the epistle to the stressed college student.

You are an idiot Jim Taggart.

You chose to study a subject in which there are no wrong answers--a subject that you believed allowed for endless possibilities and differing points of view. English? You thought that it was wonderful how much you could learn about yourself and about the universe from just thinking about things from different angles and from analyzing things in different ways. How much you could gain just from reading others' insights and pondering others' beliefs.

But what you didn't realize was that in a subject in which there are no wrong answers, there are no correct answers either. No matter how much you theorize, analyze, and consider; your opinion is still only an opinion. No matter how much you try and look at something a different way, you still can't find the "right" way. Your answer is just as much
"fluff" as the moron sitting next to you who theorizes that the fog is a metaphor for the downfall of Gregor's career when you clearly know that it is a metaphor for the loss of innocence or the evil of the machine age or any number of things.

But the truth is, in a subject with no answer, there can be no ultimate goal, or ultimate truth, or overall success. You just spend the whole time thinking, theorizing, analyzing, considering, annotating, reading, writing, formatting, studying in order to get nowhere.

In the end, no matter how much you've done all that, the only outlook you have is your perspective. And that perspective is only real to you. Nobody else will see it for what it is.

And your answer will never be right just as much as it will never be wrong.

It isn't an answer. It just an idea. Just a tiny squeak speaking out in a world where tiny squeaks all mix into one massive droning ROAR. A roar in which any individual squeak can't be deciphered from any other.

And you're a part of that, Jim. And you're just now realizing that everything you're striving for will make very little difference in the big picture. That your grades matter very little anymore. That tests don't measure who you are. That "right" answers shouldn't be used to define a person.

You're realizing that maybe all that matters is to be there; to have an 'answer'; to be a squeak within a ROAR; and to do whatever you can to be you.

Because in the end, even if you don't have it all figured out, you're you. And maybe that's the only end-goal that matters:

To speak.
To think.
To wonder.
To love and to be loved.
To eat, and sleep, and dream.

but most of all,

To be.