COLUMN: Subsistence

From Andrew Wanliss-Oriebar's "Think or Thwim," Winter '94 From Andrew Wanliss-Oriebar's "Think or Thwim," Winter '94Eric got a job the other day. He'll only be washing dishes a few nights a week, so it's hardly too exciting a prospect. Often enough, he'll probably still be standing outside WaWa, with people walking by, on their way to review sessions, rehearsals and late night drinks. It is on occasions like this that one is reminded just what differentiates students from the West Philadelphia residents on the outside of the turnstiles. Thinking the homeless are just hungrier than you is perhaps the easiest way out of that familiar urban guilt. What makes a human a human is definitely not that he or she is hungry. It is his or her capacity to imagine, conceive and produce, to think and to hope and to feel. What is truly missing from the life of the homeless is not so much a couple of Twinkies in their stomach as a couple of appointments in their mind, something to look forward to, where people will be expecting them and their contribution. What is missing from their life is precisely what makes yours exciting: your lunch date tomorrow, your interview next week and the next episode of some show. Reduced to serving their most basic needs, they cannot afford the luxury of a hope or an aspiration. They cannot even hope to get a response from most people who walk by. Life is no longer a necessity but a shrug of the shoulders, devoid of any hope or project that would justify living for something more than just life itself. You only eat then, to make it to tomorrow in a twenty-four hour vicious circle of subsistence without reason. Of course, those who don't stop for the homeless may have their reasons: the homeless are lazy, they are there every night and they never make any effort to get anywhere. Reproaching others for their lack of enterprise might nearly seem convincing to those in the midst of sending off cover letters by the dozen. This might work for a few minutes, or a few years until they get wedged in the everydayness of everyday life, with only few signs left of their twenty year old vigor. Habit sets like jello. The independence gained with maturity has made you move from the collective fun of the sandlot to the solitude of an office or a dead night at a bar. Having lived through two decades of forming your identity, self consciousness and conventionalism leave you solidly ridged a half-dozen social games away from anyone around you. With age, you enter into the great dictionary of individuals. After constantly seeking to define yourself and accumulating a unique life experience, you end up a nice well-rounded word in a dictionary, and the most you share with others are some old roots and a few expressions. All you have left are a few synonyms, friends, that by then you probably acknowldege as too different too ever get that close to. Age will have taught you to crack down on the ideals of your youth that you shared with these friends. With age, you'll come to understand that you can't just walk into places and yell out what you think. Age teaches you that little mister university student is probably not going to change the world so it's probably wiser to simply take up that half-decent job offer and leave the world for others to change. At least that'll get you out of here, you might think. Age will have decided for you that subsistence is fine. After all, how much better than you are all those other commuters doing? But whatever happened to being of consequence in this world? What are you doing in the waiting room for life, having abandoned the creative ponderings of your English recitations for the more important topics of the bathroom floor tiles in your new apartment? Are you just waiting for life expectancy to improve with the progress of medical science? Perhaps you are waiting for the world to change for the better, for a friend to call you up and invite you to the revolution, but age has taught you that you can't go out five nights a week with your friends. Instead you will build a home, where you isolate yourself from those you used to learn from and rely on. And when you do visit a friend, perhaps for her house-warming party, you tell yourself you're not like that, that you haven't settled down yet, really. You get brashly offended when someone asks you about your dragging film project at a cocktail party, indulging in your ambitions, only to get home and smirk at the mirror in an instant of realism. Finally, you settle down to think those colleagues from work really are good people and that you sort of like what you're doing anyway. There might be nothing wrong with that. Often, in fact, you realize that that dream you had of staying nineteen all your life didn't even make that much sense once you hit the big two-oh. But that's precisely where the mistake is. Look how stupid those loud, innocent freshmen seem, walking around in droves, with all their friends from third floor Speakman. They don't know where anything is but they think they're the kings of the world. Well, hold on a second, how stupid do they look? You might ask yourself that while you pull more bills out of your mailbox, and walk down Spruce alone to get your three piece suit from the cleaners. Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar is a senior Communications major from Paris, France. Think or Thwim appears alternate Tuesdays.