“These forgetful spirits hope for resurrection / into bodies. They start to want to see the sky.”
– The Aeneid, Vergil, trans. Shadi Bartsch
It is a well-known, undisputed, oft-discussed fact that it is easy to die at the University of Toronto. When each exam season draws near, you can feel the gloomy wisps of spectres floating in the brisk winter air, lingering on school grounds, trailing your stress like tendrils of warning smoke breaching any ease of mind. But this sense of mortality is a gross injustice to how easy it is to live, The instructions, like divine messages carried on lips of wind, are whispered to you from everywhere.
If you listen closely, the city and the campus are full of song. Beneath the concrete and the construction noise, there is a hum buried in the bricks of Old Vic, the tree roots sprawled under the quad, and the constant chatter of Burwash dining hall. It’s in the artists in every crowd and every corner, feeding off of each other to stay alive, and the way the libraries fill up with groups of students sticking together when times are hard. It’s in your peers protesting on King’s College Circle and the piano music that drifts upstairs from the basement practice rooms. It can be hard to hear amidst the continuous onslaught of assignments, but it is always there.
Being a student here can be contradictory and paradoxical and irrational. It can feel like a dangerous odyssey, an endless voyage on a sinking ship constantly wracked by Poseidon’s fury. But the greatest thing about university is that almost everyone is suffering with you. You don’t know it, but there is a girl carrying a bouquet of funeral flowers through Robarts library. You don’t know it, but the person dancing on the table next to you is just as worried about their GPA. At the same moment you pulled an all-nighter to finish an assignment, a group of drunken first-years will walk past you on their way home from a party. As you’re trying to sleep the night before an exam, the dorm across the hall will be throwing a birthday party for a departing friend. You go from living within two minutes of all your closest friends to living spread out across the city in your own apartments and townhouses. And among the chaos, safe harbour feels dangerously out of reach.
The semesters bleed into one another, midterms to midterms to finals, then finals again. Yet, in between, there’s TIFA lectures from your favourite authors. $5 movie showings at an indie theatre. Music recitals. Operas and ballets. Shakespeare every fall in the Trinity courtyard. Medieval plays put on by the smallest performance troupes. Classrooms filled with the chants of dead languages no one cares to learn anymore. Second-hand bookshops you can pretend to have all to yourself. Hippie cafes that play enough zen music and burn enough incense to make the mediocre coffee worth it. In between, there is a guy standing outside EJ Pratt in the dead of winter willing to share his cigarettes with you.
Life here is not just about the unattainable GPA or the endless research positions you never hear back from (but you will, eventually). More important than either of those things is paying tribute to your human flesh—to the air pumping constantly through your blood and the little biological dance that allows music to enter your ears and tangle in all the knots of your stressed-out student brain. Follow the hum of living things. Go into all of Toronto’s alleyways which might make you feel alive.
This is how I found myself in a small seminar classroom where Emily Wilson was guest-lecturing, sharing stories of a Homer re-enactor giving one-man shows to three people in his NYC basement. This is how I ended up at The Rex on a Thursday night after finals season was over, chin in my hand, two glasses of wine beside me. Through the jazz, the rhythms of brass, and the clarinet blues, one command landed in my ears over and over again: live, live, live.