Photo Courtesy Kerry Howley Kerry Howley
Graduations are a fitting time for messy, late night confessions. It’s a ritualistic, atavistic purging, amplified by alcohol and female tears and the fortifying knowledge that you will never see most of your acquaintances ever again. As a Catholic university, Georgetown provides the perfect milieu for a group confession, and I would like to name the first on a long list of transgressions. As passionate debaters, skilled orators, astute conversationalists and opinionated columnists, it’s about time we admit it – collectively, we have no idea what we are talking about.
We are liberal arts students; we are empty receptacles with impressive processing capabilities. Have you ever seen those machines at rest stops that take pennies, flatten them, and stamp the state flag on them? We’re like that. Give us some information and watch us regurgitate its content with some fancy embellishments and extended metaphors. Unfortunately, at the end of the game, that penny is still just a flat penny and, worse, it’s not even worth the cent it once was. Or, perhaps we’re more like an empty tank on a nice car; once we have some substance in us, we will be gorgeously productive. Until then, we’re just expensive status symbols.
There are those who will claim that college students have “something to say,” but I think most of us have a growing consciousness that our conversations are empty, our rhetoric hollow. We have intelligence, but no credibility. It’s awfully hard to take a sophomore seriously when she spouts off about the horrors of war, but those same words actually mean something from the mouth of a veteran. Even if we are saying all of the right things, we lack the conviction that stems from substantive knowledge. Surety comes off as arrogance; principle comes off as righteousness.
None of this is to suggest that we should not indulge in loud, decadent, demonstrative celebration over the next few weeks. It’s fortunate that our minds have been given ample time to develop in a challenging intellectual environment, but what really merits celebration is that fact that soon we will begin to fill the void of our hollow words. It’s not that we are headed for some drastic immersion into “the real world” – I don’t even know what that is – but that, for many of us, interest will crystallize into expertise, whether through continued study or substantive experience. That $120,000 worth of critical thinking ability will be unleashed, focused and we will start to speak with voices that deserve an audience. Surely, that deserves a party.
My time here is still too near to assume the artifice of narrative coherence, but while I can’t see the whole, I can follow certain threads of meaning. My happiest nights have been immersed in cheap red wine and winding conversations, long-winded debates and impossible arguments. I remember cartoon-light bulb moments of realization, revelation – new thoughts and new angles. I hope, years from now, to revisit those conversations – philosophical, political and psychological – with the authority of learned experience (and perhaps a more expensive wine).
THE HOYA has generously given me a forum to voice some of the thoughts I’ve come upon over the past year. I’m off to determine what exactly I’ve been rambling on about, whether the future leads to an infinite regress of questions or a host of waiting answers.
Kerry Howley is a senior in the College and a former assistant news editor and author of the Viewpoint column INFINITE REGRESS.
