A Collective Memento Mori

Photo by Joseph "Fritz" Scibbe

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

I probably should be working on something else instead of writing this. I have to finish a few more chapters of Moby Dick tonight, start reading Descartes for a seminar and work on a paper on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I should be doing that – but instead, my heart, as it has been for the past few weeks, is keenly attuned to The King’s College and its dire situation. 

To be honest, there is little I can tangibly do to help this situation. It is easy to get wrapped up in feelings of dread and defeat as the future remains uncertain for King’s in New York City. But worry, as we all know, never solves our deeper problems. Instead of worrying over hypotheticals, I would like to offer a few words of reality: one day, you will die, and so will King’s. I don’t know when either will happen, but both are inevitable. Neither of these truths are fun or pleasant to consider, but we must reckon with them nonetheless.  If not, we will be hopelessly tossed about in fretful misery that leads to nothing.

Both the author of Ecclesiastes and the ancient stoic philosophers understood and faced the reality of death head-on. Qohelet reminds us in Ecclesiastes that “all is vanity…a generation goes and a generation comes.” There is a time for everything “to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck what is planted.” Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world at the time, saw fit to remind himself in his Meditations that “you could leave life at any moment. Let that determine all that you think, say and do.”  

These and countless authors knew that what was to come had always been uncertain and often unpleasant. Death waits for us all, and no institution is immune from dissolution. No matter how much we might want to rage against the coming night, we cannot escape it, and it often comes in ways and times we do not expect. 

Yet our ancestors did not see such hard truths as a reason to wallow and grieve unmeasured. They sought to encourage us to fully live our lives with such a reality in mind. What does Qohelet determine to be good? That we “eat and drink and find enjoyment in the toil one toils under the sun the few days of life God gives us.” Rather than engage in tearful and pitiful depression, we are instructed to find enjoyment in the quotidian pleasures God has given us. 

“Fine,” you might say, “But that is our death. What about the potential shuttering of King’s?” A truly good question, but I don’t think the answer is so different. As I look at the diploma hanging on my wall, the question that has occurred to me often in the past few weeks is this: What value does this education have if King’s closes its doors and never reopens? Did I pour four years of my life into a degree that will become worthless? 

It is pertinent to leave logistical questions to the leadership at the school to determine arrangements for tuition and transfer credits and look rather at the question of what has been gained at King’s. What is the essence of the education that King’s has given to me and hundreds of others? 

Perhaps in the future, a job interviewer will conduct a search for my college and find that this school has closed, and perhaps this will reflect poorly on me as a candidate. I don’t know. What I do know is that what King’s gave me is not job training. King’s gave me an education. In its own self-identification, King’s is a “Christian liberal arts college.” If what King’s has chosen to pass on to us is a liberal education, an education that frees and is appropriate for free people, then that is something that cannot be taken away from us no matter the outcome of this year. 

Liberal learning is a gift that leaves an indelible mark on its recipients and irreparably alters their hearts and minds. If Plato is correct about education, that our minds are being turned toward what is worth thinking about, then that is something that cannot be removed. This is exactly what Frederick Douglass felt to be true when his enslaver forbade him to learn to read. Such an action would “forever unfit him to be a slave.” 

Our circumstances may be different, but the effect is the same. If liberal learning has taken hold of us, we can never retreat from the position we have attained.

What then are we to do in the meantime? I believe that C.S. Lewis can give us a good guide. In an address he gave in the face of the new nuclear world, Lewis works to encourage people in far more dire circumstances than us. 

First, Lewis would encourage us not to exaggerate the “novelty of our situation.” As I began, people and institutions came and went. Sad as it might be, the closing of King’s would be a near inevitability. In response to that, Lewis implores his listeners to live rather defiantly. In the same way, he had commended learning to young scholars a decade before, Lewis extols the values of learning and humanist pleasures once again. I need his reminder just as much as you do. 

You can read his actual words, but I would like to close by paraphrasing them for our King’s community: If we are going to be shuttered by bankruptcy, let the agents of that decision find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, walking in the park, going to the museum – not huddled together like frightened sheep. They may take our school, but they need not dominate our minds.

Joseph "Fritz" Scibbe is an Alumnus of The King’s College. He was the former host of Broadway and Exchange Podcast and is now a teacher.