Letter to the Editor: ‘Gather Ye Rose-Buds,’ Class of 2030

I graduated from Amherst College just over a year ago. Recently, I dreamed that I was sitting in a bar and had run into two Amherst students who promptly asked me for advice about life at Amherst. In the dream, I saw myself explaining, then rambling, gesticulating frantically, failing to communicate anything of real worth to these two very eager students. Then, I woke up, and couldn’t fall back asleep for at least another two hours.

Class of 2030, you see, back when I was your age, I knew that I was entering a momentous time of my life. I sought advice from my older brothers and my high school teachers as to how I could, say, live a rich social life, excel in my classes — you know, to squeeze all the juice out of college life! I even read and reread sleazy-sounding self-help books (“How to Become a Straight-A Student” and “How to Win at College”) as well as less sleazy-sounding books that argued for the virtues of the liberal arts and a real, intellectual education over the shortsighted pursuit of money for money’s sake (“Excellent Sheep”). My old diary entries from freshman year describe an overflowing, giddy joy as I felt an electric, buzzing potential simply while walking around campus.

I had always heard that “college is the best four years of your life.” Sure, I guess I could see how. But I also thought that sounded sad. Are you really telling me that my life is going to peak in college?

Class of 2030, I’m sure that you too will be beat over the head with various cliched advice about what to do or how to think in order to have the best/most exciting/transformative/impactful college experience. This all assumes that you can “make the most” of a certain experience by receiving advice from those who have gone through that experience.

I’m not here to tell you more of the same.

Granted, there is real truth to the cliche that “college is the best four years of your life”: There is unlikely to be another time in which you will have the same potential for breadth and depth of social experiences; you will never have another time in which you are basically still young and new enough that you could pivot into any subject you wish and achieve undergrad-degree-level mastery; there is unlikely to be another time in your life in which you will have so few real obligations but so much physical health and legal autonomy, parental and familial considerations be damned — you’re away! At college! While it is inevitable that some of you will suffer a lot at Amherst, and you will be very glad to graduate, the majority of you will have an excellent time and will be sad to leave.

I thought I saw all this. I wanted to savor my college experience while it lasted. But you just can’t. I mean to say that there is no knowing how to “savor” something until it is too late. (That’s distinct from the cliche that “you don’t know how much you appreciate something until you’ve lost it”; I’m talking here about something you haven’t had at all, so there’s no losing it — something that you are experiencing and will experience.)

I felt like I could see all of the present and future joys of college held in my mind’s eye. Accordingly, I was white-knuckling my college experience, trying very hard to live deliberately. I would go out to party specifically because I care about these spontaneous, fun social encounters and crazy stories-in-the-making, I even told myself.

Optimize your college experience all you want — and I seriously mean it, because you can and should optimize it in some ways — but when you graduate and it all ends, it will hit you like a ton of bricks that no amount of optimization, no amount of advice, no amount of white-knuckling and reflective living can prepare you for the enormity of the end of a human experience like college. To make things crude, you can bring your awareness of how “best” to live in college, how to fully “savor” each passing moment, each special interaction, however you put it, from 40% to 99%. But you can never get to 100%. It’s just not how experience works.

Class of 2030, as others probably regale you with their stories of freshman year move-in, let me describe what’s in store for you very startlingly soon: My move-out day was filled with many complicated feelings, but I was totally blindsided by the flood of emotions when I said goodbye to my freshman year Williston floormate Scott Wang ’25. I’ll admit that he and I grew apart in some ways during our time at Amherst, but not in any bad ways, as we still remained very close friends. He came by my shoebox single in Morris Pratt after the commencement ceremony, when everyone was soberly packing up their lives. I think Scott and I must have taken off our commencement gowns by then. We hugged goodbye, and suddenly I cried harder than I did all day. In that moment of saying goodbye to him, I saw, in a compressed version, the person that he had become and the person that I had become, compared to ourselves as freshmen. I saw an overwhelmingly fast and intense change between then and now. In my mind, I saw Scott, the naive freshman with a high and tight fade, heavy California tan, wearing golf shorts, meekly hanging out in the common room, desperate to make friends. Wrapped in my arms was the half-mellowed-out, half-disillusioned senior with flowing hair and glasses, who had a fun and hard four years. This vision was an enormous, unfathomable, painful experience — not for anything wrong with me, Scott, or our relationship, but for the fundamental limitations on how we humans can experience our lives.

And so I dream about Amherst. Not about the joy or pain of college life, but about the struggle to communicate this problem to current and incoming students, so that they won’t end up like me, blindsided by the passage of time and the termination of experience.

Maybe listening to an old timer like me wail on about Amherst and how you will and won’t be able to experience it will help you in some way, by showing you something even if I can’t tell you. I wish someone at least tried to do that for me when I was a student.

So, to the Mammoths, to make much of time, realize that you will never be able to “make the most of your time” by “savoring” it before it is over. You can make much, but never “the most,” for the end of the experience will inevitably take you by surprise. Accordingly, there is no time to be spent worrying about making the most of life at the College; there is only the time to be spent making much of your time at the College, as much as you can. That is, there is only time to be spent actually living.

Hopefully, that realization should be liberating: as you complete convocation — as you are called together into life at Amherst — you should live joyously, manage yourself responsibly, study diligently, build heroically, and strive dangerously, that is, you should make much of your time. By the time your four years are already up, you will be stunned, sitting at commencement — the end of your undergraduate years but the beginning of something new and hopefully even better — looking back at your life at Amherst College, and forward, wondering how you can make much of the rest of your life.