Discovering the world beyond

By Laura Siegel

I travel all the time and no one knows. Kenya, Thailand, India, Rome. The names roll like drumbeats, wisps of silk, music with strange tones, veiled women in steaming markets, ancient stones. I stare at the lectern on a Monday morning, and I am sailing down some great river under a blue sky, taking no notes.

In contrast to my musings, Yale seems pedestrian, so sidewalk and rain. In my imagined lands, days are sun-drenched, nights lit by warm stars. Or snow glistens, permanently unbroken, never too cold. Always I am traveling towards something, on some quest, though to where or for what ends I do not know. Always I am traveling alone, as Odysseus traveled alone, in the end, over the long seas. There are people in the margins of my dreams. They move like shadows, pausing to teach me a few words in a strange tongue or to pass on enigmatic wisdom. Then they move on.

The journey as a rite of passage has a long history in many traditions. America's is not one of them. Cultures of the past sent adolescents off on treks through the wilderness. Ours sends its young off to college, where drinking beer and learning physics is supposed to suffice. Then we go into the world, having experienced of it only what we found in our textbooks. We are expected to choose a trade, work hard, become adults, and pass through the stages of our lives, without a pause to find out what those lives should be.

All I know, all most of us know, is the sheltered haven of our childhood and adolescence, and these cloistered Gothic walls. Yale is an Eden of sorts, a protected garden, filled with all things good to eat and people good to know. Yet we are also all like Tantalus, doomed to understand how much there is that we will never be able to experience.

My senior friends rush off in their suits to interviews, muttering to one another in their secret codes: "Merrill Lynch," "Booz Allen," "Columbia Med," "Harvard Law." Then they run to the next interview, racing the clock, racing their classmates, racing for the right job to set them on the right track to the right life. I want to grab hold of them and ask, "Where are you running? Where is the world going to go if you stop to breathe?" But their sleeves brush through my fingers.

I tried to survey some of last year's graduating class to find people who had done something different. They were hard to find. One flew off to Germany, but it turned out that he was just postponing law school. One went to work as a bike repairman; I think he went to law school too in the end.

But what is the world in which we will practice that law? Our generation will be the most international in history. You know the hype about the Internet and faster planes as the world spins on and on; it may be hype, but in many ways it's true. Discovering the world isn't just a way to discover ourselves, it's a way to discover the world as well.

Yale's courtyards and towers, for all the stresses they impose, keep us inside a womb of sorts. We've passed through a series of them, from the literal
womb to our families' homes to the sheltered realm
of school.

Enough is enough. I want out. Give me one shot to experience it all. Give me unfettered carelessness, let me set out on no track at all, no instructions included, to find out what path I should create myself. What better way than to traverse the accessible universe, to see all there is to see and meet everyone there is to meet?

After graduation, we can rush to find other wombs, to close ourselves back up in reassuring structures, to limit our freedoms to assure our safety. Or we can embark on rites of passage. We can declare ourselves free for the first time. We can fly around the world, if we want. We can fly.

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