The order of things

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. The sound of my neighbor performing calisthenics at 3 a.m. had plagued me for weeks. He also possessed a penchant for what might be described as elevator music — that is, if the elevator broke loose and killed all its passengers. Not suprisingly, when he left for fall break my spirits began to soar. "The things I'll do!" I cried gleefully. "Sleep for hours at a stretch! Open my windows! Paint over the extensive scratch marks on my wall!" But I had spoken too soon. My devious neighbor had left his alarm clock switched on as a pithy reminder that evil is always and everywhere an insoluble phenomenon. These days the sound of beeping sets off a Pavlovian response involving a corkscrew and my neighbor's door.

Indeed, there is a certain cosmic order to things that men struggle against in vain. It permeates our lives. One such example is the Princeton beauty pageant that people occasionally call the "USG Elections." I had the toe-curling pleasure of meeting a repugnant candidate who was planning to be class president. He had started chatting with me so as to obtain "the Asian vote," whatever that was.

"I will plan many intellectual discussions, prohibit the consumption of alcohol and crucify homosexuals in Palmer Square during Lent," he said.

"You won't become president," I informed him. "Besides the fact that you're unpleasant and emanate that enchanting I'ma-serial-killer aura, you're just not attractive enough to become president. You don't have a winning smile and nice hair and hardly anybody covets your goods. Drunk sorority girls do not write your name on their naked bodies with marker pens."

He looked upset and I feared he would start singing the Ave Maria. He did not. "What do you know," he screeched. "You're a stupid foreigner."

"That I am," I said, "but I am also the oracle of truth and sensibility."

I was correct, as the oracle of truth and sensibility necessarily is. While I appreciate the democratic process, having escaped from a totalitarian nightmare of a country, the cosmic order of things dictates that, in college elections, the popular and the attractive always reign supreme. Considering how little these so-called governmental elections affect people's lives concretely, credentials and abilities are completely superfluous to the process. The only thing class representatives represent is the thorough superficiality of the human spirit. The most ludicrous of all has to be the coveted post of Social Chair. I once saw that on a T-shirt with a picture of Mao. I imagine having that on your résumé gives you a kind of Silvio Berlusconi credibility most job applicants sadly lack.

And yet the order of things can be far more dramatic than dancing flower maidens. My own friend ran up against the cosmic order of things when she fell in love with a Residential Advisor. One dark and stormy night she told me about her ill-fated love affair. Though madly in love, he had begun ignoring her because they could not be together; the rules forbade it. As she told me her tragic tale, I could practically hear the theme from "Romeo and Juliet" in the background.

"Turn that vile music off," I screamed at my neighbor while clawing at the wall. Then I turned back to my friend sweetly. As the oracle of truth and sensibility I felt obliged to dispense some wisdom. "Do it," I said. "Nobody will find out. In the grand cosmic order of things people fall in love." She was not convinced and returned to her room to weep and emit woeful noises.

I sat in my room for a long while after, thinking about all these college students pretending to be senators and presidents and devising governmental elections, rules and restrictions. It is a marvelous simulation that they will not outgrow just yet. In their tiny microcosm of the universe things are earnest and happy and run like clockwork. Everything is noble; everyone is a Stakhanovite. It is a wonderful pretense that makes things seem more important than they are, bringing the semblance of order to chaos. You can plan all the elections and invent all the rules you want, creating roles and hierarchies to fulfill every conceivable need; human nature automatically circumvents them, turning them into a spectacle. Beneath my excavation of human nature lies cultivated apathy towards all such simulacra. I did not vote for any class president because I refuse to play the role of good citizen in a postmodern Athens. This is apathy at its apotheosis. I have refused to take any path at all, and that has made all the difference. Johann Loh is a freshman from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.