I have always paid too much attention to the physical features of a page of text. I often rework sentences and substitute adjectives to make sure the final word of each paragraph ends just before another letter would require a return. I can’t stand the empty space otherwise. But now that I will no longer write twelve-point Times New Roman double-spaced papers with one inch margins and tidy footnotes (at least not for some time), I will no longer have the chance to notice these things. I stand like a miniscule cartoon figure, diploma in hand, with a gaze transfixed on the abyss that is the Real World. Now, it is up to me to decide what to write about and how often and in what tone. Now, in this regard and countless others, the choice is mine.
Old notebooks and computer files from over the years provide a glimpse into what this progression might look like. Encountering things I have written often feels like staring into a kaleidoscope, a blur of past echoes of myself, or listening to a gray-haired poet recount tales of lovers they once knew. Memories, too, help trace the development of how I have written and thought about writing at various points in my life. On a fall afternoon in the second or third grade, classmates and I passed around our Thanksgiving art projects on the bus ride home from school. As a neighbor in the year above me glanced at my finger-painted turkey, he asked if I had ever heard of a comma. Flush with embarrassment in the brisk November air, I looked at the list of gratitudes I had written—my mom and my dad and my brothers and my cousins—and learned, though I doubt for the first time, the magic of this punctuation mark.
Reminiscing on later years, I gaze through some foggy mirror at a headstrong freshman sitting in the back of an Introduction to Biblical Literature class. I can feel the damp October morning and even seem to recall watching the leaves change color. A fifty-minute lecture is not enough time for the leaves on any tree, even the gargantuan White Ash on Copley Lawn, to change color. My writing from that time provides a glimpse into initial brushes with faith and dogma, reflections and contradictions that would come to define these undergraduate years. Though the opinions on religion and near-constant use of the em-dash in these papers are nearly unrecognizable to me now, I do not look back with impatience or resentment at this younger me. In fact, his devotion to these questions is the only reason I have continued to think about them with such rigor and inquiry.
I have even learned to write in a few foreign languages, often conjuring up false cognates out of thin air and using English turns of phrase that do not work in French or Spanish or Portuguese. In language and in life, I have learned that the perspectives and ways of examining the world most familiar to me are not universal frameworks.
At another point in time, there was also the spring-semester junior who, on the rare occasion that he ventured to comparative politics lectures, knew exactly what information he needed to extract in order to regurgitate talking points on essays and exams. He once sat at the kitchen table, opened his computer, and wrote an entire term paper on electoral politics in The Gambia in one sitting. It was not his best work, but its tone that closely mirrored his professor’s and careful citations of assigned texts seemed to do the trick. I hope this resourceful and pragmatic, if listless writing will not creep its way into future endeavors. I hope that I will aspire toward the highest forms of the written word: truth, inquiry, reflection.
That writer does still come out now and then, especially when faced with an impending deadline or an uninteresting prompt. But as I’ve gotten older, the ability to hone in on what really interests me has allowed me to identify the first semblances of a budding writing style. Literary, meditative, journalistic. Even so, I know that some day I will look back at this very entry as antique, even quaint. After all, in the grand scheme of things, there are not too many years between the third grader on the bus and the college senior the morning after graduation. But I hope I will never look back with judgment, only appreciation for the fact that I felt things deeply and decided to write about them at a time when the world felt limitless. Even if that does not turn out to be the case, I quite like the look of rose-colored lenses.