Coming to college is something of a milestone. It marks the beginning of adulthood. A student's first year at college is stuffed with significance - a culturally iconic moment.
Before I arrived at orientation, I depended on my received ideas about what college ought to be: sitting on a grassy knoll with fellow young intellectuals sipping black coffee and debating Heidegger. My time at Brown would be an idyllic four years, free from all the trials and tribulations of life in the real world, full of all the joys of the life of the mind.
In the three weeks that I have been here, I have already been proven wrong. Grassy knolls are great, but not when it's cold and rainy. Sure, I've had some late night conversations about World War I and consumed lots of coffee, but I've also had to worry about lowly matters like getting the laundry done and having the power in my building go out several times.
Throughout all of this, my friends and I have reacted in exactly the way the quintessential college students of my dream world would - by quoting our favorite semi-obscure poet. When the V-Dub is closed and we have to trek to the Ratty in the rain, when we have a whole paper to write and it's 1:30 a.m., when "unitcest" gets ugly and complicated, we turn to each other and say "Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit."
For those who haven't read any Latin poetry in the last week, allow me refresh your memory. In the opening book of Vergil's Aeneid, the hero and his shipmates are marooned on the African shore after a storm. They have already been exiled from their home in Troy, and they are hungry, wet and tired.
In a situation where Henry V would give a rousing speech about "bands of brothers" and FDR would make a clever little statement about fear, Aeneas simply tells his comrades that their situation might actually be laughable. "Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit," he says. ("Perhaps at some time it will please us to remember even these things.")
We could all afford to adopt this philosophy, to have a little perspective, to take ourselves a little less seriously. Brown students in particular have a bent towards analyzing and over-analyzing every situation. We are supposed to be deeply original thinkers, but does having a profound understanding of life necessarily imply that every event in life must be made profound?
Perhaps we are convinced that this over-intellectualized attitude somehow validates our college experience, lending a significance to our little lives and a justification for what we do here. Or perhaps we simply believe college students are supposed to be like the grassy knoll version of the story, right?
I certainly thought so. Before I came here, that is. But in my first weeks, I have already dealt with enough mini-dramas to realize that none of them are all that dramatic after all. And they don't have to be. College, as I now understand it, is about perspective. The profound understanding we are supposed to obtain is the ability to look at real life from a removed vantage point, see bigger pictures and realize how small we are within them.
As the semester gets underway and the workload grows increasingly overwhelming, remember what Aeneas told his followers. When you have drunkenly called your ex on a Saturday night and are convinced that it is absolutely the end of the world, when you are two weeks behind on the reading for every class, remember that if being shipwrecked on foreign shores can be made humorous, then there is definitely hope for you.
No matter what happens, there will eventually be a time when you can look back at it and laugh - and if it makes a good story in 20 years or so, doesn't that make it all worthwhile? Vergil certainly thought so, and frankly, so do I.
Maha Atal '08 is in her first semester at Brown.
