Finality and legacy
Fear in parallel
I’ve recently made a habit of approaching schoolmates of mine and asking them: What is your greatest fear?
I have asked just about everyone. Every stratum of the school society has been tested: the hyper-popular kids who can barely make time for me, the rough country boys, the brains, the sports, the losers, the stoners.
There have been some interesting answers. Ben Spendler, a rough country boy if there ever was one, told me he was afraid of sharks because “they’re big fuckers”. Perhaps there’s a psychoanalytical reading in there about the fear of encountering something even a tough bastard like him can’t defeat. Maybe he just watched Jaws when he was a kid. Who knows?
People usually expressed their fear in a single word, only clarifying if I asked them to. And, I’ve noticed, the response was often instant.
They also had a habit of deflecting the question back onto me, perhaps in an effort to balance the revelation of their own fear with that of mine. The first time someone asked me what my greatest fear was, I paused to think about it.
Then a few more people did the same. My response — like theirs — became instant, a reflex rather than a reflection. By this I came to a realisation: everyone had such a quick answer because they had been ruminating on it before I asked them.
Why is that?
I told everyone who asked me that I was most afraid of oblivion, of being forgotten. I want my words to impact people around me. I want my actions to mean something greater than my own self. Like anyone, I want to be loved and appreciated for who I am.
The most common answer to my question was death, or some permutation thereof. Many boys told me that the uncertainty of an afterlife keeps them awake at night. This sentiment was more common than any concerns about the heartbreak of their families or the fate of their worldly possessions.
That answered my question about the swiftness of everyone’s answers; the thought of dying is keeping my schoolmates awake at night.
I don’t aim to misrepresent. There was a variety of answers. Some fear the immediately fearsome things: snakes, sharks, car accidents. Some, when I asked them, couldn’t give me a real answer or couldn’t prioritise between potential answers. Certain outliers gave especially rare responses. Martin Samuels is, to paraphrase, afraid of latent bad thoughts that might be lurking somewhere in his own consciousness.
But always, it seemed to come back to a fear of death, specifically of the ignorance that it implies.
But why? Why fear mortality when each of us is in the prime of his life?
After some thought, I have an answer. We are all afraid of death—I’m certainly not exempt from it—because we are about to leave the comfort and familiarity of school for the uncertainty of the real world.
Each one of us is conscious of the impending death of school life, of the identity and community which it provided to us. I wrote in an earlier piece about the brotherhood that prevails here; what we are feeling now is the end of that unity. And there is nothing—nothing certain, at least — rising to replace it.
Just as death precedes the unknown void of the afterlife, graduation precedes the void of the working world, of adulthood, responsibility, taxation, insurance, home ownership and adopting the constraints of modern life generally.
Even the kids who seem most certain of themselves, in particular the ones who excel at schoolwork, are weighed down by fear. Certainty of any kind is, at least in my opinion, a pretence.
We are contemplating a hypertrophic abstract of the anxieties and ambitions that are confronting us in our real lives. We are experiencing fear in parallel.
And so, from this rises a newly invigorated concern for the wellbeing of the school and other things that we must leave behind. We are soon to be old boys; in no time at all, we shall become the crooked old losers who still show up to football games thirty years after they’ve graduated, who post in rugby forums about the quality of the cheering at a game they attended.
We have become exceedingly critical of our younger peers. In our minds they are unsalvageable vagabonds. The only hope for the future is the year sevens, cheeky but pure in spirit. We constantly struggle to impart to them a healthy enthusiasm for College life.
Our proximity to graduation has made us self-assured and haughty. We are certain that no form after ours will ever achieve such heights of patriotism. Before long, they’ll start singing ‘Minnie the Moocher’ at the football again and our venerable school will descend into ignobility under the wardship of our juniors.
No year before ours was ever so disciplined or so hardy. Schoolboys these days have all gone soft; now they have laptops instead of footballs. You can’t beat on the year sevens anymore, so how are they meant to learn respect?
“We got kicked to the shithouse when we were in year seven,” or so the story goes.
We are the last bastion, the final swansong of an institution doomed to degeneracy. We are the old king, hurrying in vain to make his young heir ready for leadership, when anyone can see that he is ill equipped.
“Sure, the Class of 2015 said the same about us, but this is different.”
Everyone loves what is known and despises what is unknown. To pretend otherwise is dishonest and unproductive in equal measure.
Our circumstances compel us towards the unknown, and our uncertainty has made us hateful. We are pedants for legacy.
But in understanding our fear, we can be rid of it. And when I shed my fear, I see that our legacy — that of a school which has stood for more than a century — is in safe hands.
