We need confidence to debate

Many of you readers may not remember Professor John Fleming's column of Jan. 10, 2003, in which he advocated that Princeton students take a year off between finishing high school and beginning college. The main thrust of his point (strategically purloined from Dr. Carol Rigolot and Lily Johnston '05) was that coming to college a little older and a little wiser, perhaps having had a job or at least a bit of "real-world" seasoning, would greatly enhance Princeton's intellectual climate, not to mention each student's college experience in general. A product of the year-off phenomenon myself (I took time off in what would have been my sophomore spring through my junior fall), I cannot help but agree wholeheartedly with Professor Fleming and his cohorts.

When I had the good fortune to see the current movie "Adaptation," while visiting my parents over intersession, I realized one major benefit of my time off. Watching the film, I reveled in its self-reflexivity, its meta-narratives and mirroring – all ideas that come second hand to me, an English major interested in literary theory. On walking out of the theater, I heard a nice old lady, who has probably lived through two world wars and the great depression, say to her companion that she was going to go home and look up what a critic had said about the movie so she would know what to think about it.

I remembered having that same reaction in reading books and poems in middle school, high school and even at the beginning of college. I wanted my teacher or my professor to tell me what everything "meant." I had no faith in my own interpretive capabilities, no confidence that I might have something legitimate and interesting to say, no conviction that my ideas held any weight at all. And because I didn't think I had anything worthwhile to say, I didn't. My lack of intellectual self-assurance translated into a lack of any kind of intellectual creativity or mental independence.

Coming back from my year off I distinctly remember an experience reading The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins. It occurred to me that the descriptions of the characters' clothes might be interesting. I instantly forgot that thought and moved on through the text to see what happened. It never even occurred to me that my observation was worthwhile and might be a productive approach for understanding part of the novel.

Similarly, I remember helping my younger sister write a high school English paper on John Donne's poem "Death, Be Not Proud." She had found a number of critical essays and was trying to work them into her own argument. After reading it, I told her that I thought she disagreed with one of the critics but that she should make it more explicit. She got upset and said that she couldn't disagree with someone who had published an essay on the poem. But she told me later that she liked it when I told her she could think what she wanted if she could back it up.

My instructions to my younger sister were not revolutionary nor was my insight into Wilkie Collins a groundbreaking critical discovery. In fact, my advice to my sister was exactly what teachers had been saying to me all along. It just took a certain amount of maturity for me to understand it; it took a certain amount of emotional development for me to be able to trust my own thoughts.

While my examples of this self-confidence have been exclusively literary, they are applicable to almost any situation. To think critically about a subject or an issue requires a confidence in one's own ideas and one's own abilities that only comes with maturity. I do not mean to say that I am the only one at Princeton who can trust my own ideas; I am merely contrasting my relative immaturity at the start of college with what I hope is a relatively more mature emotional state at the end of it. Although I know that five years of life and education have contributed to my development, my year off sticks out in my mind as a particularly intense period of growing up.

Whatever it was in my year away from Princeton, it helped me to find that maturity and the confidence to believe that who I am and what I had to say are worthwhile. And since then, I've been saying it, in every precept I have, every paper I turn in, and every column that I publish on this editorial page.