"Yet men... frequently starve, not for want of necessities, but for want of luxuries."

So said Thoreau 145 years ago; still, we starve. If you ask but one question of yourself, let it be this -- What are my necessities? I trust that in answering you shall overlook the trivia.

He is a careful reader who does not, in putting on the coat, tear the seams. What I write is no decree, but musing; none who reads this, I think, would so quickly abandon his own opinions.

I and most seniors now feel the mal de high school -- we are our school's Lost Generation, disillusioned and cynical. We are conditioned animals, blind, stumbling along the path laid before us. We are alive, but hardly awake. It is curious, admirable perhaps, to hear seniors pledge allegiance to the university of their choice. To those who upon graduation will become doctors and lawyers, engineers and teachers, I have no argument; they have only to fill the mold cast for them. Rather, I wonder about the others -- not the apathetic idlers, but those who feel lost, or overwhelmed, who are ill-prepared to stomach four years more of school.

School is not the final truth.

I am untried in the world, true, and therefore have a distorted perception of what is to come, but neither am I blind. When we graduate, we are pushed irrevocably into the real world, forced to abandon the ephemera of the high school world. And of the latter, what can we claim to have gleaned? How long will we remember how to conjugate irregular verbs, or what epistemology is, or how to find the derivative the long way?

Do not be shoved along, unaware, with the mass of mindless men; one need not follow forever. For the seeing mind, high school and college -- all things, in truth -- are but stepping stones to its final truth. 

As Thoreau said, "No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?"