Remembrance of the Present

This week seniors have begun to celebrate the infamous “last 100 days” of their Harvard careers. For the rest of the school year, every night there will be an event at a bar for seniors to gather, reminisce about meals in Annenberg, and wax nostalgic about all of the good-ol’ college days. Even more so, the events serve as a last-ditch attempt to get the proverbial “true college experience,” to go out with a bang, remembering college as an exuberant, debauchery-filled romp that somehow leads to maturity.

But this scripted celebration of the last 100 days creates intense irony—now, more than ever, as seniors try to live in the present, to burn in their youth, they are thinking about their future. I don’t just mean that as these future alumni cram in their final hurrahs, most of them will be thinking about upcoming thesis deadlines, planning contingencies if their next job interview falls through or imagining what their friends will all be doing in 20 years. On a more fundamental level, for many seniors these last 100 days are not about living in the moment at all—they are instead about creating memories, shaping illusions of how they will perceive their college experience 20 years down the road. Seniors go to these events so that sometime in the future, sitting in their downtown office they will be able to think back on their wild time in college. These occasions are not meant to be experienced; they are meant to be remembered.

The funny thing is that this tendency to build memories, not experiences, results in part from the bombardment of advice we get on how to live our lives. How many times have we heard the advice that we should focus more on having fun, because we will look back most fondly on our free time with friends, on our relationships? How many people have told you to “seize the day?”

If you’re anything like me, you’ve tried to take this advice seriously, many times —setting aside time to be social, forcing yourself to forego a night of studying to go out to a birthday party, tackling your social life like another class. But the ridiculousness of the situation is that all the while as we supposedly try to live our lives in the now, we are measuring our experience through the lens of our future selves. We think about how we will remember our days here—not whether we love them now.

The large number of formals at Harvard illustrates our obsession with capturing these perfect moments. I am not an avid photographer, but the few photos I do have of college show me with a date sporting my tuxedo before a dance. But no matter how much you like getting dressed up, one of the driving motivations behind our attendance at these dances is that we want to preserve them, in our minds and in our plenitude of photos, to remind us of a perfect evening. To a large extent, formals are about constructed moments.

Taken together, these constructed memories fit neatly into our invisible CV. We enter line by line the “correct” experiences of the perfect college life—being in a relationship, trying marijuana, pulling all-nighters to adhere to this Platonic ideal that we will be able to admire with the space of time.

The futility of this endeavor is striking. There will always be the idea of our future selves who will look back and smile at the shenanigans of youth, but at what point are we going to rid ourselves of the burden of pleasing them? Do we wait until we’re comfortably settled in our careers? When we have children? Because if we don’t stop the trend of our future nostalgia, we run the risk of never actually getting the chance to sit back, remembering these days as the perfect illusion we constructed. Or, we might never accept the illusion, remembering them as the constant attempt to live the perfect life.

Perhaps the conundrum can be understood this way: we all try to live for the moment. But once carpe diem becomes the cliché of the day, it ceases to have any meaning, because we live in fear of not doing enough to live for now. You cannot live for today while thinking about whether you’re living well enough. Ultimately, even if you are living for the memories, you’ll be in for a big disappointment. Nostalgia is fickle, and try as you might to control what you remember, you’re bound to forget most of it anyway. Of the last 100 days, you’d be lucky to get one.

Robert J. Fenster ’02 is a biology concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.