Much Ado About Spring Break

19 March 2012Cherrie K

All the world’s a school, and all the students sometimes tired, and a student in his or her time can be tired in many parts, tired for ages. At first the Monday, yawning in dawn’s arms, then Tuesday, creeping like a snail, and Wednesday, sighing like those who brave the crowded line for lunch, then Thursday, stretched out as long as the Number One kilts, and Friday, drawn out like the sea, and Saturday, oh Saturday, pernicious Saturday, to awake in the Brentwood Bubble while the rest of Mill Bay is in bed!

To sleep or not to sleep: yes, that is the question! Whether ‘tis nobler for the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous homework and frantic cleaning for this Saturday’s Number One, or to take arms against this sea of troubles – and by opposing – fail your assignments and your inspection? To procrastinate: to sleep forever, and by sleep to say we end the headache and the never-ending lessons that our brain is heir to – it is a dream fervently wished. To procrastinate, to sleep; to sleep: perchance to dream: Ay!

There’s the rub! For in sleep, how will dreams come easily when there lies only the promise to wake again to a certain authority which makes calamity of so demanding a life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of grades, dwindling free time, growing responsibility, the pangs of prefect duty, cafeteria duty, academic duty, the toil of dusting and vacuuming and dusting again, the alarming number of unread emails lurking in the inbox, the disappointing static of transatlantic telephone calls – the agony of counting down to cookie break?

Who would bear these burdens, to burn under the beat and bustle of busy Brentwood life, but that the promise of something after this life – the undiscovered country of University from whose bourn no high school student returns, makes us rather bear those ills we have, than to lose this chance towards a life we know not of? Thus, conscience of this pressing future doth make students of us all…

But soft! What light comes through the yonder window but Break? It is the east, and Spring Break is the sun. Apollo – pull thy chariot with greater haste, for this poor pile of work that has bred cobwebs on my desk for a thousand days is sick and pale with grief!

Break is our light; March 9th discourses; we will answer it – the hope of eighteen days and seventeen nights of rapture which will rival the state of heaven! Its radiance shames these rain-stained days as the daylight doth a lamp, and under its ardent glow, our burdens blush. See, how Break advances closer day by day! O, that I were a glove upon Apollo’s hand, that I might make haste his chariot to overleap moons and stars –!

Cherrie K

Where Students Choose To Be