COLUMN: Unanswered Questions

From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '95 From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '95Good morning. Actually, it might not be that good of a morning, especially if it seems as though that P-Funk bass is still playing from the inside of your skull. It might not even be morning, if you decided to sacrifice your waking hours for the sake of health and hangover. Or perhaps I should attempt some final statement on What It All Meant, or sound a last rallying cry for This Generation's Ideals. But can any graduate honestly believe in these things, twenty-four hours a day? How often are we simply acting our way through this theater called Penn, with the appropriate costume change from scene to scene? Apart from the cap, gown and transcript, what does the end of a year or four actually signify? Perhaps reason and significance have no role. Perhaps it just was, without anything except the highlights or beliefs we attach in memory or columns. William Faulkner, whose own participation in World War I was largely a forgery, wrote the following passage in 1918. Find the analogy, if you think it means anything; recover from Fling; continue on. Don't worry if the statement on What It All Meant or Where We Go From Here never comes. Perhaps it never does. Perhaps the unanswered questions are in themselves answers, ones whose sense we may not decipher for some time. "I don't know what we were. With the exception of Comyn, we had started out Americans, but after three years, in our British tunics and British wings and here and there a ribbon, I don't suppose we had even bothered in three years to wonder what we were, to think or to remember. "And on that day, that evening, we were even less than that, or more than that: either beneath or beyond the knowledge that we had not even wondered in three years. The subadar -- after a while he was there, in his turban and his trick major's pips -- said that we were like men trying to move in water. 'But soon it will clear away,' he said. 'The effluvium of hatred and of words. We are like men trying to move in water, with held breath watching our terrific and infinitesimal limbs, watching one another's terrific stasis without touch, without contact, robbed of all save the impotence and the need.'"