To the rain gods: Why? When the Class of 2011 had gotten used to warm, blue-skied Providence springtimes, why bid us farewell with a chilly, rain-soaked April and an even more depressing May? — More depressing, that is, because we were even more painfully aware of what we were missing.
It's probably for the best that our senior spring was so drab. For me, at least, it felt like Brown was letting us down easy, driving in that wedge of resentment that comes before the breakup. Had it been a gorgeous, lounge-on-the-Main-Green-type spring, how much more reluctant would I be to march out through the gates this Commencement weekend?
Obviously, when it comes to the things that will keep me tied to this place, the weather is the least of it. Simply put, I love Brown. I love the faculty's combination of fierce intelligence and commitment to teaching. I love the way the Main Green looks like something out of a Gainsborough painting, even on the rainiest days. Most of all, I love the ambition and maturity and kindness of the students I've been lucky enough to spend the last four years with here.
Those 17- and 18-year-olds we were when we applied to this school: Did we know what we were getting ourselves into? Through the New Curriculum, Brown presents its students with a daunting challenge, the responsibility to form our own educations out of an overwhelming variety of options. We are encouraged to invent interdisciplinary combinations, design our own courses and, with the help of the S/NC option, study subjects outside our comfort zones. The New Curriculum isn't a program, but rather an aspiration, an ideal.
Perhaps because it has become obsessed with building and rebuilding things recently, the University likes to say we are the "architects of our own educations." But, as a musician, I think composition is an equally appropriate metaphor. Like architects, composers weave together different themes and materials to create a coherent whole. Both architects and composers will pay attention to form, structure and ornamentation, and the designs they produce on the page (or, increasingly, on the screen) will not be complete until they are, respectively, built and performed.
The first crucial difference is repetition. The architect's creation, the building, will stand until it rots. It will be strong, and though over time the building's many occupants may put it to different uses, it's not really in the nature of buildings to move around or be reproduced.
The composer's song is different. You hope its first performance won't be its last. It can still be repeated, endlessly. A song is less a space that we move in, and more something that comes alive through us as we sing it, or hum it, or listen and press "repeat." In a similar way, we will spend the rest of our lives singing the educations we composed for ourselves at Brown. Because our learning will inform our actions, our education will never simply exist, but will constantly be coming into being.
The other difference is time. Whether they fade out or stop brutally, songs end. Temporality is the mystery of music, the thing that gives the sound value. Whereas buildings outlast the people who build them, the song's performance will die, as we will. In that sense, Commencement is one of our first tastes of the finite, and the knowledge of its approach works wonders on our sense of time. When people say "College is the best four years of your life" it's not as if it's true, but rather that the brevity of college makes it feel true.
As you can see, Commencement has made me a little morbid, and since lately I've been thinking a lot about death and time (and, come to think of it, rain), I've gone back to Thomas Hardy's poetry. I've been re-reading one of the last poems he published before his death, "Proud Songsters":
The thrushes sing as the sun is
going,
And the finches whistle in ones
and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud
nightingales
In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April
wears,
As if all Time were theirs.
These are brand-new birds of
twelve months' growing,
Which a year ago, or less than
twain,
No finches were, nor
nightingales,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain.
And earth, and air, and rain.
Not so long ago, we were just particles, but Brown formed us and taught us to sing our knowledge in the world. To all the proud songsters of the Class of 2011, I wish you the best of luck. Do great things. Sing as if all Time were yours. For the moment, at least, it is.
Ben Hyman was senior editor of The Herald in fall 2010.
