An odd amalgamation of recounted ends, beginnings

To the Editors:

Because a certain many things have occurred and continue to occur, things I don’t often pay enough mind to or I forget easily, quickly and for a no good, low-down rotten scoundrel of a reason, this is my pitch to the general out theres.
A few things I’d like to recount:
That the late ‘characterist’ Al Hirschfeld, who would have been 100 this June, once said of his ideas, “[t]he good ones are immediate, but the labored ones, I usually wound up with a small ulcer.” He also said, “[w]hen you live long enough, everything happens.”
Hirschfeld was around so long, we gave up thinking he had to die. Ah well, waking life’s the more nondescript, again. The cartoonist doodled theatre stars and starlets — his notes — in the dark of the audience while watching the show. Participation comes in droves of forms, form comes in droves of participation, droves come in participation’s form. The idea might be: an audience can do great things.
The first thing the poet and alumnus Bruce Weigl asked on entering the senior writing colloquium class this past September was, “Do you guys still run things here?” I guess he meant the students and faculty. A resounding silence followed and later a shake of heads.
On the back of a Mount Zion Baptist Church of Oberlin card is scribbled an important note to self, as prompted by one of a few speakers at the youth choir’s commemoration of the life and work of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Because I’m afraid I’ll lose the note soon, I’d like to share its contents, word for word:

‘Do As King’:
march
educate
go to jail
faith
coalition
organize
politics
use media
int’l issues
write
children, family

Think of it as suggestions for a New Year’s resolution or as a jumping off point. Too bad Al Hirschfeld wasn’t there to commemorate the event.
Here’s the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake and why I found this book so staggeringly inspiring: the universe, unsure whether to keep on expanding or collapse in on itself and return to the beginning of time, gets flustered and winds up going back ten years (from 2001 to 1991). Everyone on earth has to play out the next ten years of their lives again, exactly as they did before—conscious of how things begin, evolve and end. When the timequake reaches its climax in the second 2001, few people realize what’s happened. They can’t comprehend the idea of free will. They freeze mid-step, sentence, etc., they fall down, fire alarms forget how to behave.
Kurt’s alter ego, Kilgore Trout, is one of the first people to become aware of what’s happened. To get the human race going again he shakes them up and says, “You were sick, but now you’re well again, and there’s work to do!”
(Kurt had work to do recently. For Nissan, I think).
I guess things of this nature have been said before, in numerous fashions and languages, in gestures and all those lines of communication, by telephone, print, paint, e-mail, or face-to-face, through ESP — Get up, stand up, or wake up wake up wake up, up ya wake up ya wake up ya wake, this is Mister Senior Love Daddy, and We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the moral leap, the punch and slap…
My personal all-time favorite mood-shaker is make yourself necessary to someone.
Over all time the points may be the same, but the need to make them isn’t. There’s always an inexorable administration to topple, a complacent mass to poke. People drop a lingo, not language, which means there’s always work to do, too. Thanks, Trout.
So if there’s a point, it is just to say, time to get cracking. And me, I’ll crack by writing a letter every week to the Review, our media conduit. Call it an on second thought Transcendentalism project. Call it preparation for years of letter writing. I will make my apologies just this once to the public at large (sorry) and end momentously rearing from the spotlight.

—Will Schutt
College senior