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| Kyle Hilbrecht Class of 2018 |
We are always running away from the great beast that is death. We can smell it. We can feel it in our bones because it is coming for us. It’s out for blood and we are the blood, and it wants to swallow us up and drink the whole world.
So we’d better go. We’d better wake up and realize that we lie in the sandy quagmire of time and we are on our backs and sinking. It is up and around our ears, dulling our brain and pulling our skin ever downward. Let us open our eyes now. Let us open our eyes and be blinded by the sun. Let us stand up and walk out of the sand now. We will not have the strength if we wait.
Today we are in our salad days, our youth, and we will forever watch as they skip away leaving us to stretch arms out and into the past after them. Our marble youth is being chipped away by God’s hammer and oxygen, and forming our thing into what it will be forever. We must realize that there is no time. We only have one chance before we hear the ring of the bell, before the fight is over, before all eyes are on us to ask us what we did with the thing that is us. Believe me, they will ask. You will ask yourself, too. What was it that that gave your thing its thingness? What did you do with the impossible gift of being alive and here? We must find out other things, too. We must decide who will share in our thing and whose thing we will take part in. We cannot waste our thing because it is precious and only lasts a while, and then it will be all. We must take ourselves out from under the knife of others and sculpt ourselves. We must be our own creator. We must be Adam and God and the whole world. We must create ourselves in our own image if we wish to live our own lives.
Kyle Hilbrecht is a freshman McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. He studies political science.