In Twelfth Night, the social order comes undone--women fall in love with women, gender becomes malleable, nobles marry servants, servants imagine that they could become nobility. To parallel the end-of-Christmas festival after which it was named and at which it was performed, Shakespeare's play effects a mood of licensed disorder--and things get more than a little crazy.
Life mimics art. Not that our last day of classes (affectionately called LDOC by all those who care) is the same as Twelfth Night, but in a way it performed the same function: loosened everyone up, broke social customs, made everyone rethink friend circles and habits. People I knew in completely different ways found their way to my room and met each other and mingled, we played a stream of trashed up music, tried our best to stay in a comfortable stupor (difficult to maintain for more than five hours straight), etc. Rarely are so many people so willing to get completely messed up, and rarely do we all find ourselves so devoted to having a good time. In the end, I came out with new and unforeseen conceptions of everyone, of social relationships, of how life could be if only academic stress didn't interfere with the living of it.
And the effects have not worn off. Reading period has been a time drain: last night in the library until sun-up with hardly any work done (talking, instead, to good and new friends--rehashing the year in perspective), today four hours at dinner off-campus and bantering forever.
Now to study? But how could I? LDOC is still in the air and with it a sense of non-urgency. At the end of this journey, I feel very much the way I did at Oxford last summer--looking back on a period of my life with a vague sense of having grown in as-of-yet still inexplicable ways. But that time I was only able to construct the narrative months afterward (at the expense of having by that point already made a few missteps), and I hope I'll be a quicker study this time around.
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