Our lives are frittered away by detail. What better way to live than to simplify, simplify?
(This is going to be a long post, Davisian in length. And it’s not exactly happy, just so that you know.)

I’m almost twenty-one, and I’m now a junior in college. Impressive, huh? I wish I knew what I want to know, however. I don’t know what I want to do with life, and I’m sure that’s not a good thing. Is it a failure of my generation, or of my parents, or of myself? I don’t want to think so. What I do think is that I want to do so much that to limit myself to any one thing would be doing a disservice to myself and humanity at large.

With that out of the way, the real reason I write today is fraternity parties. I went to my first one this year, and instantaneously remembered why I don’t like going. And that reason is: I don’t know. I’m normally quite good in social situations, but I just can’t get into that scene of beer, cigarettes, and grinding in a basement. It’s just not comfortable to me. I don’t like beer, especially the beer that is served at said parties. I don’t smoke. And I’m too genteel to feel comfortable in a situation where the goal is simply to get some booty. I want whatever happens to be meaningful. Which I hope is a more common wish than it seems.

But then, when I left, I felt bad. Like I was missing something important. But I knew I wasn’t…other than a partner for the night, or the beginning of a hangover for the next day. It just bugs me that this was able to bother me. And it shouldn’t. So why does it?

-2-

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” – Thoreau