“Perhaps we must accept that we are simply watchers of beautiful forms. And if we acknowledge that we are observers, bound by our own frailties and limitations, we may be able to rescue the memory of what was, for an instant, exquisite.”
Rarely is one so revised by experience, which like a river washes away the calcified sand of the soul to describe itself there anew. Rare, too, is the ability to recognize this revision. School had just ended, its shoulder-weight just … Read More
Jeremiah (“The Weeping Prophet”) is famous for prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews. In the Hebrew Bible, God called to Jeremiah in 626 BC and said that the Jewish people had forsaken him by worshiping false idols. God instructed Jeremiah to proclaim that unless they repented, the Israelites would be pillaged by a foreign nation and exiled from their land as punishment.
One day this summer, sitting in a blank white apartment that was not mine, I felt a strange weariness. This apartment was full of more books than I will probably ever read and I had fellowships to apply to and emails to write and the whole Internet in front of me and all of New York City clamoring outside.
I didn’t think much about what it would be like to participate in 7×9 until about thirty seconds before I started my shift. There was a grungy looking twenty-something year old man sitting on the ground, facing the girl I was to replace in what seemed to be an expression of solidarity. The situation would not have felt much less uncomfortable had she been an actual prisoner and not a Princeton student sitting outside of Frist.
The most vexing thing, for me, as an admirer, is that he chose to hang himself, a gesture he had to have known was deeply dramatic, in the tradition of Brilliant Suicidal Writers like Woolf and Hemingway.
“Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, The Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time.”
It it is January 14th, Dean’s Date. You are hunched over a 500-page anthology of Russian Literature, writing your final paper. The deadline is in 2 hours and 18 minutes and every second counts. You ask yourself, why?! Why did you leave these hunks of textual meat in the oven until the last possible second? Why do you always wait until the deadline?!
“Clo? How you doin?” Luke says. I take a deep breath. “I’m okay, just getting ready,” I venture. “Where the hell are you?” he slurs. I am in Forbes’ dungeon-like art room in Princeton, NJ. Luke is outside a sports … Read More
My childhood and adolescence was definitely filled with plenty of winter sports and outdoor activities, and my social and political views have been greatly influenced by the pervasive liberal sentiment. However, this reputation, although in many ways accurate, in no way fully characterizes the Boulder I grew up in. I love my hometown, but I can never view it as perfect.
