Cleo C Abram

“Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.”

–Susan Sontag, “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.” On Photography

I often consider leaving Columbia. I imagine:

My advisor is concerned at first but glad I came to see her. “Are you unhappy? Are you failing any classes? This doesn’t seem like you. Is someone in your family sick?” Assuaged by my responses—an emphatic “no!” to each of her questions on my potential maladies—she eventually consents. “One year?” “One year.” I walk out of her office feeling elated but terrified. What if I am wrong? But the year that follows shows me I am not. I do not travel, save for a car trip from Washington D.C. to Telluride, Colorado—and that lonely and rough ride can hardly be romanticized the way movies, or college students considering years off, might try to. Instead, I am idle. I get bored. Finally.

That is what I am looking for. “Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination,” wrote Susan Sontag. That line fascinates me. It hits home somewhere inside of me the way only true words do, or words that are so disturbing in their falsehood that they approach a reflection or illumination of truth. Fascination is all I know at Columbia. I hurl myself into my classes, my reading, my teaching, my lectures—even my relationships—in a desperate sort of search for learning. Am I missing a kind of Montaignian idleness that would free me “like a horse that has broke from his rider”?[1]

I go to find Sontag’s book, On Photography, in Butler Library. I am focused. I am fascinated. I am searching for TR183 S65 1977b in the Edward Said Reading Room. But half an hour later I find myself sitting on the black and white tiled floor of that same room, 616, with a pile of other books in my lap. The first is The Loser, by Thomas Bernhard; I recognize his name from my reading of Kaddish for an Unborn Child. The second is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; I pick it out like an old love in a crowd. The third is The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the fourth Illness as Metaphor… and the list goes on. PT 2662 E7 U5513 1991 through Z 8310.8 C57 1982—eventually every book within a shelf of my original object of inquiry is on the floor. Is this fascination? Or is this boredom?

Sontag’s quotation seems to mock me. “Both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other,” she chides. One leads to the other… The obvious first thought is that boredom leads to fascination, Montaigne’s great discovery. The sentence directly after Sontag’s quotation, in On Photography, begins “the Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination.”[2] Perhaps that is the root of my fantasy of leaving; I believe that through idle time I will discover what I want to explore, rather than what I am asked to. I will happen upon learning that will thrill and excite me—and I will be fascinated by it. At Columbia I am never idle nor alone and I believe, contrary to what the mission of the liberal arts education would have me think, that the constant activity and company is inhibiting my ability to self-discover and find a purpose for and direction to my education.

But fascination may instead be what leads to boredom. Is it then that my experience at Columbia, so filled with academic excitement, will eventually and inevitably turn to a type of endless tedium? Is that what is happening now? But if that were true, would my fascination outside of higher education not do the same if I were to leave Columbia? My resolve crumbles.

I consider if it may be a cycle—boredom to fascination and fascination back again, endlessly continuing, heartbreaking but fulfilling. One could see it as flames of fascination born out of idle contemplation or damp patches of reflection amidst a flurry of activity. Fascination would only get you so far; you would need to sustain interest, dedication, and motivation through periods of self-examination and quiet introspection. It is much harder to deceive yourself, to mask barefaced ambition with seemingly sincere interest, when it is quiet inside you.

I have missed something. “Both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation,” Sontag wrote. That is how I feel, wherever I am and whether fascinated or bored. I am a child with my face pressed up against the window, desperately wanting to know what is happening inside but only fogging up the glass. Where am I going? What do I want to learn about?

Sontag refers throughout her book to the work of Diane Arbus, who she proclaims to be anti-humanist and committed to portraying only the strangeness of the world. “She had no intention of entering into the horror” experienced by her subjects.[3] Her view, therefore, “is always from the outside”—my problem exactly. Diane Arbus is a privileged and educated woman, who “came from a verbally skilled, compulsively health-minded, indignation-prone, well-to-do Jewish family, for whom minority sexual tastes lived way below the threshold of awareness and risk-taking was despised as another goyish craziness.”[4] The description, with the exception of religious orientation, might be one I would give in a nicer tone about my own family. Sontag continues: Arbus’ interest in the deformed and mutilated, she says, was only “a desire to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged, to vent her frustration at being safe.”[5] In other words, she was also a child scratching at the window, eternally outside it.

Arbus writes, “they fascinate me” about her subjects and I cringe. I have used that language before about something foreign to me. “Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies fascinate me.” Since, to Sontag, those who are fascinated are merely fighting against boredom, it follows that if I can understand the deep discomfort I now feel, I can also grasp the relationship between boredom and fascination. I can perhaps even make a more clearheaded decision about leaving or remaining at Columbia.

“Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination: both depend on being outside rather than inside a situation, and one leads to the other.” After long and earnest self-reflection, neither boredom nor fascination is my answer. It is not that I need to leave Columbia and become bored to find fascination. It is not that being fascinated at Columbia inevitably leads to boredom. A cycle of the two together leads me nowhere as well. Instead, I must find a way to be inside my subject. I have the intention, but now I must enter into my studies the way Sontag shows Arbus never to have done. That is what moves us beyond fascination or boredom into dedication and purpose.

I need to talk to someone.

My advisor is concerned at first but glad I came to see her.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

The self-proclaimed goal of TED is to spread ideas; the nonprofit calls itself “a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration” through conferences filled with incredible talks. These talks are later posted online[1] for anyone and everyone. I loved it immediately. I started watching the online talks in high school, eager to fill my free time with random pieces of wisdom from the worlds most inspired thinkers. When I arrived at Columbia, I happened upon the opportunity to begin a TEDx conference—a localized, independently organized TED—so I automatically jumped at the chance. But as I started to plan, a question gnawed at me: if I at a university with hundreds of incredible classes per day and I can choose any I want, why do I need TEDxColumbiaCollege?

The answer goes much deeper than just a TEDx conference. I found that sometimes I needed not to choose some learning opportunities. Rather, I needed to serendipitously stumble upon them in order to bring new ideas and greater perspective to bear on those I did. TED offers a clearinghouse of knowledge; you never know exactly what you’re going to get. It is unique because, for a few hours, you listen to a wide array of ideas that you don’t choose. The beauty of it is that you are exposed to new ones that, maybe, you never thought much about before.

Columbia does a great job encouraging this through the Core Curriculum. The computer science major is asked—well, forced—to take a chance on Art Humanities and the art history student on Frontiers of Science. The Core forces us to explore beyond what we already know that we’re interested in. TEDxColumbiaCollege showed me the importance of this type of exploration outside of class. I started noticing that I had created a bubble around myself. I bookmarked my favorite news sources and only read from them, sought out friends with similar interests, even my Google search results were tailored to me based on previous activity. My choices were not simply focusing my learning. They were confining me. 

Now, I am obviously not arguing that we need to stop making choices about what we study. The diversity of interest on this campus is amazing and absolutely vital. But to reexamine our areas of study in new ways, we need new information and new ways of looking at it. And, sometimes, that comes from unexpected places. I think it is worth finding them.

The good news is that we can choose to learn serendipitously, although it is most easily explained, as I did at first, through instances where we don’t. We can choose to explore and to happen on new ideas. Steve Jobs, in his now enormously famous Stanford commencement speech,[2] mentioned the necessity of serendipitous learning. When he dropped out of college, he dropped in on a calligraphy course, a class that at the time seemed to have no relevance to his area of interest. But the artistic sensibilities he learned in that class were instrumental in the creation of the beautiful typography of Apple computers. In his words, “what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.”

TEDxColumbiaCollege is one way to stumble on new ideas. There are so many more. Some of them are easy: go downtown and walk around—you’ll definitely find something interesting and learn something new. Some are a little bit harder: take that random elective you think doesn’t relate. Your way might be something still completely different. Whatever it is, it is worth taking a chance on.  You might just stumble upon something incredible.

VT

“Now, don’t fly too far with the fairies tonight, Clee. You’ll be exhausted by morning!”

Every night, as he tucked three-year-old me into bed, my father would reinforce a delightful fantasy: In my sleep, I could “fly with the fairies” and make magical mischief. Long after I stopped believing in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus, this whimsical story remained. “I’ll tell the fairies you say hi, Dada!” I would giggle as I snuggled into sleep. Eventually, after years of enchantment, the fairy-tale disappeared into pre-school hyperactivity and pre-teen self-importance. Last year, however, a few academic classes inspired me to see my childhood fantasy in a new light.

The first of these classes were Fantasy Literature and Comparative Religion. Novelists and theologians alike, I find, agree that by using imagination one can illuminate otherwise indescribable aspects of reality. For example, in his essay “On Fairy Stories”, J.R.R. Tolkien says that fantasy serves to “clean out our windows, so that things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of familiarity.” Similarly, Joseph Campbell states, “a traditional religious system allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.” Connecting the two is the notion that, through our imaginations, we can express deep truths about reality.

