End Days for Dog Days

In the past few years, Harvard life has undergone an exhaustive microscopy. Each facet of campus life has been examined and every element of our academic structure probed in a furious attempt to uncover what it is that makes so many of us unhappy. But one root of our ills doesn’t hide in our days at Harvard—it is created in our days off.

Each summertime witnesses a diaspora of Harvard ambition. In New York’s stockbroking looms, Harvard expatriates watch the shuttle of industry fly back and forth for 90 hours a week and try not to get their fingers jammed. While others nap, we are stuffing our pockets and Palms with the telephone numbers and email addresses of the well-connected. We are discovering proteins; we are debating philosophy; we are disassembling poverty.

The curtain call for idleness has come and gone in our lives.

For schoolchildren, the first day of summer arrives with agonizing tardiness, and the last with frantic haste; those bordered out by these two are filled with erratic dalliances. There may be haphazard tree forts one week and trips to the waterslides the next, or there may be sandcastles first and then bumper cars. There may be nothing but hours of television. The common theme is the pointlessness of it all—the unequalled luxury of gorging on endless unclaimed hours.

Although many editorialists and arbiters of good sense have argued over the utility and the nobility of stockbrokering or African AIDS clinics, it is time for the tenor of that discussion to change completely: perhaps we Harvard students should do nothing at all.

This is tough medicine to swallow for a college student who might rank sloth well above adultery or theft on the scale of mortal sins. Summer, Harvard-style, has given up its childhood role as vacation; it has even shaken off its role at lower-strung colleges as interruption. It has become an individually-made replica of Harvard itself, as if we all grow so lonely of Cambridge’s stresses during our three months away that we must rebuild them wholesale by some facsimile. Summertime is so indistinguishable from the other nine months of our lives that, in a few cases, we pick right up what we were doing at the end of May and resume the same activity again at the beginning of June.

Then we return to it again in September, and spend the rest of the year listening to a great deal of words wondering why it is we are by-and-large unhappy. While hardly the rule for every single student, discontent has become somewhat of a dogma. Exhaustion and disillusion become lifestyle fads, and many busy themselves thinking up clever new ways to prevent them.

More than calendar tinkering, more than admissions reform, more than free beer or free shrinks or free As, the one change that might shake up our unhappy deadlock could be if we could all set aside three months for uselessness. Years of cubicled summers stretch out from graduation day to the day we are too dejected or decrepit to remain in them any longer; it may as well be now that we follow a whim, refuse a job, or ignore a class.

This means turning deliberately against not only our own selfishness but our own selflessness, too. Instead of rigorous four-week language immersion classes, we should wander around in foreign countries poor and planless. We should skip out on repairing homes on the Mississippi coastline and join in on traveling up the Natchez Trace Parkway in a truck. We should substitute out bringing esteemed literary editors coffee for scrawling our own poems on the backs of napkins.

There is no place on my résumé where I will be able to write that I have been struck speechless by an interesting bend in New Hampshire State Route 109. There is no job interview where I will be able to brag about how I can tell whether a two-cycle engine is running too rich or too lean by the sound of it. And society gained no great benefit from the cement flagpole foundation that I set into some ledge. But I reckon that each of these things is good for the mitigation of at least two or three weeks within the interminable routine of Cambridge. And perhaps we might all find ourselves a bit more relaxed, a measure more engaged in our academics, a flair more creative, and a lot more invigorated come time for that routine.

We are too quick to complain about how Harvard draws the strength out of us when the real leech lurks within. It takes a certain level of stubbornness to reject our common compulsion to activity for even the shortest while. But if we were able to muster this up and deny ourselves freneticism in the summer, we might find that its output would be returned to us, interest paid, during the rest of the year.

Fiddling with the things that surround us will only bring us so far in the game of reform. It is not the administration, not the faculty, not student groups or final clubs that keep us unhappy. We keep ourselves that way. Perhaps first on our list of demands should be that we unhand our own Junes, Julys, and Augusts.

Garrett G. D. Nelson ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies and visual and environmental studies concentrator in Cabot House.