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William Jewell College makes me hungry. I don’t know how else to describe it.
The problem with my hunger, though, is that it rarely goes away.
Maybe part of the problem is that I don’t know what I crave. It seems like it could be anything. Or everything. I’ll first think it’s receiving good grades, then deserving to receive good grades, then friendship, then fun, food, laughter, respect, violence, companionship, witty banter, sleep, exercise, and so on and so forth.
Maybe my craving is to be as annoying as possible, for I know that I constantly want to push, on everything, and this seems to me like an annoying thing to constantly want to do. I want to move things from their natural states. Relationships, conversations, philosophical dialogue, myself - all of these things make me hungry, and therefore I push them. I want to unsettle these things, make them uncomfortable, make them question their securities. Make them insecure.
Then I want to find tranquility in that insecurity.
For some reason, this is the path down which my hunger leads me.
I am not concerned with meaning. I do not hunger for meaning. However, I have found that pushing things toward some kind of tranquil insecurity does a pretty good job of providing me with experiences that matter significantly to me. I mean the kind of stuff that you can’t and don’t want to talk about, because you don’t want language to fail in harnessing its importance in order to give it a trite, though communicable, meaning - and these experiences nearly always wind up sounding trite. That’s not quite the same thing as finding meaning, I don’t think, but somehow, having experiences that simply matter quell my hunger. And so I continue pushing, probably annoying everyone to no end.
I believe that, over the past four years, I have increasingly pushed persons and things on this campus. If I have pushed you, then thank you for putting up with me. Thank you, especially, for pushing back. There are many people here that are important to me, people that matter to me, my relationship with whom I will not describe, because I find such to be more attractive when meaningless. Please forgive both my abrasiveness and my arrogance in pushing you.
My time at Jewell has made me hungrier, but I have come to believe, conveniently, that hunger is more rewarding than contentment.
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