Eight Years Later
Eight years ago, I was starting my freshman spring at Harvard. Little did I know how pivotal that semester would be for me. I quickly realized I wasn’t enthusiastic about most of my classes, which I took because I thought I was ‘supposed to’— Arabic, Economics, Statistics. The only class I liked was my freshman seminar with historian and international relations expert Erez Manela. That was the first class at Harvard where we actually read an interesting book (Wendell Willkie’s ‘One World’ from 1943), talked about it in depth, and learned firsthand from a really interesting professor.
During that semester, I decided to do something crazy— I was gonna hitchhike around America. And, despite lots of pushback, that’s exactly what I did all summer 2017. I hitchhiked 8000 miles in a loop around America for two months, talking to strangers, enjoying nature, and going absolutely crazy in the best ways.
When I came back to school the next fall, I was a changed man. First and foremost, I decided that from then on, I would only take classes that really interested me, classes that had a reading list of books I genuinely wanted to read for my own pleasure. This new attitude completely revitalized my joy for school. I loved every single class I took sophomore year— English classes, psychology, social theory, existentialism, Chinese philosophy. Every week I read a brilliant new text that expanded my worldview; every week a lecture taught me something beautiful about the universe; every week I felt like I was bursting at the seams with new ideas, like a nebula of stars reaching critical mass. I was intellectually on fire; I was a hitchhiker at Harvard; I was that little boy who loved his local library, grown up and free to read anything I wanted.
My sophomore and junior years flew by as I burned the candle at both ends. I met amazing professors, took amazing classes, and made amazing friends. Then, of course, I left school for what ended up being a very long leave of absence. You know the story. Hitchhiking, building a school bus into a home, becoming a writer, visiting all 50 states, etc. etc. And then, in Fall 2024, I returned to Harvard after 5 years and 3 months as a Harvard Dropout.
As my last semester at Harvard now begins, it’s time for me to start tying up loose ends, closing stories opened years ago, doing all the things I’d wanted to do but never done. One of those things was to take a real history class with Erez Manela, whose freshman seminar I’d so enjoyed all those years ago. This semester, he’s teaching “The United States and World Order since 1900.” While I’m already enrolled in more than a full course load (I like to take extra classes, and I’m also writing my thesis the next 6 weeks), I decided to ‘audit’ the class. For those of us who really like to learn, auditing is Harvard’s best-kept secret; you can essentially just attend the lectures informally, learn from the professor, follow along on the readings and emails, etc. without officially enrolling in the course for a grade or having to do assignments. I love auditing classes at Harvard, absorbing lectures by the best professors in the world on their topics of expertise; if I could, I’d occasionally audit classes my whole life.
On Tuesday, with two weeks of desert dust still in my unwashed hair from Skooliepalooza in Arizona, I ran to the Harvard Art Museum’s lecture hall late for his first class. I was still sporting a winter beard I’d grown since December, a dirtbag buslife beard that said “I’ve just come from the desert.” I walked into the large 100-person lecture 6 minutes late, and tried to find a seat as stealthily and respectfully as possible while Erez lectured. The only open seat was in the third or fourth row. As I sat down, I made eye contact with Erez. Immediately, he stopped the lecture, and said “You’re back!” I was stunned that he recognized me. I smiled and said “Yes, good to see you again,” assuming he’d get right back to lecturing. But instead, he kept addressing me, warmly, with genuine personal curiosity: “How long has it been?” 100 pairs of eyes were all on me, as the lecture turned into a private conversation. I searched inside to find my voice: “About five years… five and a half years since I left Harvard…” and even longer, eight years, since we’d had our class together. We kept chatting a bit, and he welcomed me back; he then worked the conversation seamlessly back into the lecture, talking about the diverse ages and historical backgrounds of the students making up the class. As the lecture resumed, I burned with pride. I felt like Odysseus. I had gone on my own extraordinary quest, returned, and there were still people here who remembered me all these years later. I felt like I really belonged here, belonged back at Harvard; this place was a home, one of the best homes I’d ever had, one that had waited for me.
After a fantastic lecture, class ended— and right after it ended, Erez headed over to me. We shook hands and caught up. I told him I was surprised he recognized me so easily from a distance. When he’d met me, I was an 18 year old with short hair and a baby face; now, I had long hair and a desert beard. But I’ll never forget the way he responded— “It’s the same face.”
I walked back to my dorm that day along the brick sidewalks of Cambridge feeling a peculiar full-circle feeling, the feeling that some threads of the story of your self have overlapped, converged, tied together after long travels. “It’s the same face,” he’d said. I’m the kind of person who flies through life too fast in a fog of forgetting; I can’t recall many episodic memories of childhood, or even of a few years ago. I’ve traded adaptability for memory, creativity for consistency. Sometimes, I feel like “who I am” is just whatever my last adventure made me. But, in this professor’s eyes, I am the same fundamental person I was eight years ago; it’s the same face. That wide-eyed 18 year old carried the same essential spark I carry now; I still am him. Walking, I felt a sort of tenderness for my present self, and a tenderness for that past self, too— if only I could tell him the adventures we’d go on, the mistakes we’d make, the joys we’d experience! He had no idea the paths he was about to walk. Eight years ago, I felt alienated and disillusioned at Harvard; I felt like I didn’t know how to socialize with rich kids, and I didn't know what I wanted to study or do with my life. I hadn't yet been seized by the dream of the Great American Novel, hadn’t yet consciously begun to turn my life into an adventure with endless horizons. That 18 year old was about to make the choices that led him to becoming what I am now.
With a smile on my face I walked to my dorm in Winthrop House, old Standish Hall, where sophomore year I’d had my first-ever single, my first truly safe home all to myself. On my back I carried a little blue L.L. Bean backpack with my name on it, my backpack from preschool. My mom had brought it up at the start of the fall, when I’d flown in from Burning Man with nothing, and I’d decided to use it for my senior year at Harvard— another full-circle feeling, from 5 to 25. Loops of my life spiral and close, spiral and close— every year of my life, folded together, in dialogue with every other year. I begin a new adventure. I am the same face.
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