The power of imagination is important even in the most quantitative of settings. Physics tells me that everything I need to know about the universe can be expressed as an equation, no matter how many variables are required to do so. But metaphor remains crucial. A real cat is either alive or dead, but without his cat somewhere in between, Schrödinger could not have explained quantum mechanics as clearly as he did. Similarly, a bowling ball on a taut rubber sheet does not actually involve the curvature of space. But imagining marbles falling toward it provides a more intuitive understanding of gravitational distortion than Einstein’s equations ever could. Clearly, these images are not fantastical. They involve no fairies, magic, gods or goddesses. But imagery and metaphor in science are powerful tools because, sometimes, the most easily understandable description of reality comes from the imagination.

Undead cats and rubber sheets are one thing, but how did my father, with his fairy-tale, allow me to perceive reality differently? The story helped me form a self-concept that included a sense of worth. I could fly; I was incredible and unique. I had adventures; I was independent and accomplished. My fantasy allowed me to explore qualities of my character that I might not have been able to see if my only light was “everyone is special.” I wonder what else my imagination can illuminate. 

Thanks, Dada.

I see your mind is miles gone

yet here at home you linger on

you tire of the things you know

I feel your heart is hungry; go.

-

but take time to remember, please

those fleeting barefoot memories

and go back to the hills above

the hometown you will always love.

-

before white dresses set you free

sit quiet and remember me

the child who ran and danced and cried

and let me join you, side by side.

-

for ‘though you seem to me so grown

you cannot travel far alone

the child in you must always stay

to guide you as you find your way.

-

we’ll go together, you and I

we’ll seek out where the answers lie

but that which we will find at last

will not replace, erase our past.

-

so take me by my tiny hand

breathe deeply, I will help you stand

and greet the coming morning strong

your childhood steering you along.

-

yes, now our feet have miles to go

each step we’ll take together though

and as we leave, I hope you see

I’m proud of who you’ve come to be.

-

It was easy, with pre-college standardized testing, to quantify what I know. From an off-topic Calculus class, I know how e^i(pi) equals negative one. From Sidwell’s library, I know the United States policies in Afghanistan from Cold War to modern day. From pure curiosity, I know a stamped banana can be successfully sent via UPS as a “self contained package.” But when at last the college process ground to a halt, there remained the harder-to-measure opposite: What I don’t know. Yet that is what excites me most.

I don’t know how to choose the best career path for me. What is the formula that relates financial gain to emotional return from helping others? I wonder if the joy I take in my barefoot-camp-counselor job is worth my barely-gas-money paycheck. Should I use Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” as a map, pursuing fortune early in order to fund charitable causes in old age? Or should I instead focus on doing immediate good, trying to heal the world one kissed scraped knee at a time?

I don’t know how to reconcile my desire to serve others with my drive for personal success. I wonder whether my time is best spent organizing a blood drive or studying for my next Physics test. Which deserves more focus: service or accomplishment? Are they mutually exclusive? Might I define my success in terms of the good I bring my community?

I don’t know how to best incite change but I know it is my responsibility to try. Is it enough, though, to simply be good, or should one strive to actively do good? Was it enough, for example, to remain a supportive confidant for a gay friend without lobbying against Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. Which of these types of actions is better suited to ameliorate the issues that face our society? Can change be measured in legislation passed and dollars raised or does more meaningful transformation depend on relationships strengthened and trust built?

I don’t know.

I used to. I knew once that a good deed was helping someone up onto the Big Toy and success meant a gold star for sharing your Animal Crackers. As I’ve obtained more life, I feel I’ve collected more questions than answers. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve begun to explore and, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “the end of all our exploration will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” I am back at the beginning, examining my own definitions of “success” and “good deed” under a new lens. And my journey has only just begun.

I hope that the next years give me the means to find answers. More importantly, though, I hope I uncover more questions. As physicist Brian Greene put it: “sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best answer.” My questions are not problems; I don’t expect solutions. I want to explore them more. I want to discover more of what I don’t know.

What should I examine next?

i carry your heart with me

(i carry it in my heart)

i am never without it

(anywhere i go, you go, my dear;

and whatever is done by only me

is your doing, my darling)

-

i fear no fate

(for beautiful you are my fate, my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and a sun will always sing is you

-

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life

which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the secret that is keeping the stars apart

-

i carry your heart

i carry it in my heart

— e. e. cummings

EHC

EHC

EHC

Lake Champlain, Westport, NY.