The Final Exam

If all goes well, there can be something very satisfying about studying for exams. Not taking them, of course--even if you're prepared, trying to spill out a semester's worth of material in three hours almost always disappoints. But studying for exams forces you to review (or, for us lazy folks, to read for the first time) the coursework and to see what exactly you have learned. And then you relize that the whole point of exams is not to make you sum up the entire course, or filter it down into the three major things worth knowing. (That's only the point of exams in Core classes.) The point is to make you study--to force you to admire, if only from afar, that vast expanse of time and thought.

So I went back through my notes and decided to review for this, my last words to you, my final exams. And I discovered that this is one test for which I am royally screwed.

It's not that I'm unprepared. In fact, when it comes to life-at-large, I'm the equivalent of a premed dork, taking notes compulsively with a 20-color pen. I keep detailed diaries, never delete an e-mail, save all my notebooks, and keep movie ticket stubs from the last five years on file. Want to know what I ate for lunch on February 25, 1997? Or what I was up to at 7:20 p.m. on April 28, 1999? I've got it all. The challenge is to select the useful from the useless, the primary sources from the endless reading lists, the major theorems from the pile of proofs. I've put it off until the last minute, and now I have to go through all of it an dig out what's worth remembering. But how can one tell what's important and what's not? Here, for example, are a few things that I discovered while reviewing my notes:

A sonnet entitled "Ode to the Yale Weekend," concluding with the following lines: "Hence we won the game, in a dazzling feat / And soon, all of Yale was thowing up in the street." An e-mail I wrote to Marty Feldstein, that he decrease his course's opportunity costs by renaming Ec 10 Sections "Ections" and the colloquially-named Marty Feldstein articles, "Marticles." (Luckily, he was amused.) My 1997 Datamatch results. (I had been hopeful--my parents met through it without even attending Harvard--but destiny awaited me elsewhere.) A quote from a student in a class I shopped that made it clear I couldn't take the course: "In this scene, Blanche Dubois is the Uberfemme. She is a stereotype of herself, creating her own moral universe." Blow-by-blow reenactments of romantic encounters between friends, delivered directly to my inbox-most of which are quite hysterical in retrospect (but don't tell them that until the 25th reunion; they won't take it well). A mention of my first 5 a.m. fire drill, when I suddenly learned that I am among the .01 percent of Harvard students who do not wear glasses. A memo about a friend's decision to donate blood in order to get out of section. (Maybe I thought it was a good idea.) A disastrous e-mail that I sent, by accident, to exactly the wrong person. Programs from each year's Freshman Musical, my invention. Rejections from every competitive organization on campus. Letters applying for jobs I never even wanted. Old cans of Raid, left over from when I and my roommates declared nuclear war on the roaches in our room. Sleeping pills from two semesters' worth of random insomnia. Bottles of bubble solution and glow-in-the-dark paint. (If you don't have these yet, you're really missing out.) But most of all, my notes record fights that I don't even remember now, crushes that met their unrequited demise, people whose names I barely recognize as former friends--and, like insignificant textbook lines that one later goes back to highlight, the earliest mentions of people who slowly, but only very slowly, became the five or 10 or 15 people who matter.

What do I take from all of these things? What will they ask me on my final exam?

Hoping for a cheat sheet, I looked to the Yearbook, surely the ultimate Cliffs Notes of one's college experience. But there, each senior's picture is accompanied by a name, permanent address, academic concentration, and a list of extracurricular activities, nothing more. Apparently someone decided 50 years ago that what best sums up our college experience is whether or not we participated in intramural sports. But who could possibly care about whether we rowed House crew? Instead, shouldn't it say, to be accurate, "Discovered that her time is hers, and she should never, ever, defer life"? Or perhaps "Understood the value of staring at the ceiling, and, when at the front of a long lunch line, often selected individual strands of spaghetti"? Or perhaps "Loved the following people..."? Or maybe "Figured out that no one should ever want to be famous"? Or "Spent too much time on X, and not enough on Y"? Or "Missed the following opportunities..."? Or Realized that what's worthwile are not the many things one tries, but the few things one chooses"? Or maybe "Learned, after 22 years, to trust herself"?

What will they ask me on my final exam?

A few weeks ago, I went out to dinner with a large group of my classmates. The occasion was a birthday, thus free from the officially-mandated nostalgia of Senior events, and it was far enough away from graduation that we could enjoy ourselves without the burdens of obligatory remembering. All of us were having a great time, eating and talking and laughing. But then a strange thing happened to me. I gazed down the long table, and in a flash of unexpected vision, I suddenly saw all of my friends old, very old.

Their heads were gray or bald, their bellies were a little thinner or flabbier, and their jowls had dropped. High-collared, broad-fronted shirts had replaced the girls'gaping, sexy V-necks, and the boys, now old men, wore thick bifocals. Some of them were speaking more slowly than before, others laughed more softly, and one or two, tamed by years of being too shy, had resigned themselves to silence. A few seats at the table were empty. But those who remained kept talking and laughing, smiling at each other as if to say, Time has passed, but I have not noticed.

We, members of the Classes of 1999 to 2002, have very little in common with each other. Our backgrounds differ far more than we assume, and even our college experiences are not the same. The only thing we clearly share is our age. But that means that, if all goes well, we will grow old together, you and I. My memories are bound up with yours. The years ahead are neither mine nor yours, but ours.

A medieval Hebrew philosopher has written, "Days are scrolls. Write on them only what you want remembered." There is no final exam, just a wide blank page waiting before us. I only hope that I will remember, now and then, to review my notes. Dara Horn '99 is a literature concentrator in Eliot House. This is her final column.