The Man and God Experience

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Finding Meaning at Andover

Alex Thorn

Class of 2004

Miss Jean St. Pierre

English 544

12.04.03

Dear Ms. St. Pierre,

At Phillips Academy, we operate and function under hectic, mechanized conditions, often leaving little room for introspection and giving its students a feeling of confinement (like Oran). Whether blame falls on the institution or its students’ own rigor is unclear. But, in a conscious attempt to respond to the system, I, like many students, have found that in order to truly enjoy Phillips Academy, students must pave their own paths – we must find our own ways to satisfaction that may not include hackneyed academic success. What I have found is that, while it can teach me Algebra and grammar, Andover is better at teaching me brotherhood, loyalty and respect. And, at a time when my peers and I are feverishly caught in the college admissions process, I have come to the realization that Andover’s life lessons to me were not taught from any book, but that their meanings came from something else.

I open with that anecdote because, throughout your class and my time at Andover, Ms. St. Pierre, I found myself asking the same question over and over: Why can’t it just end? Why can’t Gatsby stop loving Daisy; why can’t the plague stop killing; why can’t the women of Brewster place escape it? In all cases, the divine idea of fate comes head to head with the material world and the human complex. As you so perfectly describe your course, Man and God is a discussion about the clash of the human and the superhuman – living life and having a destiny, predetermination… finding what we are all supposed to be doing. Sitting in that back left corner, halfway between the window and the chalkboard, I have had an epiphany. Destiny is stupid. I am not like Gatsby, nor am I like the citizens of Oran. Instead, my solution to the question that your course has raised – where is the meaning? – is based on my belief in the strength of the human complex and its ability to not need to find meaning. I just am. I can’t do everything or have it all, but that’s okay.

You see, Ms. St. Pierre, as an Andover student, the common gaffe that students here make is to mistake success on the grade-scale, college acceptances and material world for meaning. Instead, as students are blasted with commitments and studying, true success in hyper-Andover is learning to cope with your mistakes and not get too stressed out – to realize your own shortcomings and operate with some sort of mental self-restraint so that you don’t feverishly pursue something that isn’t truly important (like the honors grade).

Like Gatsby, I am a dreamer. At Phillips, I have always fought a battle between commitments and success. However, in your class, I, unlike Gatsby, have realized my own humanity – that I cannot do everything. So, instead of being plagued by the unattainable (Daisy, escaping Brewster Place, escaping Oran during the plague, growing up in a murderous family without having it affect your childhood, the men working on the foreign, land-based shores), I have learned to let things roll. God created imperfect Man and His triumph is that His creation recognizes his own imperfections and has the capacity to deal with them. Few Andover students can achieve it all. However, the ultimate success, then, for the Andover student is to have the right enough mind to be able to recognize his own inability to do everything and move on.

Why can’t it just end? Where is the meaning? The great thing about Phillips Academy, though it may be lost on those students caught up in the pace of life or their own academic follies, is its students’ abilities to pick and chose and take what they want from the school and form their own educations that are the amalgam of intellectual growth and moral achievement.

Sincerely,

Alex Thorn

Class of 2004