Author: Daria Zhao

Personal writing is distinct from other forms of essays we complete for school. With academic papers, we as students are expected to beat home a point, to prove something, to substantiate our thesis with evidence, argument, and reason. It is not so different from delivering a sermon atop a mount. Or perhaps taking a bulldozer to anything that obstructs you from your path to Why I'm Right.

Yet with personal writing, are we trying to prove something or we are trying to understand something?

Because if it’s understanding that we’re striving to achieve, a voice of countless certainty begins to take on a simplistic or even narrow air, whereas a voice of doubt or ambivalence can start to sound intelligent, humble, and empathetic. Doubt is strength, but it’s also distinct from not going anywhere. It’s a process of understanding our formulation, frame, or approach to a life problem, rather than attaining the absolute solution to said problem.

I hope our lives can be one of discovery — of peeling back the layers and forever discovering there is more. Under most conceptions, it’s both good and efficient to have goals. But when we set our minds out do something, the ensuing process is often less a process of discovery than one of execution. We feel compelled to track to that goal, the closest equivalent of a GPS for life. Any detours into new and unexpected territory could threaten to derail or even undermine our path to said goal, so better not go there. Better stay on track. Better not acknowledge that wayward truth lest we risk starting over. 

But it’s precisely in the wayward paths that we discover new and surprising things about ourselves. We learn something unexpected that fundamentally alters our frame of understanding for the world. We peel back the onion. Only to find there is more. We grow.

It’s a costly process, in the event we discover our original goal was never quite what we wanted in the first place. But wouldn’t you say it’s better to discover that sooner rather than later? Or perhaps we adhere to the original vision, the finish line, and keep the blinders on. We reach the finish line expediently and efficiently. Have we bettered our lives because we are expedient and efficient?

In this regard, the personal essay and the academic paper are two competing, non-complementary ways to live life. Rather than ask ourselves what we want to do after graduation (which most Dartmouth seniors will approach as a multiple-choice exam anyway: consulting, banking, or med school?), the more critical question may be, how do you wish to write the narrative of your life? As an academic thesis (“I am awesome! I am right! Let me prove it to you!”) or as a lifelong quest for understanding?

I’d like to think that our education has prepared us for the latter.

Update: An adapted version of this musing was published by the Rockefeller Center here.

Music brings a certain public respectability.

Somehow, music, as a form of art, ought to be nourishing. Instead, my music is like eating emotional junk food. It's not an elevating influence but a leveling one; it meets me right where I am and legitimizes my longings, but without encouraging anything more. It breeds...complacency.

What most people don't realize is that, sure, it's not trashy, explicit, sexist, or dehumanizing. But perhaps it's subtly worse: it's the kind of music with the kind of beat that goes directly to my chest because it inarticulately expresses my inarticulate desires. It lets me continue my slow descent somewhere concealed inside all the while pretending that this is okay. Worse, it sustains it.

It's a music that moves me powerfully and immediately, but instead of filling my soul, it hollows it. Its beats almost exclusively cater to the erotic, an adolescent sort of sexuality -- the first childish feelings of satisfaction and delight. The rhythm and melody are more important than words themselves because their message, well, the message is understood before anything is ever said. And because it appeals to adolescent desire, because music is art, suddenly my longings are legitimized.

On the invisible relationship between art and legitimacy

There's a strange intrigue to modesty, of knowing someone's psychology but not his or her physique. If you venture beyond the point of fondness and familiarity, I've found, in my experience, that it's often easier to see in the dark.

Modesty and intrigue, blindness and sight. 

On special relativity and the finite speed of light:

Because the speed of light is finite, we never see things as they are, but only as they were. In a sense, we are always looking at the past; information from the past comes swiftly to us in the form of light. Sometimes it’s interesting to stop and recollect our thoughts on points of physics we know well to appreciate how strangely interesting they reveal the world to be.

The light of stars is a peculiar phenomenon, an after-image. We see our sun as it was eight minutes ago, the light that takes millions of nanoseconds to reach our eyes. Even now, with powerful telescopes and tools of observation, scientists say there are certain fundamental truths about the universe that have coasted beyond our reach.

There are some questions which we may never answer.

Worse, there are some answers which we may never think to question.

Physics can be poetry too.

