The Myth of the Cave

Sorry for the long absence. Been trying to finish the second Ransom's Law book. To make up for it, here's an extra-long post about my first year of college.

In August, I left Florida for college. I attended Calvin College, located in my hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan – the same place my brother Steve went and where my parents had both taught (and attended themselves). This may sound like a strange choice, considering my anti-authority leanings, not to mention the fact that I didn’t particularly get along with Steve or my dad. But there are several things you need to understand.

First, Grand Rapids is to Christian Reformed people what Salt Lake City is to Mormons: whether you like it or not, you’re probably going to spend some time there, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll end up there permanently. There are any number of cultural, religious and familial reasons for this, which I won’t bore you with at present. I did consider myself “Christian Reformed” at this point (and still do, more-or-less); my problems with authority had nothing to do with my religious background. Sure, my junior high teachers couched their small-mindedness in religious language, but it was pretty clear to me that the problem wasn’t that these people were Christians; it was that they were assholes. The people I knew who had genuine faith weren’t afraid of intellectual inquiry or independent thinking.

Second, I was an introverted, depression-prone kid who was leaving home for the first time. I certainly wasn’t about to move to Boston or San Francisco, where I knew absolutely no one (especially after my quasi-monastic year in Punta Gorda). I wanted to be where I had some friends. The fact that I could be “away from home” while attending college in my home town was, in my estimation, a pretty good deal.

Third, my grades were shit, and Calvin will take just about anybody.

It’s difficult now for me to remember just how I felt that first school year away from home. On one hand, I recall being elated that I was no longer an inmate at Charlotte High. On the other hand, I remember moments of profound loneliness and depression.

Some people reading this have probably never experienced serious, prolonged depression, and those people are probably starting to wondering if I’m ever going to stop whining about being depressed. A few words for those people.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t know shit about brain chemistry. What I do know is that “depression” is not a feeling, like sadness. Sadness is part of it, sure, but that’s a little like saying that persistent itching is part of having a broken leg. Whether you want to call it a medical condition or spiritual malaise, depression is a big, ugly, nasty monster that jumps on your back and drags you to the ground, making everything you do ten times as hard as it should be. I remember reading about someone suffering from severe depression who would wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and think to himself, “Should I brush my teeth, or should I kill myself?”

If that question makes absolutely no sense to you, then you’re lucky enough not to have experienced severe depression. All I can do I suggest you imagine that monster on your back, whispering in your ear, “Brushing your teeth is pointless. You should kill yourself instead.” And then, if you successfully brush your teeth, it will move on to “Getting dressed is pointless. You should just lie down and die.” And then “Why go to work? You hate your job. You’re never going to amount to anything anyway. Just quit.” And on and on, a hundred or maybe a thousand times a day. And then, to make things even more fun, imagine that people keep telling you to “cheer up.”

You can reason with that monster all you want, but reasoning with him doesn’t make him go away. Sometimes you can make yourself so frantically busy that you don’t have time to listen to it. I never really saw the appeal of habitual drunkenness or taking illegal drugs, but I can see why some people do it: it shuts up the monster, at least for a while. For much of my college career, I careened wildly between being super-busy and doing absolutely nothing. I was never actually diagnosed with manic depression (or “bipolar disorder,” as I believe it’s now called), but I was definitely stuck in a manic/depressive cycle that first year at Calvin. I alternated being rude, loud, and outspoken with being sullen and withdrawn. When I was going, I’d want to keep going; I pulled frequent all-nighters because I was afraid to stop. And when I finally stopped, I found it almost impossible to get going again.

The worst thing about depression is that your own brain lies to you. If you have a broken leg, your brain will feel the pain, direct your eyes to look at the source of the pain, and then conclude, “Holy shit! My leg is broken! I should see a doctor!” Or, if you’re too insensate with pain to think that cogently, somebody else will notice your broken leg and call an ambulance.

If your brain is broken, however, it’s not going to say, “Hey, I’m broken! I should see a doctor!” It’s going to say, “There’s something terrible wrong here, and I think I have a pretty good idea that it has to do with the fact that the Earth is hollow, and all of my friends are really secret agents working for the Fish People.” Or in my case, it will say, “Life is really hard, and you aren’t good at anything. You’re never going to fit in. People don’t like you. You should just give up and die.”

Meanwhile, other parts of your brain insist that, no, life is worth living, isn’t it? Surely there’s reason I’m here. Life isn’t completely meaningless. I just have to get through this rough patch, and I’ll be OK. But the rough patch you’re trying to get through is in your brain, and your brain isn’t going anywhere. Finally, you literally collapse one day, and can’t make yourself get back up again. And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you realize that you’re a little crazy, and that you need some help. Or maybe somebody else realizes it for you. At this point in my life, however, I was a long way from that sort of breakdown, so I sort of schlepped along, day after day.

I actually did reasonably well in my classes that first year because I had figured that college would be vastly more difficult than high school – particularly since my high school was basically a holding facility with chalkboards. But as it turned out, I overestimated the difficulty of freshman-level classes and pulled a B+ average my first semester almost by accident. What I learned from this was that I was working too hard. I ratcheted down the level of effort after that first semester, and my grades gradually got worse over the next several semesters. This wasn’t really a calculated decision on my part; it was more that the initial fear of flunking out of college subsided to the point where it was overwhelmed by my lack of motivation, not to mention residual loathing of busywork and resentment of authority. I was, at this point in my life, motivated almost entirely by negative stimuli: I hated studying slightly less than I feared flunking, so I occasionally forced myself to study. I expended vast amounts of mental energy alternately panicking about a test I hadn’t studied for and finding excuses not to study for the next test. My behavior was completely irrational, like a man trudging despondently after a bus because he can’t work up the motivation to run for five seconds so that he can get on board. That’s what depression does to you.

