Author: J. Mohorcich
Let’s start with an allegory.
A student — call him Sebastian — is accepted by Occidental College. He comes to school here. He learns about art and politics and biochemistry. He finds he’s relatively good, as these things go, at academics.
Sebastian has always suspected, as many sensitive young people sometimes do, that he was actually three or four or five people, all bound up in the same skin. Sometimes he worried that bits of these people might eclipse the edges of his skin, would peek out. He felt very full. He felt multiply-souled.
Sometimes it confused or worried him, but mostly this fullness was a happy thing.
So Sebastian was just moving right along here at Occidental, sometimes winning some very nice accolades and sometimes just getting by and most of the time was somewhere in the middle. He was doing college — well.
Probably this experience at least rhymes with your own. Probably this is an experience with which you can relate.
But as he went through Occidental College and won A’s and B’s and devoured formal logic and zoology and Greek literature, he discovered it was harder to find these other souls. They seemed to him somehow smaller and more distant. Sapped.
Sebastian was an optimistic human being. Life had given him comparatively little to complain about. So he thought this was probably just an ebb, this soul-recession. A cyclical thing. He did miss feeling so full, though.
One soul, of course, the show-off that glowed when he translated Virgil and visualized Riemann manifolds, became larger and more vivid with each day. Eventually Sebastian could scarcely see beyond it.
Sebastian drew closer and closer to graduation. He’s a good student, like I said.
On a bright, clean morning the final semester of his senior year, Sebastian wakes up and yawns. And when he does, he feels a swollen emptiness in the air like he’s swallowing something huge and very, very full of nothing.
He goes to the Marketplace with his roommate and buys a doughnut. The donut is filled with nothingness, just packed with it. He eats it anyway. It expands in his stomach.
He goes to class and listens to words. He goes to the library and reads words. He sits in front of a laptop and writes words. He works on his senior thesis. Sometimes he thinks of his other souls. There are few left. They huddle in the corners of his body, sickly and pallid. Most are gone completely.
He wonders where they have gone. He wonders if there isn’t something in the soil here, at this place called Occidental, which he admires and loves and defends and calls Hogwarts and thinks magical, that precludes the coexistence and growth of intricate and multiply-souled human beings.
He wonders if there isn’t something closing or delimiting or narrowing or contractile or winnowing or distending about the experience of college itself:
Because, really, if college is about taking hormonal meat machines and making them well-ordered thinking machines, then wouldn’t the College Process mostly be one of defining, over and over again, a breathing and multifarious and intricate being in terms of its ability to think? And if you use only one function of a multifunctional machine, isn’t there some rust involved? Some decay? Some deterioration? We are perishable machines.
So Sebastian thinks about this. And then he goes back to his senior thesis.
And two months from now, he will sweat on a plastic chair in the hot light of the Greek Bowl. There will be a rectangle on his head. He is going into the world. Monosouled. Adult.
And what I myself worry about and would like to suggest to you is not that Sebastian’s experience is an eerily-apropos and unnerving retelling for our own. I think maybe that would be sort of easy, sort of cheaply linear.
Instead:
What if Sebastian’s story in fact describes an experience you or I could not attribute to ourselves but only to one of our own departed potential selves, one to which we’ve long since said goodbye?
J. Mohorcich is a senior politics major. He can be reached at jmohorcich@oxy.edu.
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