time when class paraphernalia was cool, or at least not uncommon. We all went to the Harvard Store during our first week to register for our free Class of `99 T-shirt; some of us even went so far as to buy the big, red felt Harvard 1999 pennant and hang it above our mantel. But where would you find such a common room today? I think the pennants went into storage after first semester of sophomore year, and I have yet to see a senior suite that willfully betrays its occupants' class-year. These days, a Harvard 1999 pennant on the wall would seem as repellent as Serbian ultra-nationalism.

What happened along the way? We picked a concentration, chose a blocking group, got randomized, camped, punched and winnowed our way through activities and people. What we are now is, to some degree, the culmination of an extensive process of refinement and specialization; the Darwinian forces of our environment have forced us to adapt, grow elaborate plumage or camouflage, and develop idiosyncrasies or talents we wouldn't have imagined possessing when we first arrived.

Senior Bar throws all these rare birds together with the expectation that the will chirp in harmony. Perhaps on some nights they do, but I would guess that most often they don't. A Harvard education promises the chance to rub elbows with an incredibly diverse bunch of people; as first-years we think it's feasible to meet them all, become a part of their little worlds and offer them entrance to ours. But it can be equally awe-inspiring to think how radically different the lives of others are from your own, how no experience is going to bring you any closer to their worldview.

I walked down Mt. Auburn Street this afternoon, and high above me a stereo was thumping from the window of a final club; a group of premeds were sitting in a courtyard studying for their MCATs, while a pair a rowers walked toward the boat house for an afternoon practice. Lampoon to the left of me, Hillel to the right: it's rich panorama of life in a cheesy, Chaucerian sort of way.

So I go to Senior Bar nonetheless and sip my beer, watching the vista spread out before me. Over there's the doctor who will cure my fever, standing next to me is my future senator, who's talking to the author of the book that will make me laugh, late at night, after I've put the kids to bed. I'd like to meet them all tonight, but I have the feeling that I'll be seeing them again sometime soon. Joshua Derman is a philosophy concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.