Leaving Home

It is the spring that lies before me--not second semester--and I'm finding it hard to make the change. The academic nomenclature is second nature to me, and I slip up all the time. You see, springtime, for me, will not be filled with formals, midterms and far too many extracurricular commitments, but by an inaugural visit to "the real world" and a glimpse of what the rest of my life might look like. Indeed, I am finally graduating and leaving this old world behind for a brave new one.

Although I have only stayed one semester past my graduating class, the process of leaving Harvard has seemed an endless affair to me. During the spring of last year, I lived vicariously through my aughtie-aught companions. I, too, was swept up in the thesis-crunch of February and March, carried away by the bacchanalian reprieve of April and May, and found myself nodding in agreement with the insurgent nostalgia of Senior Week and Graduation. It is hard to describe the whole experience; words fail to capture the emotive inertia that propels the last few months, here. It is something akin to the closing minute of the Beatles' song, "A Day in the Life." Over the course of a short time, so many moments conspire in a melody that rises to a fever pitch until that final instant when the tune verges on cacophony, and the song abruptly terminates, leaving you listening to a single lingering note signaling the close of a chapter to your life.

For most of us, that note trails off in the weeks following graduation. For others, like me, the note has lingered on much longer--so long, in fact, that at times it seems never-ending. So it shouldn't be surprising that the fall term for a second-semester senior can be a strange experience. The social network that took four years to build no longer exists. It is succeeded by another resembling it, but that is staffed by a new and largely unfamiliar group of people. The whole experience is like revisiting high school for the first time after starting college. The environment and faces are familiar, but there is something different about everything, something that cannot be fully articulated, but whose meaning is clear. Your time has passed, and you must move one.

And yet, as a second semester senior, you are given the opportunity to look upon Harvard with eyes that are both old and new. For, now left largely unattached by social concern and freed for the most part from academic expectation, Harvard seems different to you. It presents itself in a manner that is modest and unassuming, and you, in turn, can gaze upon it with the same unprejudiced eye with which you first viewed everything that first year, except now the sight is not nearly so overwhelming. You may still wonder at the impossibility of Widener (or the improbability of the Science Center) but you are no longer confounded by the whereabouts of the Quad or the waspy archipelago of River Houses, for all of these places are invested with memories that make them personal to you. Indeed, they are your home.

For me, this is striking, that I have called Harvard my home. In the quiet reflections of this past semester, I have often been taken aback by this thought. After four years, I had forgotten the awe of that notion, one which affected me so deeply when I first arrived, that I could call this place my home. Certainly, Harvard is much more than an educational institution. It holds a significance for the entire world which is singular and awesome. And yet, for a few years, we all call it our own.

This is not to suggest that Harvard is perfect. Far from it. The institution could bear improvement in countless ways, and I do believe that it is the duty of students to respectfully clamor for those improvements when the Faculty and administration do not see to them. To do any less is to suggest that you don't care for the institution and that it represents no more than a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

For most of us, though, Harvard means something greater than simply this. It becomes something that holds a personal meaning for us. And just as we are drawn up into an institution that is far greater than any of us, individually, could ever hope to be, it is because we come to love that institution--whether we think of it in terms of history, academics or the people we meet--that our individual efforts guide it and make it somehow better. Indeed, for four years, we are all caught up in something momentous, even if that something becomes a little mundane after we've been here for a while. For me, at least, at the end of it all, having had a few extra months to look back and reflect, I feel a sense of wonder at having been here, and when I think back upon the past four years, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for how lucky I am to have called this place home.

And so, I am moving on. It is time for me to go, and I am excited for the future. And yet, I know that there will come a time, when all of my things have been packed and loaded, and I watch as Harvard recedes from me in the rear-view mirror of my truck, that I will think on ahead to second semester and regret, for a moment, that it will only be spring to me.

John Paul Rollert '00-'01 is a social studies concentrator in Mather House. This is his final column.