When I woke up last Wednesday, I already knew it was going to be a lousy day. I was in the midst of a particularly bad stretch of midterms, having suffered through a sadistic three-hour doozy on the last few hundred years of Supreme Court decisions on gender and reproductive rights the day before, and I was facing down another three hours of exam essays later that afternoon.
It was rainy and gloomy, and I was expected at work in just under an hour. Plus, Au Bon Pain had stopped serving their corn chowder on Wednesdays, a highlight of my summer internship, and The OC wasn't set to return until the following week. "Only two more months of this," I muttered as I stumbled to the shower.
But as I towel-dried my hair a few minutes later and started surfing through the day's headlines, I realized just how awful the day was gonna be. There, buried halfway down the page, apparently less important than Elvis' annual earnings, was a story that made me gasp: Elliott Smith had been found dead in his Los Angeles apartment of an apparent suicide. I sat down and took a deep breath, then clicked on the link -- all the while feeling my already-dreary spirits sinking into a tailspin.
For those of you unaware of a music scene outside of the frat house favorites, Smith was a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter and indie rock luminary from Portland, Ore., who managed to achieve a promising career wholly on his own terms, including the release of such highly lauded records as 1997's "Either/Or" and 1998's "XO." He also briefly flirted with the mainstream spotlight, ironically performing his Oscar-nominated song Miss Misery from Good Will Hunting alongside Celine Dion.
Drawing comparisons with such esteemed forefathers as Nick Drake and Jackson Browne, he crafted sweetly delicate, deeply melodic and darkly tuneful folk gems in the vein of the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, clearly paving a path for current artists including Travis, Dashboard Confessional and Aimee Mann. However, it was always as a lyrical poet that Smith truly shone brightest, struggling to find the glimmer of beauty, albeit brief, in bleak, melancholic tales of instability, dependence and despair.
It wasn't that his death came as a tremendous shock -- he was rumored to have become reclusive and slipped back into regular drug use this past year, and he had a long history of addictions and mental illness. And it wasn't even that I was Smith's greatest living fan, though I did listen to his records occasionally and was always moved by his poignant honesty and the heartbreaking humility in his writing.
No, what really got me was the way he died -- a single, allegedly self-inflicted knife wound as he sat alone in his kitchen, clearly wrestling with his own increasingly dark and threatening thoughts. Much like the lost and abandoned characters on his records, Smith was unmistakably looking for some flicker of light, however small and tragic it might be, to inspire him to continue. And when that didn't appear, the world lost one of the most talented songwriters of a generation.
It seems that everywhere I turn lately, there's another sorrowful cry for help going unanswered. Only two weeks ago, in stories that have gone scarcely noticed on this campus aside from a casually tossed-off crude joke, former Penn Library head Paul Mosher pleaded guilty to child pornography, sexual abuse of children and unlawful use of a communication facility.
Look, I'm no criminology expert, and I know almost nothing about Mosher personally or about the illicit world of child porn and the psychological trauma that would lead to such an obsession. What I do know, though, is that when you pay to download roughly 2,000 such images with your credit card and store them on your work computer, you're screaming to be caught and rescued from an out-of-control craving that's taken over your entire life.
Over my years here at Penn, I've never made any big secret of my own personal struggle -- to find my place and my voice on this aggressively competitive and frequently intimidating campus, one that can seem to be dominated by the sorts of people typically found starring in an Aaron Spelling series. When I first got here, I was surprised at how easy it was to feel utterly alone and invisible at a school that only months before had seemed fabulously inviting and perfect.
But as I sat in my apartment last weekend, staring at the flickering candle flames and listening to Elliott Smith's fragile voice on the gorgeous Waltz #2, I began to see exactly how much I've grown since coming to Penn. Years ago, I would have turned Smith into an idol of misunderstood genius; now, though, I became frustrated at the sort of self-pity and disillusion that appears to have overwhelmed him in his final days.
Sure, there can be artistic beauty in pain, but there's awfully more in self-rescue and survival. So please get help or help yourself, but don't go the way of so many around us, crying out for help alone in the dark. Let that be Smith's legacy.
Rory Levine is a senior Communications major from West Nyack, N.Y.
