“In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfils its various functions. When everyone who moves around the city today is dead, in a hundred and fifty years, say, the sound of people’s comings and goings, following the same old patterns, will still ring out. The only new thing will be the faces of those who perform these functions, although not that new because they will resemble us.”
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle
January’s Arctic temperatures provide sufficient doom and gloom (with the exception of two magnificent, if not historic snow days at UTSG), so perhaps Knausgaard’s meditations on death make for ill-timed inspiration. The Norwegian autofictive author claims the city “does not care” whose knees extend around every bend, with great shuffling crowds of pedestrians defined by a mass of bodies, not the masters of the bodies themselves. That the cycles of people’s comings and goings will continue “following the same old patterns,” tremendous torrents carving paths through ravines and eroding the dirt, demolishing family-owned restaurants, beating new cracks into the sidewalk, lighting new trash bins on fire.
There lies something humbling in the idea that the city does not care, that we are just patrons whose only purpose is to fill theatres to maximum capacity irrespective of who those patrons are—a matter of quantity, not quiddity. That we are one among 70 000 student numbers scribbled onto exams and emails, a new phalanx, new students closing up our ranks as we edge ever closer to the end (the “end” as in graduation, not the smothering embrace of the infernos of our friend Yuriy on the run… see Sijil’s coverage for more).
Moseying around Vic in this final year, looking from the top of the ladder to the rungs below, you get a clearer view of the faces staring back at you: replicas of your friends’ features appear through rippling reflections, in new clothes, new classes, with new friendships and new fallouts. The faces are “not that new because they will resemble us”—the first years will step into our well-worn shoes already splitting at the heels from the owners we borrowed them from. We observe not a process of replacement, but rebirth: new faces finding new ways to fill the gaps you leave behind. All things considered, these moments which hold such personal significance for our lives—living alone, application acceptances and rejections, house parties with dear friends, first loves—are but one strand of wool twisted into a greater ball of yarn, with (fraternal) twin strands following close behind. As you cycle through the pages of this first 2026 issue, look up and find the cycles in your immediate surroundings, your readings, your classmates, and the decor adorning the classroom walls. As the yarn snake devours its own tail, focus not on its gaping maw and the swallowed skein, but on the new strands being spun.