Whispers of greatness<\/b><\/p>\n
Recently, ever increasingly, in questions asked, open LinkedIn tabs, and an intangible, <\/span>broad<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 malaise\u2014taut strings that come down from the sky, tangled, untraceable, thin white thread that puppeteers us to work ever harder, to go to HL for the tenth time this week, that snakes its way through our skin, slithering along our bones, and coiling itself around our hearts, carefully choking them\u2014I have observed the bits of agency that the common questions of my circumstance (what are you doing this summer?) have robbed us of. I feel those strings tugging on me. The freedom of exploration and exploration of freedom that I felt in the hearts of all of us last year (it was in the air) has, over the blink of an eye of the last summer, been corroded, distorted; and now, the pull of the strings subtly steers us towards scripted lives in this world (turn it upside down).<\/span><\/p>\n I reflect on my late years in high school. Those common questions of circumstance that bring me such unease now did the very same then, that feeling that your heart and the world not only conflict on occasion and at times, but are fundamentally opposed\u2014that not only would I, as I was born from dust, return to it, but also that in that ephemeral blink of being, that instead of doing what I felt was right, being who I felt I was, I would rather agonize over what I did not, in who I was not. In between the cracks of my life then\u2014headphone-laden bus rides, slow walks between classes, and taut sleepless nights\u2014a certain darkness, a void, would drape itself over my reality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And this inky dread has arisen in my life once more, after a year\u2019s absence, that period of at stellar best a feeling of fully free fulfilment, and at very worst bittersweet goodbyes to all that my life was prior. Now that ever-occuring, looming, seeping void that I thought had left along with my school-age life stands before me; it stands with an unassuming form, but with a presence grander than a skyscraper. It greets me dryly, \u201cHello.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In between those cracks of my life then, those nights when my mind, instead of caring for itself, taking its necessary rest, would open its eyes, and, within that vast immaterial universe made of not things and beings but flows and notions of every color unimaginable, stare at that monochrome galaxy of void, that odd spiral disk that seemed like it didn\u2019t belong, that sat apart from all else, but also existed with a certain authority, a certain purpose, a drive to be inversion incarnate, the opposite of all that is\u2014great cloud black dust. And that cloud, that void, would stare back, with a glare that pierced with an invisible laser through and past my mind\u2019s eye, that shot into it a fear so great that it could no longer rest, not for hours.<\/span><\/p>\n When those nights would come, when the minutes and hours drifted by, when the world outside of my room faded away, and the significance of this night\u2019s sleep, and the next day\u2019s school, dissolved into dust, I would\u2014with a certain last-resortness, mind melting exhaustion, and boredom\u2014leave my covers, open my laptop, put on a Bartok quartet, sit cross-legged\u2014on my bed, against my wall\u2014and write whatever came to mind. In the deep darkness of my room, as my green walls morphed to grey, as my room became an isolated, onyx prism, a prison for me, thoughts, and feelings, the only light that was was the screeching white glow of my laptop unto my face.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And in those computer-white pages I would find a certain comfort. I was holding a mote of light, small, perhaps the size of a racquetball. It was warm, round and soft, composed of an odd geometry\u2014shapes that folded into themselves and each other, that rotated in planes beyond, with brilliance purer than any other, radiance otherworldly,<\/span><\/p>\n Something that truly mattered,<\/span><\/p>\n With which I felt I could write the whole world.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n It was also during those times\u2014of dreadconsciousness and life uncertainty\u2014that I became aware of what I call the whisper: a quiet voice that in answer to all the common questions of my circumstance back then (what schools are you applying to?), a voice that spat back in lieu of the mask of an answer my physical mouth would regurgitate\u2014a plain, foggy phrase:<\/span><\/p>\n To be great.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t a burning desire that I chased with all my being with all of a pronounced certainty. No, not that. It was just a whisper, a word. I could barely make any sense of it\u2014I had no concept of what this word <\/span>great <\/span><\/i>would mean in this context: it was simply a textual ideal that a quiet hunger within me, when I held that bit of light in the depths of my darkest moments, told me I ought to be.<\/span><\/p>\n It confused me: this fuzzy voice that sat in the corners of my head and that, even if I was unaware of it, was always watching me walk step by step through my life, examining my every thought, word, and action. And in moments when my mind drifted from the world around me and became briefly clear like crystal, I was able to listen to this voice, who spoke not through words, but rather through subtle longings, kernels of regret, and slivers of motivation.