Wasted on the Young

It was one of those awkward dining hall conversations you have with decreasing frequency after freshman year. The friend of a friend and I, abandoned during the dessert course by our mutual acquaintance, were trying to fill the silences between sips of coffee with pleasantries. We had inquired about each others’ concentrations; where we’d grown up; which courses we had decided to take; how we had spent our respective summers. Then, when the silence lengthened uncomfortably, I cleared my throat and introduced a formula I’d relied upon since elementary school: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Perhaps because I’d been away from Harvard for a while, I hadn’t imagined he’d think the question an affront. After all, most Harvard students I know lack certain hallmarks of adulthood—financial self-sufficiency, for instance, or the ability to drink in moderation, or disdain for the Ben Stiller vehicle Zoolander. If pressed, I would define our stage of development as mid-adolescence. Being a grown-up, I’ve long thought, is something different, something removed and complicated—a state involving mortgages and full-time jobs and the ownership of a china service for twelve. But the friend-of-a-friend was affronted: “We are grown up,” he said.

“We’re not grown up,” I told him, making a mental note to update my collection of rejoinders as well as my collection of pleasantries. But he only raised his eyebrows and sipped his coffee in a convincing, if broad, show of maturity.

Much as I’d like to regard the friend-of-a-friend’s evaluation of our grown-up-hood as anomalous, I can’t help but think his view might be the majority’s. Harvard students do evince a striking degree of maturity (or prissiness, depending upon your point of view). April Fools’ Day after April Fools’ Day goes by without anyone’s noticing I’ve short-sheeted their bed, much less retaliating; when I pleat meeting agendas into paper footballs, my peers fix me with icy stares instead of making little uprights out of their forefingers and thumbs. Students run extracurricular activities with an intensity more appropriate to the governance of small countries. Already this fall, seniors have donned conservatively-cut suits and trotted off to recruiting meetings. And Harvard University Dining Service recently announced that, in a bid to improve our health, they have eliminated trans fatty acids—those building blocks of every childhood treat from French fries to Oreos—from the HUDS menu.

I suppose Harvard students’ gravity shouldn’t surprise me. After all, most of us are here because of our studiousness, because we were good at aping adult mores, because our teenage disaffectedness was never fierce enough to prevent us from being our high school teachers’ darlings. Holden Caulfield doesn’t come to Harvard. (When I shared this theory with my father, he snorted and said, “Maybe he sneaks in the back door at Hampshire.”) What few of our rebellious impulses weren’t screened out by the admissions office are promptly smothered under red brick and ivy. Even our youthful indiscretions—despoiling the John Harvard statue, say, or running primal scream—groan under the weight of tradition.

And I suppose there’s nothing inherently wrong with adulthood. What troubles me is—and please forgive me my generalizations—the danger of our passing directly from sober childhood to sober adulthood. What troubles me is the danger of our being too intent on someday sowing grass seed in our front yards in Greenwich, Connecticut, to ever sow any wild oats. It is not our precocious adulthood that troubles me so much as our precocious yuppiedom.

For many of us, these four years, bookended by high school overachievement and grueling ascents to professional success, will be the only significant span of time when we aren’t bound to impress anybody. We ought not to squander it. Straight out hedonism is seldom advisable—but a lack of self-consciousness is. When George Plimpton ’48 died last week, obituaries didn’t mention his GPA, or the brilliance of his pronouncements in section. They did include a description of his disrupting a Lexington ceremony honoring Paul Revere’s ride by galloping in costumed as a British officer and stealing a dignitary’s microphone.

In an impressionistic passage from his 1930 novel The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos ’16 writes bitterly: “and all the pleasant contacts will be useful in Later Life say hello pleasantly to everybody crossing the yard/ sit looking out into the twilight of the pleasantest four years of your life/ grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde.” Cambridge Octobers are cold enough. A chilly maturity will not improve them; a warm abandon will.

Phoebe Kosman ’05 is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.