Weltschmerz: A Dissertation on Life
weltschmerz - "melancholy over the state of the world" (Webster's New World College Dictionary)
Melancholy is exactly the word to describe how I feel when I hear people talking about how much they hate university and how they just want to get out as fast as they possibly can. Sometimes I dismiss it as differences in disposition between people, but other times, I really comtemplate the state of my little world.
What exactly is the purpose of university? Is it a means to getting a job and moving on with the rest of one's life? Is it four more years of schooling to make us conform to some societal expectation? So, you go to an institution, get put through a bunch of classes, forced to study and learn things you'd otherwise ignore, and what for? If you don't enjoy it, then (begging Tennessee Williams the use of his phrase) what is the pleasure of a cat on a hot tin roof?
Whatever else university is, it is a place where you learn about the world so that you're more equipped to live in it. When you take away the frills and lacey obscurements, that should be the core of university life. Students encounter new ideas and ways to think in whatever field they're in. A science student learns something about the order of the universe. A math student learns about the formation and manipulation of ideas. A literature student learns about the evolution of stories. Whether the student encounters these ideas about the world in the language of algebra or English (or, if you were a literature major 500 years ago, Latin), the key point is to learn and to be enlightened.
That is the point of university. We loose sight of that sometimes, but reminders of that are all around us. It's what school's mottos allude to. University of Waterloo's motto is excruciatingly uncreative for a school that Macleans calls innovative. It's concordia cum veritate, meaning "in harmony with truth" and the enlightenment, the knowledge of the world is the truth that it's talking about. This message is echoes everywhere, including places like
And learning shouldn't stop at the classroom, at the assigned homework, and at the assigned reading list. Not all learning happens in classes. The spirit of university is to instill in its students the quest for knowledge. Most of the time, I don't see that around me, here in Waterloo. I mean, how cultured are we that we can't support a fine symphony orchestra? Yes, it has the makings of a university; it has classrooms and professors and students and textbooks. But it's missing the cafes where students talk about the things they read, the things they learn. It's missing the atmosphere of a liberal art's college, which is acceptable because Waterloo isn't one. This is why we get to hear so many students despising university and treating it, not as a search for the light, but as a hot tin roof they have to walk across to get to the other side which is to say the rest of their lives. It's moments like this when I really wish I'd done something different and ended up at a university where the school motto of pursuing the light was more than an obscure Latin phrase found only on the walls of the old gynasium.
Sometimes a person's actions matter surprisingly little in directing the course of their own destiny. Sometimes, the environment surrounding a person has perhaps more to say. Pounding through a reading list of important literature has all the benefits of knowledge that can be found in a library, but you can only take so much on faith. What is the point of reading books that no one around you has read? You can't discuss the ideas and you can't refer to them in conversations to make a point more clear (it'll do the exact opposite, if anything). At most, you can write a melancholy blog. The promise that there's a bigger world outside where you, with your ambitious reading list, will fit in, can only be believed in for so long before you start to doubt that the world can never live up to your expectation. It's tiring to always be the person in Plato's allegory of the cave, who's seen the light outside of the cave and is trying to convince everyone who's only ever seen shadows to believe him. Sooner or later, it'll just too much easier to watch those shadows with that feeling of weltschmerz.
And that is why this blog is called "A Little Like Weltschmerz".
Melancholy is exactly the word to describe how I feel when I hear people talking about how much they hate university and how they just want to get out as fast as they possibly can. Sometimes I dismiss it as differences in disposition between people, but other times, I really comtemplate the state of my little world.
What exactly is the purpose of university? Is it a means to getting a job and moving on with the rest of one's life? Is it four more years of schooling to make us conform to some societal expectation? So, you go to an institution, get put through a bunch of classes, forced to study and learn things you'd otherwise ignore, and what for? If you don't enjoy it, then (begging Tennessee Williams the use of his phrase) what is the pleasure of a cat on a hot tin roof?
Whatever else university is, it is a place where you learn about the world so that you're more equipped to live in it. When you take away the frills and lacey obscurements, that should be the core of university life. Students encounter new ideas and ways to think in whatever field they're in. A science student learns something about the order of the universe. A math student learns about the formation and manipulation of ideas. A literature student learns about the evolution of stories. Whether the student encounters these ideas about the world in the language of algebra or English (or, if you were a literature major 500 years ago, Latin), the key point is to learn and to be enlightened.
That is the point of university. We loose sight of that sometimes, but reminders of that are all around us. It's what school's mottos allude to. University of Waterloo's motto is excruciatingly uncreative for a school that Macleans calls innovative. It's concordia cum veritate, meaning "in harmony with truth" and the enlightenment, the knowledge of the world is the truth that it's talking about. This message is echoes everywhere, including places like
Harvard (veritas, "truth"),
Yale (lux et veritas, "light and truth"),
Columbia University (in lumine Tuo videbimus lumen, "in Thy light shall we see the light"),
Caltech (the truth shall make you free),
Johns Hopkins University (veritas vos liberabit, "the truth will make you free"),
Amherst College (terras irradient, "let them give light to the world"),
University of California (fiat lux, "let there be light"),
and the University of Cambridge (hinc lucem et pocula sacra, literally "from here, light and sacred draughts" and colloquially "from the University, we receive enlightememt and precious knowledge").
Yale (lux et veritas, "light and truth"),
Columbia University (in lumine Tuo videbimus lumen, "in Thy light shall we see the light"),
Caltech (the truth shall make you free),
Johns Hopkins University (veritas vos liberabit, "the truth will make you free"),
Amherst College (terras irradient, "let them give light to the world"),
University of California (fiat lux, "let there be light"),
and the University of Cambridge (hinc lucem et pocula sacra, literally "from here, light and sacred draughts" and colloquially "from the University, we receive enlightememt and precious knowledge").
And learning shouldn't stop at the classroom, at the assigned homework, and at the assigned reading list. Not all learning happens in classes. The spirit of university is to instill in its students the quest for knowledge. Most of the time, I don't see that around me, here in Waterloo. I mean, how cultured are we that we can't support a fine symphony orchestra? Yes, it has the makings of a university; it has classrooms and professors and students and textbooks. But it's missing the cafes where students talk about the things they read, the things they learn. It's missing the atmosphere of a liberal art's college, which is acceptable because Waterloo isn't one. This is why we get to hear so many students despising university and treating it, not as a search for the light, but as a hot tin roof they have to walk across to get to the other side which is to say the rest of their lives. It's moments like this when I really wish I'd done something different and ended up at a university where the school motto of pursuing the light was more than an obscure Latin phrase found only on the walls of the old gynasium.
Sometimes a person's actions matter surprisingly little in directing the course of their own destiny. Sometimes, the environment surrounding a person has perhaps more to say. Pounding through a reading list of important literature has all the benefits of knowledge that can be found in a library, but you can only take so much on faith. What is the point of reading books that no one around you has read? You can't discuss the ideas and you can't refer to them in conversations to make a point more clear (it'll do the exact opposite, if anything). At most, you can write a melancholy blog. The promise that there's a bigger world outside where you, with your ambitious reading list, will fit in, can only be believed in for so long before you start to doubt that the world can never live up to your expectation. It's tiring to always be the person in Plato's allegory of the cave, who's seen the light outside of the cave and is trying to convince everyone who's only ever seen shadows to believe him. Sooner or later, it'll just too much easier to watch those shadows with that feeling of weltschmerz.
And that is why this blog is called "A Little Like Weltschmerz".
posted by Kay at 6:32 PM
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