College is like the “random frat guy” your freshman year roommate hooked up with on the Roble catwalk during orientation. She couldn’t remember his name the morning after, and he became a running joke the rest of the year. We will remember Stanford’s name, but as the second week of another quarter rolls to a close, everything else is a bit of a blur. All the specifics fade, and we are left with a catchphrase here, a memory there. The past four years begin to feel like they’ve boiled down to an inside joke we’ve been passing around for so long that we don’t even remember why it was funny in the first place.

In another six months, we won’t remember the details of calculating standard deviations, not reading William Blake’s “Jerusalem” or even analyzing “Long Day’s Journey into Night.” It’s not because they’re particularly complex topics. We also can’t remember the differences between ionic and covalent bonds, and all that we can muster about metallic bonds is that they probably involve metals. Theoretically we learned that at the age of 14. We can’t remember the specifics of every party, though we’ll probably be able to sing “Come on Eileen” on our deathbeds.

This quarter, we’re both surrounded by sophomores and freshmen in introductory courses we deliberately forgot to take. You really shouldn’t be able to count up to your course number with your hands. We look around and wonder if we looked like that as sophomores: small, clean and slightly on edge as we scribbled notes. We want to take all those whippersnappers aside, stop them as they write down verbatim quotes. We want to let them know that after four years of education, it’s likely that they won’t remember anything quite as well as the anecdotes that they failed to take down in their notes:

The professor who compared America’s recurring “loss of innocence” to the perennially virginal Doris Day, then waxed poetic about the “rehymenization” of America. The time your PWR instructor told you the too personal story of how he went swimming naked in a sea at night and came out covered in bioluminescent algae, “glowing like the very body of a Greek god.” When you’ve forgotten your professor’s name, you’ll still remember that her hair was five times the volume of her head.

Forgetting the names of professors is one thing. But forgetting the names of your friends is unforgivable...and inevitable. How many of the people you lived with freshman year still have last names? In another quarter, on the eve of graduation, will anything remain of the four parties we attended this weekend? It seemed like a perfect slice of college life: a live performance of early Mozart quartets, vodka and whiskey from an ice luge, fending off foreign grad students on the dance floor, picking up a few bucks at a 7-year-old’s birthday party.

Four years, and all we’ve got is a growing case of amnesia. Alzheimer’s at the age of 21.

But just as we’re about to log on to Axess to unenroll and save ourselves the tuition for this quarter, it begins to come back to us. Perhaps we did not read word for word all the books for Language and Prehistory or Archaic Greek Art. But we begin to remember snippets, and suddenly it returns: the physical sensation of our minds being blown. The moment I understood, “A word is an artifact, like a pottery shard or a ruined temple.” The awe of seeing live remnants of 2,500-year-old Greek statues in a museum after a quarter of seeing them merely projected onto the wall. Staging a fake wedding for forty guests.

So perhaps we still can’t remember who Fichte is. But in the end it’s more surprising that there are so many things we think we’ll never forget. And as the facts fade, the moral of the fable remains. Don’t do the smart thing when you can do the memorable one. Because though you can’t regret what you’ve forgotten, it would suck to get to the end of four years and not remember anything.

$20 to the first person to write us an e-mail. Make it one we won’t forget: robinp@stanford.edu, mhutcher@stanford.edu.