Ingrid Diran
View From a Purple Mountaintop
Let me tell you what this essay is supposed to do: offer a short and informative glimpse of my personal Williams experience, allow both students and alumni points of entry where they may link their experience to mine, and finally, help elucidate what a Williams education looks like from its finish. I will say from the start that I’m afraid I won’t be able to accomplish these things here. This is at least partially because the place has both set me on a journey and taught me to map it, and so I will write of Williams as someone whose first view of her own experience has been, as it were, from a purple mountaintop.
Imagine that I am writing from the summit of a biographical Greylock, from which a view opens onto a landscape of experience marked by worn, sprawling trails. From here, I see paths that began four years ago lead from intellectual curiosity to intellectual conviction, from a late-adolescent awkwardness to an early-adult hopefulness. I can see that my very desires and fears have not only changed direction, but have a new topography beneath them. As I prepare to leave this, my first vantage point, all routes lead back into the bramble, the underbrush. My future invites and daunts me with the prospect of new mountains to top — although not for the sake of destination, but for other views. This essay will be about how I reached my first vista here at Williams, which is not a very different task than explaining the process by which one opens her eyes.
I am a first-generation American, the daughter of two Romanian immigrants, born in Los Angeles, a sun-lover and beach-goer. Of course, I didn’t know that until I got here. Williamstown, before revealing anything of itself, first made me aware of who I had been, and what I’d left behind. I remember for the first time feeling “west-coast,” “Californian,” and something like an immigrant, my first year here. My pace of life and notion of ambition were so different from those of my peers that words like “internship,” “CV,” “fellowship,” took two years for me to register, and a third, finally, to understand. The worlds of careers, intellectualism, activism, politics, broke on me like morning. For that reason I can say that Williams, illuminating entire regions of new thought, slowly helped me notice that I had indeed been in the dark.
Yet the way these worlds were revealed to me was not only to point my gaze outward, but inward, too, where light shone on a ground equally as foreign. As I acquired new knowledge in courses or among friends, I was simultaneously made aware of unknown terrain in myself. Learning about ways of representing the world helped lay the ground for my own self-representation, my self-consciousness. This has been at the heart of why I study literature: to acquire a generous vocabulary for bringing things into definition. I like a process of inquiry in which reading a story also means learning how it is told.
I am a young, female, American student, educated in Williamstown, a literature-lover and nature-walker. Of course, I didn’t know that until I spent spring and summer of my junior year in Southern France. My Williams experience came mirrored back to me then just like my California background had come into the relief of the Berkshires two years before. Everything that was strange and difficult about France made me aware of who I had evolved into at Williams. The new possibilities that fascinated me about French life, clearly showed me those which I had realized in my American one. And while I was far from literature (indeed, from all books in English) I was reading my education as Williams had taught me to do — that is, as a double revelation. The story of my past was being written by the experience of an unfamiliar present. When I came back to Williams, I became aware of how much this story had indeed come into my possession. I saw the blue of the Mediterranean clearest against a spring Berkshire sky.
Sitting here at the corner of Spring Street beneath such a sky, I can only guess what I will say about myself a year, or even, a day after graduation. But in that retrospective knowledge, in what I will then miss about this place, will also be what I have gained from Williams. Standing atop four years here, I move gratefully onward. And while I can't take the mountains with me, I will always carry the view. My hope is another prospect.
Senior Essay
by Ingrid Diran ’05
OnCampus Commencement/Reunion Newsletter, June 2005
Diran is an English major from La Canada, Calif. Next year she will be studying history and English at Exeter College, Oxford University on a Donovan-Moody fellowship offered by the college.