Three Weeks at Stanford: What Ikiru Taught Me About Meaning

I walked in nervous. The questions people were asking Professor Lee in those first few mornings felt like they were coming from somewhere I hadn't gotten to yet, and I spent a lot of those early sessions just trying to keep up instead of actually engaging. I don't remember the exact day that changed. It just did, somewhere in the middle of the three weeks, and by the end I was the one raising my hand with something I actually wanted to ask instead of something safe.

Writing my final paper on Ikiru ended up being weirdly connected to that. My whole argument is that Watanabe never gets to feel the meaning of what he built while he's building it, it only gets pieced together after, by other people, badly, in a room he's not even in. I kept trying to figure out if that was true of me too. It's not entirely. I could tell I was changing while it was happening, even if I couldn't have said how. I just didn't get the full shape of it until now, trying to explain it to someone else.

The swing scene still messes with me a little. In the paper I argue he's not happy, that the film won't let you forget the pain underneath it. But my gut reaction, before I'd read a word of Heidegger, was that he'd reached something like happiness, and honestly I still think that even after four pages arguing against it. I can't tell anymore how much of that is just instinct and how much is three weeks of Haidt and Slingerland quietly changing what I think happiness even is. Probably both, and I've stopped trying to pull them apart.

If my paper's right that meaning comes from other people and not from sitting alone with your own head, then the people who actually did that for me weren't in the readings. It was dinner at the dining hall, talking about lecture and the books and FIFA in the same breath, none of it separated out. Nobody was trying to make me more confident. My roommate definitely wasn't trying. It just happened from being around people every day, the same way Toyo isn't trying to teach Watanabe anything in the movie, she's just eating her parfait and making wind up rabbits, and he copies her anyway without either of them meaning for that to happen.

So I don't think this camp was one clean moment on a swing, and I don't think it was just a verdict I'll figure out later either. It was a little of both, felt some while it was happening and still only really visible now that I'm the one trying to put it into words.