On being 22
This end is a new beginning
April 7, 2007
Sarah Weigum
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
(T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding)
Last week I turned 22 and next week I will hand in the last essay of my undergraduate career. If, like me, you’ve followed the general timetable set forth by the modern education system, then these two events have occurred reasonably near each other for you also. Of course, some of you will be 21 or 26 or 45 when you walk across that stage, shake hands with the president, and giddily grasp that fake diploma.
Twenty-two, however arbitrary and accidental an age it is, marks both an end and a beginning for me. An end to exploring the underbelly of the Alloway Library (why are the books I want always on the bottom shelf?); to the gruff face of Dick Sather when I claim my packages in the mail centre; to long-winded, sometimes pointless conversations in the Mars’ Hill office (okay, the long-winded pointlessness will probably continue, but the location will be different); and to so many other things I can’t even recall as I quickly write this column between one assignment and the next.
It’s also a beginning of a professional life (somewhere in the media, I hope; my fingers are crossed); of making money instead of spending it; of new topics of conversations; and, to a certain degree, of uncertainty. The uncertainty might be the hardest part of it all. No matter how many times I’m told not to worry about life after university, I still do. “You’re just a baby,” one of my professors told me this year. And while I know in my head that 22 is young, it doesn’t keep me from feeling that life will change irrevocably as I take the next step; after April 28 I can’t go back.
I’m not the first person to feel this way. When the early 20th century generation was 22-years-old, something happened in the world of literature that marked an irreversible shift in Western consciousness. In 1922 James Joyce published Ulysses, T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land, and modernism was born. In their convention-defying styles, Joyce and Eliot gave voice to the themes of disintegration and loss they saw in the post-World War I generation. Despite the despairing note his work sounded, Eliot nevertheless found it within himself to write, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” While there was no going back to an age before the trenches and the millions of deaths, there were still fragments worth holding on to and things capable of providing meaning in this modern era.
Our experience today is far removed from that of the early 20th century, but there is still a legitimate sense of fragmentation within our generation. Even if you’re not graduating, some of your friends probably are. And while we have cell phones, email, and Facebook to keep us connected, these technologies can at the same time alienate us from the richness of human contact.
But my intent is not to end my last column on a note of gloom. Though great changes are in the works, our futures are always firmly buttressed against our pasts. Wherever we go tomorrow, we also carry yesterday—whether it is a new friend, a lesson learned, or a soul more perfectly constituted in faith, hope and love.
Two decades after The Waste Land, Eliot published Little Gidding, in which he quotes Julian of Norwich who, in the 14th century, said: “[A]ll shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
To this thought I add my whole-hearted agreement, as well as my own paraphrase: “this is not the end, and this is not the end, and this end is a new beginning.”
Now you go...
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