Reality Checkpoint

Cambridge is a city, but it doesn't always feel like it, especially when you spend all your time amongst the colleges. These are concentrated in the older part of town that is nestled in a curve of the River Cam, and beyond the river, in what is a less densely populated area that gradually blends into countryside. On the other side, this part of town is bordered by a large number of greens and common areas, from Jesus Green on the northeastern side down to Christ's Pieces and Parker's Piece. The only side that isn't thus distinguished from the rest of the city is the south side, and even that feels as if it has a boundary in the form of Lensfield Road, which is wider and handles a higher volume of traffic.

Clearly, I am not the first person to recognize the discombobulating shift that takes place when you walk from the western side of town toward the eastern side. I know this, because in the middle of Parker's Piece, there is a towering streetlight at the junction of the two walking paths that cut across the roughly rectangular green at its diagonals, and this streetlight is locally known as the Reality Checkpoint. The idea, of course, is that there is an entire, intensely self-absorbed world on one side of town, and when you pass the streetlight, you're entering the real world with all the shocks attendant on that experience.

The ivory tower of academia is a funny thing. You can lose your thoughts in the vast reaches of space, contemplating stars and time or whatever lofty things you like, but as big as you may think, the humble world is unchanged when you stop looking through your telescope and start looking out your window. It's easy to grow monsters in your mind--and often just as easy to kick them out with a dose of fresh air.

I had my own little reality checkpoint this morning, as I tried to remain calm and focused enough to read through objections to Descartes's real distinction argument without panicking over all the things that are sure to go wrong this afternoon: the questions won't be on things that I've looked at closely, I'll forget all of the fine-grained distinctions that I need to keep straight, my supervisor will once again be deeply disappointed by my inability to respond to his feedback on previous essays, I'll completely miss the point and write several hundred words arguing an irrelevant point... There are so many ways this could go wrong.


This paper has been especially painful for me, because I'm not used to being so thoroughly aware of my shortcomings without being able to remedy them. When I got a sense of what my supervisor was looking for with my first essay, I went into Easter break with the determination to master universals and Abelard, and write the clearest, most focused response that I could, far surpassing my first, admittedly poor attempt at Boethius. Noble enough, as sentiments go, but quickly dashed when I sat down to read a summary encyclopedia entry and found myself struggling to get through each paragraph. The lowpoint, at which I resigned myself to making a hash of my second essay too, was when I spent two hours reading three sentences from Abelard's Glosses on Porphyry, and could make neither head nor tail of them.

I think the pre-test anxiety was too great to be sustainable, though. Not that I was nauseated or anything. In that sense, I'm usually just fine. But having reached a point of personal despair over my inability to meet my supervisor's expectations, I sort of fell out the other side in the middle of real life (this has actually been happening a lot lately, but I guess when you've gone down the rabbit hole once it gets easier the next time around). For me, that moment meant realizing that I was going to take the test, I was going to give it my absolute best, and whatever happened would not change who I am by a single iota.

It sounds silly, doesn't it? I think I face this a little too often: the feeling that if I get less than the very best grade, I must have done something wrong, slacked off a little too much or maybe just failed to be smart enough for that class. Every year, I promise myself I won't do it, and every year, I, Sisyphus, climb the hill again. But in what feels like a precursor to an intense bout of senioritis, I'm just not as ready to identify myself with the numbers on my transcript right now. There's a lot more to life, and while I should do the best that I can now, I don't want to miss out on the other riches to be had, whether that means lingering over a letter, listening to blackbirds at twilight, or spending an entire day ambling around Cambridge with a friend while making hobbit-frequent pauses to eat. These things take away from studying, but they certainly don't impoverish me, and they're probably what I really want to take away with me from these five months anyway.