The conference of the Columbians

We’ve almost arrived at the year’s end.

But we’re not there yet. We won’t make it until we finish finals in a blaze of glory and fly away, burned out and in ashes. We won’t consummate our Columbian-ness, we won’t understand what all the craziness of another semester means until, like the moths of 12th-century Persian mystic Farid ud-Din ‘Attar, we’ve stumbled through the final flames of the semester.

Attar’s moths appear in a short parable in “The Conference of the Birds,” an epic poem about the mystical journey to truth. They seek to investigate the reality of the flame—that to which they are so essentially and so fatally attracted. Two moths fly by a flame and return to the other moths, each claiming to have understood the truth of the fire. But their claims are rejected. A third then flies to the candle, plunges headlong into the flame, and is set aglow. It is he who has understood. His burning wings symbolize his true understanding of what it means to love and to seek knowledge.

The parable clearly has divine and mystical significances, but, in an odd way, I think it can also act as a metaphor for what we do here at college, especially in this holiday-turned-finals season. We’ve each been burned before at Columbia, whether by each other, by the powers-that-be, by the system of education itself, or by whatever. We’ve come in such close contact with Columbia—whatever “Columbia” may metonymically represent to us—that we’ve been engulfed in metaphorical flames.

A question then arises, though. What is it that makes us willing to do this? What is it that drives us to this figurative self-immolation?

Attar’s moths suggest that we do all this out of love. Just as the moth’s intrinsic attraction to the flame makes it fly into the fire, it’s because we love what we do here at college that we seek to be burned. We’re so single-mindedly in love that we can’t be at peace until we weld ourselves to our object of adoration, until our sleepy eyes and heavy backpacks and dirty hoodies all take on a Columbian identity.

That’s highfalutin, but in reality, it’s simple: We love. We love being college students, and we love doing this whole college thing with a couple thousand other brilliant people. Granted, we don’t love it all the time, but at the end of the day, when all is said and done, we do.

For some reason, it’s a sentiment we refuse to articulate. We pretend to be aloof. We pretend not to care. We pretend—in lecture and discussion section, in the dining hall and our dorm rooms, on Broadway and the subway—to be all brains and no heart.

Yet, if there were no love involved in all of this, I don’t think we’d make it. We just wouldn’t bother. We’d be the first two moths who fly by, nonchalant and unscathed.
But that isn’t what we do. We bother. We fly into the flame.

It sounds maudlin, but love acts as the thread that weaves our disparate Columbian stories into a single, coherent narrative. It is Hephaistos carving and Genji crying; it is our disdain for parochialism and our advocacy of diversity; it is an inter-group campus event and a campaign for student council; it is a scattered people longing to go home and a high school student longing to leave home; it is a desire to study abroad and a hope to honor America; it is an aggressive campus debate and a harmonious campus dialogue; it is that which makes everything seem so temporary but everlasting, so sad but joyous. And it is what makes us end the year ablaze but burning out, able to claim, as the last flames flicker away, a visceral understanding of the journey to knowledge.

So, as we ironically sip coffee out of festive Starbucks cups, let’s think about what it is that makes us soar, like Attar’s infatuated moths, right into the Columbian fire. And, flaming out as the year dwindles away, let’s express it in a way that can be told.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a former Spectator editorial page editor, a former senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and served as secretary of the the Bahá'í Club of Columbia University. He is studying abroad at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Tuesdays.