A healthy relationship cannot be conceived from a need for security because that will bound the relationship to stay small, quiet, and safe. Disagreement and some fighting should be welcomed. In a fulfilling relationship, we need to have vocabulary for negativity, be able to express the many layers or contradictions of adult emotion. Not through technicolor filters but through real, honest openness. We have to be comfortable around feelings like unhappiness, uncertainty, and regret. It's the basis for establishing understanding. And that’s what I think makes a great relationship. Empathy.

The most important quality I need in a partner? He has to be smart. I know that sounds like an underwhelming answer, but think, for a minute, what it means to be smart: it might include intelligence, it might mean being funny or clever. But “smart” for me is all of these things draped in an aura of awareness. This is a person who is smart, you think. This person is smart!

“Smart” is when you know you are in good hands. “Smart” is when you realize this person is showing you something you didn’t know or didn’t realize you knew. “Smart” is about making connections and conveying understanding that goes beyond mere experience. “Smart” takes time and introspection and a whole lot of solitude to develop. It means being humble enough to have faith in the process of life, internalizing that the process is where you learn rather than where you’re out to prove what you already know, or think you know. “Smart” is an authority that can’t be faked.

Bad dates are a gift. With a bad date, I can stop quickly and move on. It’s the “pretty good” that’s the worst. We shared some spark, some good conversations, he was considerate and expressed some thoughtfulness, we both liked the brunch menu - okay, but what now? We could do the whole thing again, a third time even. There’s nothing “wrong”, nothing I can explain, but there’s simply not enough “right”.

For me, it comes down to the mental connection that elevates a “pretty good” into a “yes please, let’s do this again!” And that connection can only be found in conversation. In fact, when a date goes so well, it feels at once inevitable and surprising. Anyway, so that’s what I mean by falling in love with someone’s mind.

On the chronology of falling in love for Professor Lively's SOCY 62

1. Fill in the blanks: I would rather be ___ than ____.
2. So far in life, what have you done that makes you most proud?
3. So far in life, what have you done that makes you least proud?
4. If you've ever had a [member of opposite sex] as a best friend, what made him or her so valuable to you?
5. What do you think is the relationship between love, intimacy, and sex?
6. Describe your perfect average day:
7. Is there something you thought I would ask but I didn't?

Tonight you are a small bird, wings tucked loosely beside you like the bags beneath your eyes. You're flying through a town that died before you were born, watching men and women retrace their footsteps through the streets, their heads bent low and weary like crows in the morning.

The sun's been gone for days now, but darkness is just beginning to taste the edges of the sky. Lights are streaming by above tightly shut windows and weather-faded signs, with roads that branch out and students who trudge on with hands in their pockets and wind behind their backs. And as you're soaring above the skyline, all you can think about are these crow-like humans, their wings too burdened to fly.

But this is New Hampshire and we are not explorers, just burnt-out kids with crease-laden eyes.

They slept on the floor when you drank.

Like worried puppies, too small to reach the bed stand, sat with their backs against the wall by the bathroom while you showered. He and his sister hid car keys and telephones.

Peering over ledges, he watched your listless eyes wonder to windows, thinking of his father, of home, of separation. Toes curled against the kitchen counter, he would beg his sister to hide, beg you to sleep...

She cleaned the sinks, the rugs, the ashtrays. He capped the bottles, placing them on the highest shelves. You woke up to Saturday morning news, a headache, and a new pack of cigarettes.

No one spoke on Saturday mornings.

To the brown-eyed boy:

I know you still think about the depths of her eyes, the smell of her hair, and the texture of her old cashmeres. But did you ever pause to catch the way your mother's bones stuck out of her body or how sharply her spine spliced her skin?

You want to forget that she's not a perfect mother, you want to hold on to this figure who held you, who sang 'happy birthday' to you across phone lines and sent you her affections through the mail.

You once told me that you used to pretend she hadn't left you for a chemical-scented man with crooked white lines. But once a year, she slices open your sanity with a phone call, a text: she loves you, she needs you, she's dying without you.

Help.

So you make excuses again. You hold her hand, you tell me lies. But you're better than this; you're better than a mother who was never present enough for you to remember. You're still a boy with stars in his eyes and you deserve more than asbestos-lined promises and inebriated phone calls. So, for all the smoke in your lungs and the ache in my heart, I hope you find what you need.