It took me a long time to write this sentence, because I had decided that I had to write the best senior column of all time. Naturally, that made it impossible to write anything at all for about a month. But in the spirit of one of my favorite senior columns (written by Grace Carroll, a former editor of mine at The Daily), I want to first make a case for what is truly the greatest senior column of all time: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot.

Admittedly, Prufrock isn’t so much a senior column as a seminal column of Modernist poetry, but there are striking similarities in circumstance. Eliot wrote Prufrock at my age, 22, in the summer of 1911 after his graduation from Harvard University. At first, this shocked me; after all, Prufrock is the sorrowful, beautiful, self-pitying rambling of an impotent middle-aged man wrapped up in his fears of mockery and social rejection. But upon re-reading, the poem seemed to perfectly encapsulate the anxieties of this particular post-grad transition.

As my loved ones know, I have a terrible memory. So, instead of trying to draw up old reminisces and wring them into a cohesive narrative — squeeze the universe into a ball — here are a few un-redacted excerpts from my diaries over the years, intertwined with lines from the only poem I have ever successfully memorized. Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

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When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Feb. 5, 2023

I was so soporific after dinner lying in bed scrolling endless reels that I took the walk N—— prescribed. So lovely, the grad quads at Rains flowing into each other, the fairy lights strung across a ceiling, a dark green wine bottle as a candle holder, the silhouette of a guitar head, two bicycles and some wheel here or there — a bike repair hobbyist? There is so much beauty in our lives that it hurts, yet we shell ourselves away, fear each other compulsively, shut the blinds and turn off the Zoom camera.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

March 30, 2023

Going out was a lot of fun. I pushed a man who was looking up our legs when we danced on the platform. I danced a lot, a lot and enjoyed it. I sobbed uncontrollably between La Vaquita and Mandala after looking at his new — really, quite old by now — girlfriend’s page again. I scrolled through pictures of N——. I took pictures of M——, A—— and I. We lied to men and cared for each other. I wanted women to dance on me as though I was a man. A girl from Berkeley moved across the circle to me and said you are so good looking.

The men were men. Sometimes I got irritated or felt that the others reacted too much to the men being men. But maybe I just wanted to seem like: look at you lot, so affected by the cruel and unfortunate and unfair ways of the world, unlike I who understand. Perhaps getting used to things is not always a sign of strength.

We played volleyball with a kid and a grandma in the activities pool. M—— lay blind drunk on my and M——’s bed one night, just the two of us, and asked if I thought she should date women this summer. A——, M—— and I lay on the same bed the night after, when M—— had entered one of her moods, talking about our parents. 

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Oct. 6, 2024

Listening to choral music, I wonder if I have been somehow hardened to beauty. I was meant to reject old forms of beauty in my radical house, where anything old and white is anathema; in Stanford’s broader landscape, I was meant to work hard and contribute value to the economy, have a plan for myself, business clubs, research, the job hunt. I stopped singing and rarely thought back on it. If I had joined my second choice choir, would I still be singing today? The practice of music would have been ingrained in my life. Why does it break my heart so much now to hear that old humming, voices knitting together?

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

July 20, 2022

All I want is to be able to shuffle words between my fingers as magicians shuffle copper coins, glinting and disappearing between knuckles, solid moving with the quality of liquid.

Do I want to pursue what is beautiful? It’s what D—— was saying: her urge to curate a life that is aesthetically beautiful, to her possible own detriment.

To be cared for is not really beautiful in the aesthetic sense. It is beautiful to long, to yearn, to care.

I want to possess this ability, I am terrified, always. Terrified of my own impotence.  

I do not want to be M——, torturing myself. I want a release in the beauty of beauties, I don’t want these small comforts anymore.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

Feb. 25, 2025

Woke up with a monolid today and felt the fold unfurling during Stats lecture, like a wing opening out.

Last night A—— and I were boiling, ice-bathing and oh my god PEELING 70 Korean drug eggs. She has so much lightness in the kitchen — everything seems easy to her because she’s having fun doing it.

And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Nov. 6, 2021

I feel so restless, like I’m brushing up against the membrane of a massive soap bubble and that bubble contains all my undirected ambition, all my potential futures. It’s precarious and exciting but so frustrating because I can’t see anything inside clearly, it’s all swirling around in the back of my skull all the time. I want things to be more exciting, I want the college experience, I want to feel wanted but I want to be excellent, I want to learn how to build everything I’ve ever dreamed of, for those dreams to be the limit instead of my ability. I want to be young. I want to be old.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

Nov. 9, 2023

It’s so much easier to love the versions of yourself that you could have been than it is to love the one that you are. I wanted to be an author. I thought that by now I would have a publishable novel, that I would be advocating for my writing as much as I once did, submitting everywhere, thinking of poems as I walked.

And in short, I was afraid.

