“Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses--- ”
– Rosalind Connage (164, This Side of Paradise; F. Scott Fitzgerald)
As I start my final year of college, I’m struck by the desire to look back and find the Beauty hidden in my first three years. I don’t have specific dates with transcribed dialogue, but I do have periods of time and feelings that will have to do.
Freshman year was beautifully embarrassing. Everyone was eager, self-assured and friendly. It made for a terrible smoothie that tried too hard to live up to an inauthentic ideal. Drama raged over the floors as hormones snuck beneath every door and into every conversation in the dark corners of dorm basements.
Sophomore year was beautifully strange. Nothing was the same. Friends who were inseparable and spent every moment of the previous year at one another’s sides slowly drifted apart. Passions that were thought to be life-long subsided and left an emptying feeling in their wake. But after Christmas break, new groups formed that were awkward at first but then become the norm. Several random occurrences that elicited a “huh, I’d never thought I’d be into that,” happened in such close proximity that the message could not have been clearer.
Junior Year was beautifully enlightening. Nights spent with friends in off-campus houses and hookah bars birthed boundaries and morals in a way that entire childhoods spent in Sunday school never did. Magnetic Januarys and semesters spent abroad attracted bursts of spiritual and relational insight. Some pieces faded, but others clung deep like fish hooks and are still embedded in their prey’s flesh.
Senior year is portended to be final. It’s the final chance to have that kiss; the final chance to ask that question; the final chance to start that conversation; the final chance to drink deep of the supportive and secure well of shared academic exploration.
My Senior year will be beautifully final.
The pinnacle of Beauty is impossible to reach without finitude; the knowledge that a beautiful thing will soon cease to be enhances its every quality. The final day of winter transforms the depressingly bleak, snow covered parking lot into a stark, stunning, tundra; the last drop of smooth Scotch or dark Rum exudes a deep aroma and treats you to complex flavors that the rest of the bottle never so much as hinted at.
A sentimental soul will be brought to the edge of sorrow by finality because of his or her longing for that which is Beautiful to remain so. A romantic soul is enlivened by and desires to experience finality because they know that Beauty is fated for a tragic end.
“Damn.
Damn.”
These are the last two lines of the first part of This Side of Paradise. Amory Blaine and Tom D’Invilliers are wandering around campus during the dark hours of their final night at Princeton.
The moment is filled with finitude and longing. The so called ‘greatest four years’ of their lives were over and they had to move on. Their shared history and shared acceptance of an unstoppable future make this moment beautiful.
The romantic part of me revels in endings and change, but I’m expecting sentiment to make a powerful thrust at graduation nonetheless.