<\/span><\/p>\n I pointed the finger back at myself and came up with psychological faults for this voice\u2019s residence in my head\u2014greatness was just a cheap gambit for fame, my hopes of being a <\/span>great<\/span><\/i> mathematician, musician, or writer were desires for my name to be in history books, in a wikipedia page translated into forty languages, or on the foot of a statue or the overhang of a building, for many people of many times to laud over my achievements, to feel the love of the world when I couldn\u2019t feel my own.<\/span><\/p>\n Or greatness was a cheap gambit for purpose, to extend the actions of my life beyond my short time on this earth, to, through my contributions to fields, movements, and lives, give my life some greater importance, to insert myself in some literary critic\u2019s defined evolution of artistic and cultural thought, that could be <\/span>a<\/span><\/i> meaning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But it would be a paltry one. If to be great is to occupy the minds of those in the future who study the past, then is that greatness, your great life, your own? You die. You are destroyed, and must be rebuilt. You do not construct greatness.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You are constructed from it.<\/span><\/p>\n Truth in self goes with the self.<\/span><\/p>\n And any greatness I achieved would not be my own.<\/span><\/p>\n It is not <\/span>for<\/span><\/i> me.<\/span><\/p>\n The whisperer\u2019s words of greatness were no different from the words on how to live my life that the world spat at me every day\u2014words of fortune, words of love, of exploration, of contentment, of nil.<\/span><\/p>\n Choosing which words I listened to,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Calculating which flavor of dust I liked best.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n But that <\/span>light<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I recall that light.<\/span><\/p>\n That mote I would hold in those moments when this world would crumble away, and what was was solely myself and the page\u2014that light that I can catch glimpses of now\u2014the color of the radiance, a white so brilliant it is iridescent\u2014it is infinite inside: the small mote leads to a world of luminosity, a world so great, it feels like warmth, still air, beautiful clarity, gazing tear-eyed at eternity, and a quiet smile. Even if the world were to sink into nothing, I would have this light,<\/span><\/p>\n For when I hold it, I know what it is I truly want.<\/span><\/p>\n I want to write a masterpiece,<\/span><\/p>\n To touch the souls of others as so much art in my life has touched mine.<\/span><\/p>\n I know this light is truer than all else,<\/span><\/p>\n For it has one thing behind it that nothing else has,<\/span><\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n Goodness is a sunny breeze<\/b><\/p>\n Over my first year in college I had found myself spouting, in answer to the common questions of my circumstance, phrases like \u201cI\u2019m going to stand in a wheat field in Nebraska\u201d, \u201cI\u2019m going to herd sheep in Iceland\u201d, or \u201cI\u2019m going to roam the steppes of Mongolia\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There was a certain lightness, an air in my step that I feel defined my psyche during that time: it was an open flat plain of possibility, not unlike the places I would spout about, that underpinned my and probably my peers\u2019 lives then. I interpret these answers now as verbal manifestations of that openness, that freedom I felt\u2014that feeling that the first chapter of my life was behind me and that forever was in front of me, truer responses than the answer that my mind via my mouth would often return: \u201cprobably math grad school or teaching.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ever since those sleepless nights in my senior Spring when the green walls of my room would silently scream at me as my head caved in until I was a reduced to a husk that could only listen to Debussy\u2019s string quartet and write nigh-schizophrenic ramblings on something called \u201cgreatness\u201d, ever since I arrived at Bowdoin and started smiling and hugging and walking slowly, I thought that to be good was enough\u2014to lead a good life, to be a good man. A new and growing part of me said that I ought to keep my head, to buy a tract of land and tend it, to cultivate a space of beauty and serenity, a life of contentment and peace\u2014it told the whisperer to quit with that nonsense of \u201cgreatness\u201d, and that to, over one\u2019s life, do right by oneself, others, and the world, is enough; we ought not to ask more of ourselves and our lives.<\/span><\/p>\n It was this part that wanted to go stand in a wheat field in Nebraska.<\/span><\/p>\n It was this part who filled my steps with air, gave my life that certain lightness: I was becoming one with the breeze, a lone man standing in an open field, feeling the wind of a thousand acres swish and sweep past and through me. I knew what I wanted to be, that I was almost there, and that I had all the time in the world to become it.