I’m starting to believe maturation means admitting how truly childish you are. If there’s any part of life in which maturation occurs the most, it has to be college.
“Nobody cares how smart you are,” Kurt Vonnegut once told a group of graduating college students. “Nobody wants you to think, nobody wants to hear your wonderful answer.” This oddly cruel-seeming admonishment came after he had previously asked, “Do you know why cream is so much more expensive than milk?” Seeing as the speech was delivered in New York, the audience assumes the writer born in the Midwest might have a better answer; they say, no. “It is because the cows hate to squat on those little bottles.”
Vonnegut explains his joke to the audience: “When I asked you about cream, you could not help yourselves. You really tried to think of a sensible answer,” and when the answer is given, “you are so relieved to at last meet somebody who doesn’t demand that you be intelligent. You laugh for joy.”
This is the last Friday of classes. I apologize for that, although I had nothing to do with this. All complaints about this state of affairs must be taken up with whomever is responsible for the passage of time. So if you’re an atheist, blame gravity.
That means we’ve reached this point: We are all now moving toward the next part of our lives, whether that be the next year of undergraduate or graduate school, the first year of post-baccalaureate or the first time out of education. All we have in between is a relaxing interlude of exams.
Then why is Vonnegut so concerned about joy, anyway? Why not intelligence? Unintelligent people lead us into bad wars and vote for Donald Trump. Unintelligent people make small talk and don’t understand the health value of kale.
I concede eating kale and not voting for Mr. Trump are admirable civic virtues, but something has to be said for joy. Surprisingly little is.
Joy is the taste of your morning coffee; the changes in intensity and color of sunlight throughout the day; the sound of the voices of your loved ones; the hair on your dog’s back. “Oh, of course,” you might be thinking, “it’s the little things.” And yes, I’d say. It is the things, the texture present in your life. But texture is not happiness, or any emotion really. It is a thing — a thing that connects us with the world around us, but most importantly, with others.
Joy is foolishness, really. The smart thing is to pretend you know more than everybody else and aren’t susceptible to their problems. If you never find love and intimacy, you can at least tell yourself you’ve found respect — in that everyone remains a respectful distance from you.
Near the end of his speech, Vonnegut announces about the graduates, “No one must treat them like children again. Neither must they act like children — ever again.”
As a child, you feel so distant from the people around you. The news doesn’t seem to make sense, the playground doesn’t seem to make sense and the question “What are you going to do with your life?” really doesn’t make sense. If there’s anything I’ve learned to remind myself at the end of every year of college, it’s this: “It’s really not supposed to.” Nobody cares how smart you are, anyhow. It’s a foolish answer, it’s an answer you’ll go to bed at night with and wake up to. It’s surprisingly adult — though I should point out, I don’t really know.
Neel Bapatla is a UF English sophomore. His column appears on Fridays.
