It’s the last week of classes and I’m thinking about goodbyes. It’s graduation in two weeks for my senior friends and I’m thinking about goodbyes. It’s the final article for the Spring 2021 Miscellany and I’m thinking, as per usual, about how attractive John Keats was. Keats the Hottie, as he was affectionately known on Connie Walker’s 2020 London trip, is rumored to have said, in 1821, on his deathbed in Rome: “I can feel the daisies growing over me.”
Fundamentally, I don’t place value in saying goodbye. I don’t think it exists if you know people who are dead, dying, or in constant threat of death. It’s the way that people on tv hang up without saying it; the way that Black media always makes the past present for Black people; the way that your mom refuses to tell you that your dog died when you were eight. All of these forms communicate the same thing: life is repetitive, enjoy what you can, there is no such thing as goodbye.
But. I do believe in last words.
I decide, with the assistance of a senior named Maddy, that I don’t care about Keat’s many surviving words; all I need are his last ones. I keep his words, which I doubt he said, on Wentworth Place’s postcard, because I believe that a good ending is paramount to being a successfully self-absorbed person, which all good authors must be.
He definitely doesn’t hold the title of best last words. Elizabeth Barret Browning summarized, “beautiful,” about whatever was on the horizon. Gay icon and lover of nonsense, Oscar Wilde, remarked: “my wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.” These were not his very last words, as he died weeks later, but they are the ones which carry his charisma. I particularly like James Joyce’s: “does no one understand?” Because it feels like the type of thing you say when you are fifteen and no one understands you, or when you are in Advanced Fiction with Greg Smith and no one understands why you don’t want to spell things right.
I don’t mean to push into Looking for Alaska territory (mainly because I don’t possess John Green’s skinny-white-boy sympathies) but I think that if you love drama, you must also be obsessed with last words. They confirm the fallacy of your favorite author, and make them seem much more crazy, sexy, cool than they actually were. For example, I have no way of knowing if Keats was the sad hot boy I made him out to be in my head. It’s for that reason I pick his daisy-ridden fantasy as his last words, and not the more god-fearing alternative which is also attributed to him: “I shall die easy; don’t be frightened — be firm, and thank God it has come.” I disregard this alleged quote because it does not serve my fantasy, but all last words are fantasy.
Writers indulge your main character syndrome and live with melodramatic flair; they do this for their characters and in death. They provide camp to people like me, who love to exit. I love ending a zoom meeting at the first goodbye; I love when people cancel their plans; I even love the end of term tears. Perhaps it is the narcissistic knowledge that something is still there for me, expectant, and will be there whether I want it or not. I enjoy the process of getting rid of myself, and getting rid of other people, because goodbyes are really the selfish alternative to saying hello.
It’s not to say that last words aren’t similarly self-serving. They’re about what the author wishes to project to their exterior world and what we wish to hear about our interior selves. It’s the same literary narcissism that makes us look for ourselves in the characters we read, and hear goodbyes with the expectation that people will miss us. What tells you that someone will care if you say goodbye to them? If you write a message in their yearbook? Theoretically, there is no amount of words that can amount to a satisfactory goodbye from people you love. Time and effort, not a pithy phrase at the end, is a measure of how much others care. So it’s not the “daisies growing over us” that mean anything; it’s the image of Keats dying in the arms of his close friend — the arms of someone who did not need a goodbye. His last words, in actuality, are for strangers. It’s for someone to ascribe meaning to behind a computer screen exactly 200 years later.
If goodbyes are self-serving, then the only altruistic thing you can do is say hello — introduce yourself, assert your projections early. And if nobody’s dying, and they’re just graduating, we can at the very least send them off in the most selfless way possible. In the lineage of white, old, dead authors saying goodbye, a clear winner is Henry David Thoreau’s “moose… Indian,” which is a line that is perhaps missing its context. Not that we care to find it.
A very happy graduation and “moose… Indian” to Gray, Lena, and Amanda, the editors past of the Miscellany. We wish you some meaningful future hellos.
As for everyone else, catch you next term.