College saved my life.

In high school, I was a depressive. I spent over a year of my life crying every day. I hallucinated regularly. I sat in class, in droning public school classes in which I knew all the answers, in which I could walk in late and give a historical analysis on the spot, leading to my teacher praising me, then hand back the dittos to my teacher, telling him, the model of politeness and appreciation for his noble profession, “I’m just not a person who does dittos.” This wasn’t the way to learn. I thought college was classist, was for the good kids who sat in French and knew the answers because they’d summered in France as kids, those kids who thought (quite correctly, actually, though not in the way they thought) that I was crazy but recognized my intelligence. I was the mad scientist who wrote skits in French about jumping off the Eiffel Tower, who wrote insanely liberal editorials for the school paper and advocated insanely liberal positions in class discussions, who sat in class with a slew of girls around me whom I couldn’t imagine, for all their notes and cards and batted eyelashes and smiles, that they actually liked me, who cried silently through the entirety of other classes, then cried on the bus ride home, writing full-length feature movie scripts about serial killers who hung people by their nipples and penises. The good kids weren’t surprised when word got out that I got the highest ACT test score in school; my I.Q. was never in doubt. It wasn’t my genius but my sanity that was the issue. You see, I believed, like all idealists shot into depression by the radical separation between right and this world, between sense and this world, in love and social justice. College, with its discriminatory tuition, with its bought diplomas as badges of elitism, was not for me.

And then my parents gave their depressed son, their golden child who spent his days alone downstairs in a room painted black, their brilliant son who gave angry political rants at the table, their sad son who made loose threats and then cried when someone took them seriously because he would never want to hurt the brother, the mother, the father he had threatened, an ultimatum. Go to college or get a job. And, faced with the prospects of minimum wage Hell, the prospects of being surrounded by idiots and forced to do trivial tasks; faced with a mother who went through every school in the books, who quantified them in charts; faced with parents who took me to multiple schools and made calls on my behalf, who were willing to pay whatever they had to and to send me to the school of my choice no matter their disapproval of it; faced with parents just who wanted me in college somewhere and who just didn’t want me to kill myself, I went to a small liberal arts college.

And I had a horrible experience. But I discovered that I liked classes. That I liked the community, the people involved in various projects -- people more intelligent than the general population, people more driven than the general population. And so I transferred to another liberal arts college and I had the time of my life.

Gods, do I miss those days at Lawrence. I miss my professors, a number of whom I knew socially, a number of whom I loved, with whom I discussed history and religion and politics in their offices, professors with whom I drank and laughed. And I miss my friends, other crazy but smart people, people with whom I could go to the library when a conversation turned to Dante and we just wanted to see those Dore illustrations again, people with whom I could get drunk and fall in love and talk. I miss the cheap Chinese restaurant in all its gaudiness wherein I bought a girl dinner before the foregone conclusion of our sex, the comics store and the gyro shop at which I stopped with two friends on the way back with comics, the Thai restaurant at which I shared wine and blissful food with one friend or another, the Greek restaurant at which a professor bought dinner for and shared thoughts with myself and other interesting students, a professor’s office at which I drank Irish whiskey after midnight and talked about life. I miss the flamboyant professors, the fire in the dormitory that a friend and I rushed into in an attempt to save lives while its residents slept, the cigarettes and alcohol and drugs mixed so effortlessly with intellectual conversation, books, popular culture, and ancient Greek. It was sad, a time of tears, of desperate hopes, but it was a time of life, a time when I could start my day by crossing the street, buying a coffee, and stepping into the library to read newspapers and journals from around the world as I sipped it in a fine chair by a bed of windows, then go to class and meet my friends, dash off for comics or a movie, take in a candlelit dinner with a friend, and end the night discussing the fine points of Homer with the same people I’d seen passed out drunk the night before.

When I wanted to read Shakespeare, I went downstairs to the computer lab and just printed four copies of a play, for free on a school laser printer, then read the play with friends, each of us performing parts and interrupting to discuss it before we opened a bottle of Greek wine. I remember walking into Lake Michigan for my oceanography class, watching a friend spontaneously walk over to a piano in the dorm lobby and play beautifully, the carpet on the floor of my lover’s suite as we talked after some stress and she surprised me with a blowjob. Hedonism and scholarship blended like wine and cheese, and the days passed all too quickly.

This is not to say that I was cured of depression. I don’t think I ever will be. But I found a place in which I could live with myself, in which the world was not unlivable, too flawed and unjust for words.

And this is not to say that I did all my work in my classes. Indeed, I didn’t even do the majority of it. My friends who shared my classes would stay up late with me, reading Herodotus desperately, annotating and smoking, talking to figure it out like people fleeing a burning building. But I spent far more time than reading consistently for class would have taken at the library instead, checking out videos of movies I knew were classics but had never seen, browsing the stacks for hours on end, discovering these gems among them, reading wildly and thoroughly on my own, relearning ancient Greek over and over on my own, writing play after play, story after story, poem after poem, novel after novel, comic book after comic book. And then, in the true ancient Greek model, this thorough, difficult, time-consuming but much-loved intellectual questing, the resources all there a block at most away, would give way to laughter, to Wednesday drunkenness with people I knew well, to fantastic parties the likes of which one cannot understand if one has not truly had a hostess, if one has not truly felt the bliss of Bacchus, the joy of talking shirtless with one’s tenth glass of wine in hand at a small but professional bar assembled by industrious hedonists in their own dorm room with a beautiful shirtless woman who it doesn’t matter if you have compared to the fine point on how some recent movie reflects the particular oddities of character in classical drama.

