Our sweatshirts thin and cold but the air so youthfully profound we hugged our bodies on the stone steps of the library, watching the night pinned to the sky with stars. Quiet spread across the grassy yard and the sleeping squirrels, to the church dark and old whose golden bell rang at intervals nobody understood.

That night we felt powerful, and small. I had decided to drop a concentration in English, and he had decided to drop college for a year. We wanted to abandon our undeserved comfort of brick walls and ivy, of classrooms polite and intellectual, and dash to those places of loss where they needed us. Why had we been granted fifty thousand dollars to argue and essay, when there were exhausted men and women silently bent over in mines and fields, collecting illness and less than a dollar? We knew, while we stretched our legs over several steps, we knew there were people handing over their lifetimes' savings for a chance to live in the first world, our world. Because in theirs, there were machetes and empty wells and homes with flickering lanterns, there were prejudices and worries and landgrabbing. We had class in the morning, English 10a, Major British Writers. But of what importance was it, really, the colour green in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?

We go to Harvard, some say smartly, pumped with secret delight at the immediate awe they receive. But our pride is a wicked illusion if it springs from the self-indulgent achievement of attending a school. We will only know that we deserved this honour the day we choose to plunge into the wailing world, and leave our resumes behind. Not a day earlier.