My last year of college is here

[amelia_petkova]

both quotes are from Tam Lin by Pamela Dean

"Janet found in her mind the words of some of Tolkien's people, discussing the story they were in and how they might end it. Bilbo had thought of, 'And they all lived happily ever after until they died. It is a good ending,' he had said, 'and none the worse for having been used before.' 'Ah!' said Sam, 'but where will they live? That's what I often wonder.' Janet wondered, too. For four years they would live here. After that, unless somebody made a prodigious and possibly miraculous effort, they would scatter to the four corners of the world, their fellowship broken, and do what all of them had done to be here in this roon now: find new friends. It seemed wasteful. Perhaps they could buy an island somewhere."

"Janet moved herself into the room she and Tina and Molly had secured...and had hardly put down her suitcases before she was assailed by a violent melancholy. This was her senior year. It was her last fall at Blackstock. All this time had gone by like a dream. You couldn't stay, unless like Thomas you had managed to much up your graduation requirements...
"'Our revels now are ended.' If you could call them revels. Yes, they had been that. Evans, Medeous, Ferris, Davison, Fleisher, had all served as Master of the Revels, each in his own manner, with her own flourishes, using his own language, her own music."

Comments

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

I miss college sometimes. (Has it really been seven years since I graduated? Feels like longer - maybe a week or two)

But the thing is, there will be other experiences. You can't hold on to the past too hard, or it will slip through your hands; do that and you are holding on to nothing at all.

[littlelotte.livejournal.com]

<3

I really really really love that book. I also know how lucky I was to have a similar melancholy my last two years. There were a lot more changes and a lot more gains and losses than Janet, in a lot of ways, but it just amazed me how reading that story took me back to my own.