Adventures with Campus Ghosts

In truth, I know nothing of Matthew Pearlstone. I never saw him. I never met him. If we crossed paths, he was nothing more than one of the hundreds of anonymous faces I pass on this campus every day, blurring together like leaves viewed through the window of a moving car. I have no memory of him. He was nothing to me.

And then, suddenly, on Monday morning, he was something.

Of course, he was not himself. What I and every other reader of The [Cornell] Sun Monday morning came across was little more than a vague approximation of a human being. If Matthew Pearlstone was once perceptible or real, by the time I had been introduced to him, his presence was nothing more than its own simulacrum.

A 500-word effigy [the writer means elegy or eulogy, I think] was the only trace of an entire being that I could glean, the only intimation of who Matthew Pearlstone was before he died in a University of Virginia dorm room on March 17. And sadly, for most of us at Cornell, this is how he will remain, the only index of his persona being the indeterminate outline offered through newsprint.

Newspapers have an almost Orphic propensity for awakening the dead. They are the place where the specter of what is passing is posited, recorded in blocks of text and still images, as if time could be compressed and suspended. And whenever we need to revive what is past and what is dead, we need only turn to newspapers to find these snapshots so that our imaginations can animate them. That is their remarkable capacity, that with only minimal detail they can formulate a resurrection, no matter how temporary it may be.

Many of us learned early on that Cornell was a place where more than GPAs go to die. For whatever reason, Cornell has the pejorative [I’d drop this adjective] reputation of being a school with a high suicide rate, even though, by comparison, [drop “in comparison”] it hardly leads the nation in such a morbid category [drop this last phrase - end with “the nation.”] Perhaps it is because we have the bridges that span themselves over the depths of the gorges, those ominous signifiers of a liminal point between life and death. [Getting a bit wordy and pompous here.] Perhaps it's because our prelims are so maniacally stressful. Either way, death is part of the culture at Cornell. In any student's time here, several of his classmates will die. Nevertheless, that knowledge still fails to blunt the impact of hearing about a fellow student's passing.

The Sun, by turn, has the rather dubious distinction of reporting on student death whenever it occurs. As a paper, The Sun isn't exactly well-equipped for recording death - it doesn't have an obituary section and no staff writer specializes in such writing, so the eulogizing of a student must unfortunately be incorporated into the bare-bones, objectified reporting of their death. But when such a death is reported, The Sun becomes the grotesquely fetishized object of our collective curiosity (in fact, it might be the only time that some people read The Sun). I don't think that anyone can deny that their interest in the paper is piqued ten-fold when they see a headline pronouncing the passing of another - we need to know who, what happened, where it was, when and most importantly, how. And so those essential aims of news writing, the five Ws, become synonymous with our voyeuristic desires. But where in this process is the image of that person elucidated?

There is certainly something to be said of the effect that such an article has on those who read it. I don't honestly think that anyone here is so cynical so [drop the second “so”] as not be troubled and saddened by such news, and I think that it gives us all the most uncomfortable of pauses. But how ephemeral is that impact? I think that, as a campus, we are all unified in a feeling of pathos, both for a life lost and for the family and friends who must carry on with only the void of that life. But how long does that sympathy persist before it becomes transient? A week? A day? Until we realize that its time for our next class, or our friend turns to us and changes the subject?

And more importantly, how long does our process of remembrance endure? If our sense of that person exists only so long as we have the paper open, then it vastly too short. But at the same time, can we expect anything more? Is it really in our nature to care more deeply about those we have never encountered, or have never even heard of until we glossed through the paper on our way to class? Sometimes I wonder where the ghosts of this campus go when everyone turns back to their daily routines. [Lovely sentence.] Do they disappear, vanishing just soon as they arose? Or does this campus open itself, pulling them up inside of it and holding them there in a great repository of past history? [Past history is redundant.] At The Sun's office there are bound volumes of every issue of the paper that has ever been published. Every single issue, even the most mundane and inconsequential, from the 125 years of its existence, is held there, some of them torn, some of them crumbling like rotted fibers. Paging through these bound volumes is like experiencing a temporal suspension - a backward movement through time becomes possible, and we can access, at least in our imaginations, all that was.

The problem is that, outside of whatever bureaucratic, administrative records exist in Day Hall, The Sun may be the only actual archive of Cornell's dead, recording and reporting each one as they pass. I don't know if there is a better way, if it is possible for this institution to remember its dead in a format that won't be discarded to the trash can at the end of the day. But if The Sun is to be the only record, then I hope it can be cherished as that.

I will never know anything more of Matthew Pearlstone, or any other student that has died during my time here, than what I read in this very paper. And while that may be horribly inadequate, I am still thankful that, at the very least, I had that one textual incarnation of them allowing me to approach some level of familiarity, even [if] it was only in my imagination.

Zach Jones

[L]eft behind dozens of online messages that delved into his drinking habits, providing a rare glimpse into the thinking of a boy on the cusp of being a man. He was well-versed in the dangers of alcohol. He clearly did not drink thoughtlessly. He intellectualized it. He defended and defined it with the same brilliance he brought to academics.

…One of his Cornell housemates, Philip Chow, recalled how impressed he was by Pearlstone's intelligence and his dedication to following a strict marathon-training diet of protein shakes, energy bars and pasta.

"The whole thing feels really weird, but we still miss Matt here," Chow said in an e-mail interview. "He was a nice kid, who livened up parties and always had stories to tell, but loved drinking a little too much."