Falling into the jug

In the 11th century, Amir Onsorolma’ali Kaykaus, a prince of the Ziyarid dynasty, lived and wrote prolifically in the Caspian coastland of modern-day Iran. In one vignette he included in a letter to his son, he told the story of a tailor who owned a little shop outside the city gates within sight of the graveyard. The tailor had hung a jug from one of the rafters outside his home.

Each time a funeral procession passed through the city gates en route to the graveyard, the tailor would toss a little pebble into the jug, one for each death. The tailor repeated this process ceaselessly, dutifully making note of monthly tallies, until one day he too met his end. Some time later, a man came by the store, his clothes in need of altering. As he approached the shop, unaware of the tailor’s passing, he saw that the doors and windows were shuttered. The visitor asked a neighbor the tailor’s whereabouts. The neighbor simply responded, “The tailor too has fallen into the jug.”

In this day and age, we, like the tailor, are fixated by the myriad ways in which the numbers are stacked against us. The statistical probabilities of death and destruction are probed with zeal and reported with unmerited urgency. In the event of bad news, we always seek quantifications. We seek to know the body count, the economic cost, the rejection rate, the weight gain, the grade-point reduction, the likelihood of survival, the odds of escalation, the probability of inheritance, the number of infected. Like the tailor, we seek to quantify in order to control, and we believe that by marking catastrophes big and small, we might cope better. But Kaykaus passed on the story of the tailor to his son for a reason. He was issuing a warning that a life preoccupied with inevitable tragedies is a tragic life in the end. As the neighbor’s response testifies, it’s hard to live a life worth remembering when one devotes one’s energies to counting funeral processions.

The University, unlike any other place, forces us to count funeral processions as a by-product of education. We are compelled by our courses to grapple with the deficiencies of the status quo and the atrocities of the past. We never know enough, and we are always on the brink of repeating history. Our cultures, societies, and states become the ephemeral contents of textbooks, and they cease to be the constants of our livelihoods. Everything is ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Mortality and morbidity are the hallmarks of human existence—science fighting a valiant fight to sustain us, the art of letters seeking to nourish us. But we always die in the end, with volumes of wisdom unused. And on top of all of this, we have more practical concerns of the quotidian. To a certain extent, getting an education is only as valuable as the job it provides. That job is only as rewarding as its paycheck. That paycheck is only as valuable as the groceries it buys. The groceries are only as valuable as the biological functions they sustain. And really, how valuable is a churning stomach?

Infinitely valuable. A churning stomach nourishes the body, which in turn feeds the mind. The mind breeds ambition, passion, fraternity, and love. Our emotions drive us to build and bolster, to inquire and innovate, to test and test again. This is the project of the University, which is a forum for the exercise of human faculties as a force that can make a job into a vocation, an individual passion into a societal paradigm shift. In the present, as students of Columbia, 90 percent of what matters to 90 percent of the world’s population is addressed for us in one trip to John Jay dining hall. In the future, our skills as thinkers and tinkerers will enable us to overcome the challenges we face. We have the opportunity to be remembered as remarkable people by our neighbors, both local and global. Mercifully, opportunity doesn’t exist in probabilities. It is a binary: Either it exists or it does not. We always have the opportunity to excel. And we will, beating back the specter of disaster for our neighbors, so that they may remember us as more than mere pebbles in the streambed. As students, we all share this potential.

But if, by some twist of statistical probabilities, our lives are struck by disaster, if next week a tornado cuts a path through Columbia dormitories, well then, I’ll see you in hell.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj is a Columbia College first-year. He is a member of the rugby team. C.U. in Hell runs alternate Thursdays.