April 12, 2023

At McMurtry, waiting for Data Narratives (switched out of Math 53 thank god or fuck you to my future self). Man came out of a door on the rooftop, leant on the wooden half-wall and sobbed with his fist in his eye, shoulders shaking, silent except one noise. I didn’t want to stare but I didn’t want to intrude. He noticed me and shot a thumbs-up and a sort of grimace, then walked back inside the door. It was all maybe ten seconds. This is a strange place.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

May 24, 2023

Walking back from Gates, I had such a strong feeling that I will miss this all so much one day. The quiet. The trees and red flowers under lamplight. The laughing boys stumbling down the grassy hill towards Terman fountain, easy. Had dinner with the cast of Sweeney, we ate so much & paid with the ticket money — what we’d earned together. S—— behind the wheel of a parked car near the restaurant — a smile and wave. Bringing leftovers to N—— working late with R—— and L——. Talking with P—— in the clear night air, treading the perfect tiles of Engineering Quad. I’ll miss it all.

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor –
And this, and so much more?—

16th October 2024

There is so much depth of experience and feeling available to me right now that one day I will crave to claw back — this face, body, the pleasure of walking to class in the sun, making a coffee in Kairos at 9 a.m., chatting with A—— until we both fall asleep, study nights with the friends, White Claws and waiting to be vetted by a frat bro, so many long conversations and brunch debriefs. Being passed by L—— & co. on their golf cart at any time of day, anywhere on campus. Co-working with E—— and I—— on research in the sunny ICME block of Huang. Unexpectedly delicious dining hall meals that make you want to pass your regards to the chef. This free carpet covering our entire floor from Weedsteria. How nicely my ears all healed. Saying hello on the stairs. So many people to wave at or avoid eye contact (meaningfully, mutually) with. This place is so much more than my ambition, or the ambition that currently consumes me, and so am I.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

March 12, 2023

Stanford University. Is it a privilege to be here? Absolutely. Am I sick of Stanford students? A little bit. Do I want to work on Heap Allocator? Why the fuck would you even bring that up? Am I tired of overhearing in the dining hall: “I never had the privilege of having many different kinds of friends…”

It’s exhausting to process the world in this way. Gives and takes. Rubbing along with so-and-so will confer upon me some advantage. And why should so-and-so pretend to like me? Because I will also confer upon them advantage, and we both know that this is the nature of our relationship. Maybe I’m too cynical — I definitely am — but at the same time I think it’s been too long since I had a healthy dose of cynicism. I’m not impressed by people’s aspirations here, they’re all too similar. And if you don’t fall into one of those categories, people will assume that you’re dumb or incapable. Think of all the millions you’ll never make if you decide against it. Half of us chafe against the pipeline, forced down it slowly by fears and lack of imagination and lack of courage.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

January 21, 2025

Yesterday I saw E—— walking with A——, his arm draped around her neck and her wearing a beautiful long floaty dress with a scooped neckline, laughing and smiling and chatting in that secretive way that lovers have together, the sun beaming onto them — waved, and was ignored or unseen, and felt — that’s what casual dating should look like, beautiful people, how in hell did I believe I was beautiful in the way people like them were? And at office hours for Stats, where everyone already had a solution for every problem and was only verifying their approach with the TA rather than asking for help from scratch, while I sat in front of my half-empty problem set in utter dread, not even knowing how they seemed to so easily understand that aperiodicity meant X and irreducibility meant Y, not even asking a single question to the TA (one of those people who frustrates when asked to explain something that is to them obvious) and leaving early after shamefully taking a photo of the whiteboard… To today, walking back in the sun, craning my neck to look up at the fluffy white underbelly of the small bluebirds that congregate on the path leading up to the house, thinking: I am likable, didn’t the professor like me in office hours and treat me with such familiarity verging on fondness? And didn’t the lady working at the package center smile at me, and I at her, and there was something genuine there? And didn’t the boy sitting in front of me in MS&E lecture turn back to look at my face, or at least what seemed so in my peripheral vision?

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

May 1, 2022

The beach was under a cliff, and the cliff jutted out in these finger-like rock structures, or more like they had been stacked in layers like splintered discarded wood. They were covered in scars, and we wondered where the scars had come from. There was a narrower entrance for the waves rushing furiously towards the shore, between two large rocks. The rock sentinels subdued the incoming waves; still, they washed against this one much smaller boulder, standing stoically alone. The boulder had some sort of barnacle on it but the side facing the sea was washed completely smooth, light grey. I said that rock was probably carried there by the sea, and now the sea was washing it away. N—— said that the rock was never built up, so its entire existence is its destruction, its wearing away into nothing. I said that was like humans, then. He said, no, we’re like a parabola, and I loved him very much for that.

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By my count, Prufrock contains fifteen questions; the poem roils with self-doubt and anxiety, literally structured by a lack of certainty. College is a time of extremely high entropy, and we spend much of our time and energy trying to reduce that entropy: trying to define and answer the question of what our future lives should look like.

While we experience this state of entropy as overwhelming discomfort, I think it is also what we’ll look back on and recognize as the distinct flavour of youth. We might even come to miss the time when our futures were so unknown to us. So, as much as possible, we should endeavour to linger a while in that intangible mystery, the energy of unrealization.

After four years, it may feel as though we are leaving behind those days of fresh-eyed naivete and youthful energy. In fact, we are re-entering — perhaps for the last time — that position once more, making our debuts into the true adult world. That world is wide open to you. It still wants you. Don’t waste this feeling.

So, for my fellow graduates, I leave you with T.S. Eliot’s words:

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.