Admittedly, no everyone got the same experience. Most people, even there, walked out their classroom doors and shut off their minds, content to drink bad beer at thoughtless parties without geniuses, dilettantes, without the paradoxes and surprises of complex philosophy espoused by well-known ladies, without the thrill at discussing the Medieval iconography on the wall beside a cubist print and a cult movie poster. Most people never learned that their professors were people with their own obsessions, tendencies, habits, all based on real-life experiences that occur no matter their intelligence and training. Most people, I dare say, still wanted a piece of paper with a university seal as if that meant anything compared to the kid of knowledge that a life of lively intellectual indulgence and exploration provides. But I did have that experience, and others did as well.

Yes, college is classist. Yes, the bureaucracy stinks at times. No one enjoys the mandatory course taught blandly by a man of questionable intelligence. But the requirements are there for a reason: to force you to broaden your horizons, to expand your experience, to make you cross the street and talk to those scientists or the humanitarians, the Asians or the ancients, the people of different interests but nonetheless alive. If the bills are rough, they’re nothing compared to the real costs of maintaining these pocket pseudo-communistic communities, with all their free services, that we call college. But this is, for the intelligent person who sees the petty politics keeping people dying, who sees the farce most people pretend as love, who sees the elephant in the corner or the king’s nudity and knows no one wants to hear it - college is the best answer in a hostile world. We do not subsidize it as does France, but we make it possible, we keep it relatively free from police of law or thought, and we respect success carved from service there.

I’m not the biggest fan of George W. Bush, but, driving to Carbondale where I am currently studying, I caught a speech he gave at a school about appreciating one’s teachers. He said that they cared and that -- in words one can believe coming from someone we know to have been a slacker -- you'll wish you paid attention, and appreciated the opportunity, later in life. I was moved to tears. I remembered my grade school teachers who were friends with my parents, who I talked to and who cared about me. I remember those professors who gave the benefits of years and years and years of study and hard thinking to we apprentices or dabblers, who read writing, that most intimate of expressions, and offered thoughtful analysis that pleased or imposed guilt, that angered or frustrated, but, in the best of cases, was honest -- or at least what they thought I needed to hear, or was said in the way they thought I could hear, at the time. I recalled those conversations that convinced me I wasn’t alone. Venerate your professors. Venerate those who know more than you but devote themselves, even for a couple hours a week for a dozen or so weeks, to giving you some of that knowledge, some of that skill at playing with the knowledge you have or will get, some of that joy at reading, at learning, at thinking. There is nothing I know more valuable.

You may already know of all this. You may not have known its extent. But don’t complain that there’s a cost, financial or personal, to the opportunity. Don’t go to college if you want a degree, if you want to use it as a vehicle to make more money or get a job, as if it was a guarantee or a key to some secret society. You may need a degree to answer phones, dig ditches, or manage a gas station -- but you don’t need an education, and it’s that most substantial but most intangible of assets that college should be all about. No, a degree is just a certificate of participation that says you made it through a particular program at a particular time. It may boost your ego, or others’ respect of you, on a wall, but it doesn’t mean anything, increasingly true in a nation and a world in which consumer mentalities have allowed majors and course credit for the easiest and most dubious of experiences and regurgitations. No, college is descended from monasteries and divinity schools -- that's why a Ph.D. is a doctor of philosophy even if it’s in a language, a reflection of the Medieval curriculum. A college, hopefully, does not have the same kind of dogmatic agenda that came with monastic education, though some agenda is inevitable and the same dogmatism is frequently seen in sociological arguments throughout the curriculum. But studies in divinity meant understanding the self, the history of the self, the history of the world and its beliefs -- and it is that informed contemplation that remains the prime duty of college. It’s fine to train for a career: parents and apprenticeships, or just poorly-paid introductory positions, used to provide that. But that isn’t college.

No, academia exists wherever a person watches the news and doubts its truthfulness, considers its agenda. Wherever a person sits and reads a book, letting the rest of the world fade in importance compared to the beauty of the page and the contemplation of an author’s words, I am there. Whenever a person watches a movie, surfs the internet, or stands before a work of art and loses himself in the same beautiful way, letting his mind flow across the ideas, blissfully and frighteningly, I am there. I am in the operahouse. I am in the theatre. I am in the conversation at the café, ranging from the new movies to the deeper meanings behind local politics. I am in the hearts and the minds of every child who dreams and wonders, in every human who sees art and culture, who sees thought and people, and yearns, and stretches his mind omnivorously along their curved trajectories, trying to parse their deep roots amidst the indiscernible dirt.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

Mini-sites have been created for The Continuity Pages: Swamp Thing and The Continuity Pages: The Sandman. Changes have been made to Frank Miller Chronology. As always, many small updates have occurred within The Continuity Pages.

Your assignment for this week, should you choose to accept it, is to thank a professor of yours or someone who has intellectually inspired you. If you've been out of school for a while, find a teacher and call him or her. Have a chat. Let at least one of these underappreciated people know that they made a difference -- it's often what they live for, though rarely expressed even when felt.