The Rack of Reading Period

Fresh from winter break, I was actually ready for the onslaught. I was prepared for a siege, ready to lay waste to the mountains of unknown material threatening to undo me. My keep was filled with an abundance of preserves, primarily Christmas cookies from mom, and my will to defend the coveted GPA could be no higher. I was primed for battle.

But now, more than three weeks after my return, my keep is empty, my will gone. It is right about now I reach maximal fatigue, as those granted freedom quietly and deliberately separate themselves from those condemned to continue battle, one group steeped in bacchanalian post-bellum festival and the other steeped in paper-cut blood. The barbarians are knocking at my gate, and I barely even hear them. At the climax of the battle, when the boiling midnight oil should be burning through pages of texts, I find myself utterly enervated, unable to move or even to breathe.

I have been outlasted, out-fought, out-maneuvered by the Harvard reading period.

And no wonder really. The Harvard finals system is a mental siege, not a straight-up, honorable open-field battle. At almost ever other institution in the country, students withstand a honorable frontal assault, their #2 pencils glinting in the sunlight and failing with glory as the finals process lets them have it straight away. Treacherous Harvard, on the other hand, will not meet us on the open field. It lies in wait, it cuts our supply lines, and tortures us with anticipation before it storms the castle.

The most insidious aspect of the Harvard finals system is the mental angst caused by its duration. Classes bleed into winter break, which bleeds into reading period, which bleeds into an extensive finals period. The time bleeds students dry. Three weeks of hanging over the ravenous jaws of finals is enough mental torture to break anyone's will.

During winter break, finals are just a mental gnat that must be swatted away from time to time as friends ask "how was your semester" and we are forced to reply "I don't know--yet." Mercifully, the change of venue keeps the horror ahead out of consciousness, for the most part.

But as reading period draws to a close, the pressure begin to build in earnest. Slowly the cold but humid Harvard air becomes oppressive, thick and heavy. I become Ed Harris in The Abyss, breathing a slurry of oxygenated hydrocarbons. Each breath is positive work, my diaphragm labors draw the viscous fluid into my screaming lungs, then expels it out again through my narrow trachea. I am in a slow-motion free-fall through frigid, silent water, receding from the dim light of the sun as the deep rushes to swallow me. Every moment of descent adds thousands of pounds of water pressure that compress me on all sides, but I am not crushed. I just continue to fall, with no end in sight. I begin to hallucinate.

I dream of mountains. Mountain air is like none other, dry and thin, it crackles with energy. Like pure water, this cool air is hypotonic. With each breath, impurities and particulates, the shellac of concerns and obligations, leech out of my lungs and are expelled into the cool wind. I dream of freedom.

My dreams are interrupted by a startling but welcome sight: the Bottom. With a primal scream, my heart leaps as the end of my torture emerges. I wait out a subjective eternity as the sea floor rises to greet me, and finally, mercifully, end my descent.

The horror of this final wait for the Bottom is what really drains me. As the ratio of time spent studying to time until the Bottom increases without limit, my interest in things unrelated to schoolwork increases proportionally. The smallest curiosity, the dullest barb can hook my attention for hours. As the opportunity cost of stealing away time from studies increases, my irrational desire for shenanigans becomes unbearable. An hour and a half on amihotornot.com playing God of aesthetics. Forty-five minutes re-reading an utterly boring Times story on the profit margins of foreign car manufacturers. An hour faux-drumming to Led Zeppelin. The only procrastination that I have found to be acceptable to the efficiency-monitoring system of my mind is physical exercise. The other jaunts into extreme inefficiency don't even recharge my batteries, they just remind me I should be doing other more dreary things.

The descent continues, for me, until Monday. Then, having hit bottom, I will transform into a human bubble, light as air I will shoot up through the Harvard Trench of finals period, and undergo explosive decompression. I will float right to the top of the mythical mountain, and draw my first pure breath of freedom in more than a month. I can't wait.

B.J. Greenleaf '01 is a physics concentrator in Mather House.