The Meaning of the End

The desperate search for meaning, closure and reassurance that typifies senior year (and practically suffocates senior spring) stems from the threat of the imminent end. The many rituals and ceremonies designed to help us finish and fondly remember our undergraduate days just reinforce the urgency of this search. Only my impending graduation could explain my relatively recent desire for a frame to put around the past four years of my life. The fact and experience of the end have inspired a host of meanings concerning my life in college, meanings that both draw upon and stand apart from the smaller events and patterns of my day-to-day experiences.

The end of my college career has actually introduced several different interpretations of that career. In one interpretation, I feel that general sense of accomplishment and gratitude that often accompanies life’s major milestones. I have found myself stepping back and surveying how much I have changed, appreciating the unpredictable ways in which my view of the world has expanded, and marveling at how I have been the beneficiary of innumerable twists of fate and happy coincidences. Somehow, circumstances have conspired to make me happy here; they have let me prosper within the opportunities, academic and non-academic, provided by Harvard, and I am grateful for that.

But for some reason, senior spring has also brought with it a certain unhappiness, and it is not the unhappiness I generally associate with good-byes and departures. For the past several months, various what-ifs have plagued my thoughts. My choice of concentration, the effort I devoted to my extracurricular commitments, the activities I never tried, the people I might have held on to but didn’t, and the people I never met—all these things remind me of how differently my life might have turned out. I can’t help but dwell upon all the ways I failed to take advantage of this place and time, all the lives I might have led. It’s not that I have many specific regrets, and I would not want to give up the experiences I’ve had and the particular people that I’ve loved for an alternative undergraduate existence. But at the same time, I have been unable to shake a more general sense of awe in the face of what I didn’t have control over, didn’t see and didn’t know.

This is an anxiety that I did not expect, and it competes not only with the more positive sense of satisfaction I have about my Harvard experience but with the seemingly truer, more straightforward anxiety that I did anticipate. There was a moment at the end of my sophomore year when I foresaw the pain that graduation would bring. In a half-empty room strewn with boxes during spring exam period, in an almost mystical moment of clarity, I saw the end—I realized that I would have to leave what I was beginning to love, that the people that made me happy would one day be gone from my life, and that any attempts to hold onto this four-year moment would ultimately be in vain. That realization made me grieve for all the happiness I knew was yet to come, and I wondered how much my college experience would ultimately mean to me if the things that inspired such fondness could not always be with me.

I still have not discovered how to handle the reality of this loss, nor have I been able to reconcile all of the different perspectives on my college career that I have come to hold in the past year. I have little hope that I will ever have a clean, confident and balanced view of my undergraduate experience. Right now, the confusion from these conflicting interpretations only allows for a very wide sense of sadness and celebration about letting go of everything that was and everything that might have been. I predict that a fully coherent picture of this four-year moment will always elude me, even as anxieties about what it all meant have powerfully shaped not just my last year here, but the way I will remember the past four years as well.

But even though I might never really know how I should think about my time here, I hope that I will always retain something of the deeper and indescribable emotional experiences also inspired by the end of my time here. Accompanying the desperate search for meaning is the effort to wholeheartedly embrace the experience of living in the penultimate moment, of loving the people and the times that are about to slip away. The fruits of this effort have no solid conceptual content, and the irreducibility and immediacy of these sentiments have made them more stable and valuable than any of the various ways I might try to interpret the past four years.

P. Patty Li ’02, a religion and history concentrator in Eliot House, was an arts chair of The Crimson in 2001.