To the end of the line

To board the 1 train, I extract my wallet from where I’ve jammed it down into my pocket. I open it, fumble for the MetroCard among my credit cards and ID and CUID, transfer wallet to the other hand, and swipe card. I negotiate the turnstile, return MetroCard to my wallet and wallet to my pocket as I walk toward the platform, see the train has already arrived, run for it. Mind the gap. I push between the riders, find an open space, look for a handhold, reach to grab it as two other people crouch, unembarrassed, beneath my up-stretched arm. I can hear my neighbor’s music beat through his headphones.

I try, as the train screeches and rumbles out of the station, to find inner peace.

Someone once wrote that trying to think in New York is like trying to sing in a boiler room. Some universities sprawl across expanses of wilderness; Columbia fights its battles block by block. Residents of Hartley and Wallach fall asleep to the sounds of ambulances screaming into St. Luke’s-Roosevelt; in Morningside Park, recent shootings unsettle the scores of another world. The laboratories of the Manhattanville campus have been specially designed to keep subway vibrations within tolerable limits. The walls of our academy cannot keep out the ceaseless hum of diversions and possibilities.

And the campus within those walls teems with people and distractions and opportunities. We take too many classes, involve too much of ourselves in too many pursuits, spend our evenings scurrying from meeting to meeting. We text and post and tweet to stay in touch with people who live next door. For each new thing we do, we must duck out of dinner with friends a little earlier. We must set aside the lives of our minds one more time. We must experience everything else a little less. I used to be swallowed up whole by what I was reading. Now, it seems like the book is the childish guest who demands all of my attention. We are spread increasingly thin.

For generations, Columbia’s means of shutting out the outside has been the Core Curriculum, a dark pool of study in which we are supposed to dive deep. We are meant to think that we can put all of our being into dissecting Aristotle or analyzing Bruegel. Yet that oasis, too, is rippled by a ceaseless rumbling. You can learn about African Civilization in 26 class meetings between macroeconomics and general chemistry—civilization in Asia, a much larger and more populous continent, will take you two semesters. Each week in Morningside Heights, the great questions of a generation of composers are neatly disposed of in two 75 minute sessions. Between Tuesday and Thursday, centuries of literary history pass by unremarked. Most Core texts I read, I read in pieces, in sprints, when I could fit them in. Scenes rose and fell in discordant chaos, each passage totally disconnected from the next. Surely, as I rushed forward, the wisdom fell beneath the tracks.

But perhaps this is how we are meant to live. 8 million people climbing on top of each other have produced the richest and most intense concentration of culture and opportunity the world has ever known, and we revel in the possibilities. New York extends a thousand offers in a hundred directions, and we scramble apart to try them all. One cold winter day, my girlfriend led me to an unassuming SoHo storefront that concealed an artificial indoor park, a clearing of plastic grass and wallpaper trees tucked away in the middle of a hundred concrete blocks. It was beautiful, even though it was so full of people that there was nowhere to sit.

I would not trade the joy and support and strength I have gained from my friends and colleagues in these four years for the opportunity to have read 80 more pages of Hegel. In our lives after college, we’ll be crammed into narrow, deep pigeonholes. Eventually, we’ll have families and lifelong friends, and we’ll leave behind the rotating circle of acquaintances and classmates. For now, we’re spending four years in the best city on Earth, in the company of thousands of intelligent, engaging, thoughtful people. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with pushing through the crowd to experience as much as we possibly can.

And sometimes, in the gray light of a Thursday afternoon, when the sirens from Amsterdam go quiet, and the subway rumble subsides, we find ourselves in a room packed full of those extraordinary people, and we dive deep into the bottomless pool of pure learning.

One night, in a moment of silence in the Spectator office, I heard the horn of a Metro-North train bellow across the Upper West Side—a broad, flat note. It echoed across city and river and suburb and the rolling open plains of the country. It said, there’s more to see. There’s a green world out there, beyond where the subway lines end. Come away.

The 1 train arrives at 96th Street. I begin to move again.

Samuel E. Roth is a Columbia College senior majoring in history and political science. He is a former Spectator editor in chief. We Are Not Alone runs alternate Thursdays.