And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...

(T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock)

I used to live there. That mass of columns, palm trees and sunlight is my alma mater, Pomona College. In a few weeks, I'm going to attend my five-year college reunion. Dun dun DUN!

It was a very formative place to be. Challenge. Friendship. Ideas. Food (oh, the food!). But what does that mean? A room of talented, ambitious people debating male homosocial desire in medieval literature. Anti- and pseudo- and post- and more post-. Discovering coffee. Anglo-American vs. Continential philosophy. Beer. Pink Floyd. Fake snow. Flip-flops. A thesis on Nietzche and Dostoevsky. Have the courage to be offended. T-shirts that said Harvard: the Pomona College of the East.

My thesis advisor once told me, "Sometimes elitism is good. You have to be elitist to be a leader."

Now most of the alumni I know have gone on to higher education or to service fields. And now something in me wants to run the other way from academic ego and ambition. I love having my ideas checked minute-by-minute by the person in front of me, ready to say, "Nope. You've missed it. That is not it, at all."