One odd effect of my newfound freedom away from home was the sudden onset of a profound, almost Tourette’s-like affinity for profanity. In other words, I swore like a motherfucker. This may not have been noticed at a public university, but flavoring every sentence with six or seven f-bombs was decidedly frowned upon at the Official College of the Christian Reformed Church. I remember my floor’s resident assistant gently taking me aside and asking me to cut down on the foul language, to which I predictably (but amicably) responded, “Fuck off.”

“You’re just digging yourself into a hole,” he told me. I’m still not really sure what he meant by that. In any case, I reassured him that I was not digging myself into any fucking hole.

One Saturday night, I came home late, and this RA peppered me with questions about whether I was going to go to church the next morning, and if so, where. We weren’t actually required to attend church (and I rarely did that first year), but the RAs tended to encourage it. The funny thing about this encounter was that I was fucking wasted the whole time he was talking to me, and he had no idea. At least it struck me as being very funny at the time. I realized a few weeks later that he was fully aware that I was drunk and had simply been fucking with me.

I didn’t really drink very often, for the supremely sad reason that I wasn’t invited to very many parties. Occasionally, I would get drunk with my roommate, a friend from Grand Rapids Christian named Dave. Dave drank a lot. Dave also smoked a lot of pot. In fact, between the pot-smoking and the drinking, Dave did even less studying than I did. My two suitemates, with whom Dave and I shared a bathroom, weren’t exactly exemplars of the Protestant work ethic either. At the start of that year, Dave and I were freshmen, and our suitemates were sophomores. At the beginning of the next year, we were all sophomores, except for Dave, who was still a freshman. In other words, despite my deplorable study habits, I was the only one of the four to actually advance that year. I’d like to claim that I was, therefore, a positive influence on my suite, but the fact is that I got by almost entirely on my uncanny ability to absorb concepts without really paying attention, along with a complementary ability to construct extremely convincing bullshit. For example, I once scored a ninety percent on an essay question about Plato’s Myth of the Cave – which doesn’t sound that remarkable until you consider the fact that at the time of the test not only had I not read Plato’s Myth of the Cave; I had never even heard of Plato’s Myth of the Cave. It seems I had missed a few lectures. And not picked up that particular book. I figured, based on my sketchy knowledge of Plato, that it had something to do with knowledge, and maybe shadows or something. Evidently I was right.

Another time, I was attempting to prepare for an upcoming Religion test. Perusing my notes, I found that my notes consisted entirely of drawings of characters from Marvel comic books, so I asked the sweet blond girl who sat in front of me if I could borrow her notes. I honestly don’t know why people said yes to this question; you’d think they would say something like, “Why don’t you just draw the Green Goblin on the test, Dumbass?” But usually they would say yes.

Unfortunately, this particular girl was not what you’d call a conceptual thinker. She knew she was supposed to be writing down what the professor said, but she had absolutely no sense for recognizing key ideas and the relationships between them. Essentially, her notes consisted of a single run-on sentence that spanned five pages of note paper. Some strings of words had been subjected to a combination of highlighting, underlining, and double-underlining, apparently at random.

I nearly despaired of extracting any meaning from this Joycean epic, but slackers can’t be choosers. And she did at least make up for in thoroughness what she lacked in organization; the information was all there; it just needed to be corralled into a manageable form. I ended up rewriting her notes, doing my best to organize them in an outline format. I even photocopied my version and gave her a copy, along with her originals. End result: I got a B+ on the test. She got a C. I found this very amusing. She did not.

In another example, I realized during the second session of my freshman math class that the professor, who spoke in a nearly unintelligible mumble with a thick Dutch accent, was simply regurgitating the contents of the textbook. I concluded that there was no point in getting up at seven AM to have someone mumble something at me that I could read for myself and decided that I wouldn’t be attending that class anymore. I had a fellow student give me the next day’s assignments and turn in my completed work. The next time I showed up for the class was for the final exam. I ended up with a B- in the class.

I would gleefully recount these episodes to my suitemates, who reacted with a combination of admiration and disgust. To me, getting a B- without ever taking any notes and having missed a third of my classes was far sweeter than working my ass off for an A. I felt like I was beating the system. In fact, I was cheating myself out of a good education in exchange for a few anecdotes showcasing my cleverness. But I was too far down the slacker path to easily turn around; I couldn’t suddenly buckle down and start studying at this point without admitting that I had been acting irresponsibly up until this point.

The slacker strategy didn’t always work, of course, and as I continued to find new ways to do as little class work as possible, my grades inevitably got progressively worse. A habitual class-ditcher, I performed particularly poorly in anything that required substantial class participation. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that during my four-and-a-half years at college, I flunked out of both volleyball and swimming. Far from being easy, this was in fact a very stressful way to live. Again, this is where the insanity aspect comes in: most people would much rather spend a few hours a week studying than have to constantly worry about failing half of their classes. But I could never quite make myself get on that bus.