We do not work eight hours a day. Few undergraduates spend more than 20 hours each week preparing their lessons, and that leaves them much time to think about other things. Since they are not confronted with financial or professional pressures, they can spend time wondering about themselves. They exist in a community of intellectual superiors; upperclassmen, professors, men who have written good books; and they begin to wonder whether there is anything they can possibly achieve. Their questions grow increasingly insistent as they progress towards graduation and the choice of a career. Some people are temporarily paralyzed by the discordance they sense between themselves and the community around them. If they cannot amass all the available information, are they capable of learning anything?

A Retreat

Harvard, which exposes its undergraduates to ceaseless complexities, also provides them with unlimited freedom of retreat. Within this large community, anyone can associate himself with a group of like-minded friends, and comfortably ignore experiences which might radically challenge him. If the CRIMSON editor, a clubbie, or a Tocsin member does not grow very much in wisdom by remaining inside his chosen organization, he at least avoids the risk of altogether losing himself.

There is no senior here who has not submerged some of the questions that disturbed him in freshman and sophomore year. Some things, whether they are academic or personal, one shall never learn; nor, a senior realizes, should one attempt to absorb all of life in a few years. But some of us have been frightened into submission. As a freshman one is shocked when he encounters classmates who can discuss Rousseau's Social Contract, or Ulysses, or Freudian theory, with absolute fluency. One constructs long summer reading lists, or projects complex plans of study, which are never completed. By the middle of sophomore year one has grown desperate over the amount of reading one must still do in order to become a fit candidate for a Harvard education. One buys book after-book, and after hastily trying to master them fears that he has absorbed nothing. He difficult to realize that one must grow in common sense before one can grow in knowledge.

Submit to Ignorance

By junior year we often submit to our ignorance, ruling out of our possible education books we cannot understand and accepting as truths the cliches of the classroom or the text-books. We are likely to avoid difficult intellectual questions, for to think about them honestly might be to change our conception of ourselves, our potentialities, our futures. We are nearly self-assured but beneath pose often lies the feat of confronting new information.

Our style of arguing, so frightening to freshmen and sophomores, proceeds by assertion and by reference to obscure, half-absorbed ideas. We cease to listen carefully to other people, fearing that our painfully developed sense of our own correctness might gradually begin to erode.

With each year we increase our investment in a certain set of assumptions, which we call our truths. For a time, late at night, we continue to question ourselves, and Wonder if we have grown old too soon. But even this process involves a certain risk, and some of our inner voice are quickly silenced.

Is this maturity? A man must undoubtedly deny himself certain possibilities, of experience and knowledge, but where does he draw the line? A senior chooses a career that would have revolted him as a freshman: has he gained judgment or lost self-respect, No one can think himself a giant after four years of Harvard College, but are the choices to which our seasoned opinions lead --of friends, of politics, of careers-- the measure of increased wisdom or of defeat?

Yet it is not all so bleak. Most people gain some common sense and information in the process of surviving Harvard College, With each flaw he finds in himself, and with the strength he derives from unexpected sources, the undergraduate gains a kind of tolerance. He finds books and ideas, once opaque, that have managed to fortify him, and these are treasured. Certain experiences and people yield him greater pleasure as he comprehends more of what lies behind them.

Soon we shall graduate. Commencement, as the ceremony is called, means beginning, and one enters the world nearly naked, knowing far less than one ought. But graduation seems more like death than birth, for it is a time of summing up, of departing into the unknown. It is the death of close friendships which may be be recalled but shall never be restored; it is the limiting of possibilities, the narrowing of hope. Of all the futures that once appeared open, we must now choose one.

During four years at Harvard College one fights many fights, and there is no way of determining victory. Yet in the last days before graduation one has the terrible sense of something irretrievably lost. Is it one's youth, or one's self