The Technique of Living

What Columbia College Today taught me about nonsense.

By Marianna Jocas

“Whatever the style or technique, teaching at its best can be a generative act, one of the ways by which human beings try to cheat death—by giving witness to the next generation so that what we have learned in our own lives won’t die with us.” – College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco

Illustration by Isabelle Oh

I came to Barnard with a Mount Holyoke College yearbook from 1968 that I found in my town’s thrift store. Despite my lack of personal connection to the college, I would spend long stretches of time flipping through its pages. The layout was unconventional; there was minimal writing and few ads. Each page was instead organized to hold large and impressive photos depicting quotidian acts as they appeared in that moment for the camera: teachers sitting as they leisurely graded papers, barefoot students riding bikes, lovers hidden in secret hallways. And so I cut out my favorite pages and hung them on my wall, many of which still remain. 

But a few months ago during a dull lecture, I came across another archive, this time one that pertained more directly to my own life. It was an online archive of Columbia College Today—the college's alumni magazine. I began to interrogate where my appetite for archives came from, realizing that much of it was rooted in the way insignificant details decorated them. I spent most of my time reading the section hidden on the sidebar called “My Columbia,” where alumni recount their favorite memories of the dorms. In the 2006 volume, Saul Fisher talks about the nightly ritual of the all-male howl in Carman, suspecting that it was “one of the salient differences between Columbia and Barnard.” Elizabeth Olesh writes about the graffiti that spawned on the walls of Furnald when students heard that it was going to be gutted and renovated. And E. Michael Geiger recounts a “Panty Raid.” 

My attention never stayed loyal to the main articles. I always wandered to the unusual, to the mistakes. How Maggie Gyllenhaal’s last name was misspelled in the answers to the crossword puzzle on page 68, and how David Muskat wrote a letter to the editor with a pronunciation problem, for the word alumnae can only rhyme with pie if one ignores the already established anglicized version of the word alumni. My affection for these details reminded me of an interview with Marie Howe, an author and poet based in New York City. She is also an alum who has returned to teach at Columbia in the past. The conversation goes:

Ms. Howe: I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.

Ms. Tippett: Really?

Ms. Howe: They really find it hard.

Ms. Tippett: What do you mean? What is the assignment? 10 observations of their actual world?

Ms. Howe: Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

Ms. Tippett: It does.

Ms. Howe: We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point.

Ms. Howe: It’s the this, right?

Ms. Howe: Right, the this, whatever. 

“The this” is why I keep returning to the Columbia College Today magazine. Even though it is an alumni magazine and charges itself with the responsibility of remembrance for entire generations, it is not shy of dwelling on the personal and specific. Reading these memories somehow makes the magazine appear more honest, as if to elaborate on the minuscule is to reveal the truth. We often worry about misrepresenting the whole, especially in something like an alumni magazine, which endeavors to remember something as fluctuating as a university campus. But we learn about the whole through its particulars. George Charles Keller ‘51, the editor of the magazine in 1961, pointed to the connection between alumni magazines and honesty when asked what he was going to do during his reign over the glossy publication, saying: 

“There is too little [honesty] in alumni magazines—and elsewhere. The magazine should not paint everything at Alma Mater gold and white. Every reader knows it just isn’t so … It should not dodge controversies, but describe their origins, dimensions, implications. It’s in the lively exchange of facts, ideas, and opinions by reasonable and well-informed people that we are most likely to make some progress … I know that trying to find the truth is like trying to gather in snowflakes, but it's exhilarating to be out in the cold occasionally.”

We can hold a fantasy of something until we actually get close to it and live with it; one can only idealize something so much before it becomes familiar. This is what distinguishes the magazine from other Columbia publications, because all readers have attended the school, and so it becomes a confluence of reality, nostalgia, and reunion. Current campus journalism has a different sense of relatability. It’s immediately tangible. The thrill of Columbia College Today is in its observation. 

What I learned from the magazine is perhaps less obvious than a student publication, because it made me pay attention to the technique of life—the minutiae of our daily existence—instead of its general choreography. By that I mean, if life is this grand performance you can probably get by well enough if you know its general movements: the successful career, the devoted partner, the loving family, but if you haven’t yet perfected the technique of it all, it ultimately remains unfinished. And to an untrained eye, these two versions of life can get confused. 

So maybe emphasizing the magazine’s “insignificance” is misplaced, because while I think we can gather large ideas about college life from various spaces, only in some can you find its technique. It’s a humble position that technique takes, the audience may never know how far the performer has gone to perfect the position of their body so that the dance appears seamless. But the end product is there, in all of its entirety. 

Columbia College Today almost glaringly tells us to focus on our technique, to make a signature of our time here. Because one day you may return and see people following your same general movements: rushing to class, eating at John Jay, or complaining about finals, but it won’t be quite right, and it’s because they’ll be oblivious to your specific routes to class, and to the mosaic of cooking stains that decorated suite 6C, and to the church stair that propped your leg as you wrote a birthday card to your soon-to-be best friend. 

This is all to say that paying attention to the trivial may not be as useless as we think. When we leave, the stupid stuff sticks to us because it's easily discernible against the general, overarching motion of our twenties. Columbia College Today is proof. These archives are a way of defining ourselves against the present with the past; they provide a stepping stone for leniency and self-balance. To borrow from Delbanco’s quote, storytelling at its best can be a generative act, one of the ways by which human beings try to cheat death—by giving witness to the next generation so that what we have seen in our own lives won’t die with us. This essay, then, is an ode to those who come before me, to those strangers who left pieces of themselves in writing and reconfigured my perspective towards living—on this campus, and elsewhere.