<\/span><\/p>\n I had been performing my life\u2019s Spring cleaning, neatly cordoning off its childhood chapter and tearfully letting go of the things I could no longer use, bittersweetly sealing away all those hockey games, midnight drives, basement hangouts, schooldays, and music lessons to live in the land of memory forever, in that orange-tinted portrait of a first year that sat in a cardboard box in the back of my Rav4, while I drove westward with that fresh, open feeling in my bones, cruising to that good life I so wanted.<\/span><\/p>\n I had left my life of agonizing in the dark, dreaming of greatness\u2014and began to smile in the light, living with goodness. I felt holy and pure, not unlike a monk or an old man. I slept easy and long. I was present. I smiled and laughed and glowed so much, with so many others, also smiling and laughing and glowing. I developed a certain confidence, a confident certainty, one that was completely unfamiliar to\u2014but also felt right at home in my heart. At this stage in my life when everything was new, unformed, and yet to be, I surprisingly felt a sense of surety that I had never felt prior,<\/span><\/p>\n And one that I haven\u2019t felt since,<\/span><\/p>\n For in that orange-tinted portrait, I had also sealed away, with the utmost care and security, that empty dread that would creep in the borders of my vision as I ate takeout alone, as I stared at the ceiling between rounds of a video game, and as I contemplated it all while gazing at the backs of my eyelids,<\/span><\/p>\n For the portrait began to taint with blots of ink, stains that grew, that spread beyond the frame and to the box and the seat; it slithered, growing, across the doors, the windows; I-80 all around me: road, cars, trees, green signs\u2014became instead an infinite void. All I could see was the pitch black manifold formed into the shape of my car. It might have still been driving but it didn\u2019t matter because the outside world didn\u2019t exist anymore. I was back in one of those sleepless nights in high school. Back in my ethereal bedroom\u2014me and my onyx prison.<\/span><\/p>\n And my psyche of elegance, sun, breeze, and fields flaked away piece by piece, like reversing a paper mache, like the skin was falling off, bit by bit, slowly revealing what was underneath, exposing more and more until I looked in the mirror and I saw that I was that same high schooler who couldn\u2019t sleep, who would now and then drift away from this world and its delicious food, azure sky, and wonderful people and instead contemplate that void that awaited him at the end of it all, drowning his ears in headphones and speakers, yet at the same time also listening to that old, soft voice deep in his heart that muttered, stated, chanted that same word infrequently but incessantly.<\/span><\/p>\n The whisper of greatness came back,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And thus, then on, with each passing week (each passing second), he relayed his growing unwillingness to wait\u2014through vague dissatisfaction and rumblings of urges that lived deep down. He told me I ought to be like Martin Luther (King Jr.), Joan of Arc\u2014that I ought to be like Aragorn.<\/span><\/p>\n And thus, once more, I wanted it all.<\/span><\/p>\n That nagging thing within me ushered me to create. I felt I had a story to tell, a fusion of my consciousness with the current world and time it found itself in. I began dreaming of that light once more. I loved it. The climax of \u201cIslands\u201d that often evokes from me beautiful tears propelled lines and lines of words across the page. I felt that light. My wildest dreams: of capturing the experience of finding a way in <\/span>this world <\/span><\/i>as we all live in it, distilling it into words so poignant, so artful, vehicles of meaning that form into convoys and carry with them, through mechanisms so ingenious they elude all explanation, raw feeling, raw experience, things so indescribable that they seem to come from outside and beyond this world. I wanted to tap into that light. I wanted to show it to all. I wanted to write it into existence.<\/span><\/p>\n When I thought of <\/span>greatness<\/span><\/i>, I thought of those figures who changed my life\u2014Tsukumizu, Natsume, and Yuasa, Bartok, Coltrane, and Stewart, and McCann, Kerouac, and Woolf\u2014and I thought that <\/span>that <\/span><\/i>was what it meant to be great, that it was to, via art, convey ideas from the inexpressable divine, and that if I sought to be so and do such, then I had to fully accept my gift of my whispering friend, who recognized the gaps in our world\u2014where goodness and light fall through into worldly suffering and nocturnal infinity\u2014and distill his solutions into pages, spreading it among followers, students, and friends, igniting a fire that burns all the possessive ills and suffocating incentive of our contemporarytechnologicalcapitalistic world, leaving behind golden\/green\/turquoise beauty: sun whose rays shine on all, rocks that rise from stormy seas, cliffs that stare into infinity, fields of unthinkable breadth and majesty.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The whisper had been trying to tell me for so long what I needed to do.