My best friend recently moved out of our hometown to start medical college. She got overloaded with a ton of books with titles like ‘The Human Anatomy’ that gave me a headache just by looking at the pictures she shared. We were both smart students who developed a reading habit in our early teens which we are yet to give up on. An author we both really like is Sally Rooney. Her characters often shared lengthy emails with each other when they were apart inspiring us to start our own Rooney tradition. My emails would almost always be about the books, articles, interviews and poems I had been reading, and their intersection with my daily life. Whether it was a conversation with my mother about clothes reminding me of the book ‘Love, Loss and What I Wore’ by Ilene Beckerman, or an interview on navigating through grief with the poet Sara Henning, these things made me realise that even though I’m an engineering student, I couldn’t escape art and the way it permeated every aspect of my life, which I assume is the same for everyone. I believe that our lives are just kaleidoscopes of random, seemingly unconnected moments, memories, laughter, music and the sky. So much happens leaving us wondering why; why now; why in this particular way. Life never seems to be following a linear course of action, and art is the thread of connection running through this apparent impermanence, rendering this chaos some form of meaning, or rather, making the lack of meaning no longer appear so desultory.
Loneliness was something my best friend and I experienced when we entered college. ‘The Lonely City’ by Olivia Laing was a book that gave me immense comfort and I hope sharing this piece of art with her in our emails helped her feel better too. This is what art does. It arms us with a vocabulary to understand what we’re going through. Which is extremely important regardless of your career choices. Attending early lectures in winter mornings, looking over at the marigolds blooming all over the university campus, random instances of beauty or a moment of connection with Camila Kasem from ‘Writers & Lovers’ by Lily King. The blues of the sky reminded me of a poet’s (Maggie Nelson) obsession with the colour blue that gave us Bluets, an excellent book. Solving asymptotes in the campus library while listening to California by Lana Del Rey. Getting my heart broken and finding comfort in All I Want by Kodaline. Different forms of art pierce through different moments of my life and make it all just a little bit more bearable.
Unfortunately, among my peers in the non-humanities streams of studies, the only consumption of art is for the purpose of escapism. While escapism does have its uses to lift our mundane lives into something extraordinary, it is a very slippery slope. A rabbit hole and we’re all in Wonderland. While it is nice to have a tea party with the Mad Hatter sometimes, Alice does have to wake up in the end. I’m not asking for us students with our busy lives of a million assignment deadlines to give up all forms of joy and turn everything into an existential debate. But to pick up a book every once in a while (that’s not titled Advanced Engineering Mathematics), or just listen to music for the sole purpose of listening, or watch movies that don’t always have to serve the purpose of escapism, to look at the starry night and think about Van Gogh and how he, too, looked at the same sky all those years ago, will definitely make us feel less alone and will add more colours to our own kaleidoscopes.
As the poet Richard Siken writes, ‘If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other’.