<\/span><\/p>\n He would show me the way,<\/span><\/p>\n And all I needed to do was to put my faith in him, that he would guide me to the light,<\/span><\/p>\n So long as I dedicated <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> to turn that faith into fact.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n Epilogue<\/b><\/p>\n I don\u2019t hear that voice anymore, only the wind.<\/span><\/p>\n The light\u2019s so far away now.<\/span><\/p>\n I can\u2019t even see it behind the clouds.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m here on this campus, standing, staring, off at the beautiful Maine sky, so vast, filled with fat long clouds, greyness stretching forever, a great big sheet that domes in these old brick buildings, these green-needled trees, and cold crisp air. The wind speeds through the land. It is massive. Bigger than anyone could ever be. Bigger than a city.<\/span><\/p>\n I meld with the breeze: I become like another one of those green-needled trees, should one squint, subtly swaying.<\/span><\/p>\n I no longer sleep like a baby. The insomnia that haunted my teenage years visits my new room every now and then. I\u2019m still staring off, watching the wind, with all its might, slide the sky along only slowly, inch by inch, as it at the same time threatens to topple me, throw me away to some other place.<\/span><\/p>\n So what could the light have been, then?<\/span><\/p>\n The force of the wind and the weight of the sky are eroding me.<\/span><\/p>\n It was like one of those long nights in high school, when nothing was real except the laptop, its music, and my writing.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m overcome with a compulsive urge to be entirely honest,<\/span><\/p>\n Honest with my whole existence.<\/span><\/p>\n I wear my malaise on my face and in my stride. I walk slowly, so, so, slowly\u2014slowly not with satisfaction, contentment, and ease, no\u2014slowly with weight, dread, and fatigue. The only things I can hear are the wind and my headphones. I can\u2019t stand to listen to anything else. Music is what\u2019s barely keeping me going. The world is turning so fast (I have so much homework due). The sky is so gray.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m in my room now. My roommate\u2019s there. I don\u2019t take off the headphones.<\/span><\/p>\n I lay on my bed. I pick up a book for the first time in months.<\/span><\/p>\n The pages speak a preacher\u2019s words: of sinners, of the monument of the damnation of hell, its pitch-darkness, its eternity, and its being an apt punishment for those who turn towards lesser, base, animal instincts and turn away from their higher, divine, God-given rea\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n But I\u2019m taken out of the passage by the music. The lyric of song removes me from the lyric of sermon. I thrust myself once more unto the pages.<\/span><\/p>\n Countless words slip by. None enter my brain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I insert the bookmark, then close the book.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I set it down,<\/span><\/p>\n And close my eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n The music takes me away\u2014no, it places me <\/span>here<\/span><\/i>\u2014not where I am physically, not my bed, my room, but in the dim backstage behind the eyelid-curtain, what I am feeling, <\/span>my consciousness feeling itself<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n I feel the music as I felt it the first time I listened to it, as I will in the future. Memories and moments live in the sound. Or maybe my memories sound like this music, and stages of my life sound like what I was listening to during them. Track by track, I invisibly drift along in pitch darkness, but I\u2019m not moving; I just see colors, faint little radial pulses of blue and green, the red of the blood in my eyelids. Colors can be a sort of movement.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2014<\/span><\/p>\n The album ends.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n My eyes are still closed.<\/span><\/p>\n Silence.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n I open my eyes to see what\u2019s there.<\/span><\/p>\n I take off my headphones, and I begin to hear once more the quiet music of this building: electronic vibrations, wind whistling, and bells tolling from far away.<\/span><\/p>\n I sit up on my bed. I look around.<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s my room, all the same, nothing strange.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n The only thing I could think of doing next,<\/span><\/p>\n Was writing about it all.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whispers of greatness Recently, ever increasingly, in questions asked, open LinkedIn tabs, and an intangible, broad\u00a0 malaise\u2014taut strings that come down from the sky, tangled, untraceable, thin white thread that puppeteers us to work ever harder, to go to HL for the tenth time this week, that snakes its way through our skin, slithering along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":796,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9,19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5711","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture","7":"category-philosophy","8":"category-poetry","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/796"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}