MARCH 9, 2026 – It’s a question with multiple answers—broad and narrow: “Why did I go to college?” As is the case with the same basic question in other contexts, the answers can be approached from either side of the subject experience. For example, “Why did I go to Paris?” The “pre-answer”: “To see the skyline from the top of the Eiffel Tower.” The “post-answer”: “[As it turned out], to have the most wonderful conversation with strangers over the finest cuisine in the world.” So it is with college. From the “pre” perspective, there was a dual answer. “So I could get into law school, then become a lawyer,” was my naïve and largely myopic answer to myself. “So I could learn stuff,” was what I assumed my professors wanted to hear.
As I worked my way through life and career, however, my simplistic “pre” responses were transformed into something less definitive. Yes, of course, I went to college to “learn stuff,” but the more I ventured into things, the less applicable was the “stuff” I learned, at least in proportion to the volume of “new stuff” I had to absorb to cope, adjust, adapt, survive and (every so often) excel. And if an undergraduate degree was a sine qua non of gaining admission to law school, and graduation from law school (coupled with passing the bar exam) was a sine qua non of becoming a lawyer, well, I could readily affirm my other “pre” response to the question, “Why did I go to college?”
But there were times during my career when I seriously questioned my early decision to practice law. My career choice had led to some unhappy times and places, and I remember well falling into a serious slump, when every workday for months on end, as I approached the back door of our house after escaping from my office, mumbling to myself, “Another day squandered.” For a while, this daily assessment was accompanied by the question, “Why did I go to law school?” But then one day it came out, “Why did I go to college?”
Fortunately, I emerged from that long dark professional funk and found joy and fulfillment in my work. In turn, I discovered renewed purpose in life outside of work. One day a kind of “Eureka!” moment occurred when I saw life and everything in it as an integrated proposition; I realized that all in my life informed everything else in my life. And somehow I tied this personal insight to those years as a cloistered undergraduate, when life felt wholly integrated.
The circumstances of my surroundings—a small liberal arts college near the ocean in one direction, on the edge of the wilds of Maine in the other—were artificially arranged, you might say; unrealistic in contrast to the “real world” beyond our tidy campus (and often untidy rooms), but that was the whole point of the experience: to spend what we were told would be “the best four years of life” living in a world where academic rigor (“learning stuff”?), athletic pursuits, broad social engagement, late-night bull sessions, wild parties, and peering at the outside world from the quiet confines of the “newspaper room” of the library were interwoven into a highly integrated life.
Of course, I didn’t see it that way until the “Eureka!” moment when I was past the age of 60.
Fast forward the clock, then the calendar to . . . the present. As I consider flight options for attending my upcoming 50th college class reunion, the question looms again: “Why did I go to college?” Or more specifically, “Why did I go to Bowdoin College?”
While pondering the question this morning, an email helped answer it. The sender was one William Owen, a music major classmate who’d graduated from Bowdoin summa cum laude, was a Fulbright Scholar and obtained a masters at Yale; was a Fellow Commoner at Kings College, Cambridge, received an honorary doctorate from the Episcopal seminary, Nashotah House, and was the organist-choirmaster at Christ Church Christiana Hundred (Wilmington, DE) for no fewer than 33 years.
I’d known Bill during our undergraduate years. Our connection was music, but he was quite beyond my league, and I’d lost track of him altogether until recently when our musical backgrounds landed us both on the program of a memorial service planned for the reunion.
After the Bruckner concert (see my 3/6 post), the bright idea occurred to me that I could ask Bill—the consummate organist—the questions I’d wished I’d put to my parents, both accomplished organists (though surely not of Bill’s caliber), about how Bruckner’s own prowess at the stops, consoles and pedals informed his symphonic compositions.
First, however, I did my homework. I Googled Bill, and in addition to the above snippets, I learned that in concert with The Nature Conservancy, he’s devoted time and energy beyond measure to the care and cultivation of longleaf pine on his family’s sprawling farmland in Virginia. My jaw dropped as I tried to comprehend his arboreal efforts next to my far more modest “tree garden” in the wilds of northwest Wisconsin.
Yesterday evening I hammered out an email to Bill describing my recent attendance at a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 in c minor. I remarked how I could “hear” the organ playing throughout the work, though the instrument finds no place in the score.
This morning I received Bill’s reply, in which he pulled out all the stops regarding Bruckner and the organ. I quote in full what should well have been incorporated into the program notes for Friday evening’s concert at Orchestra Hall:
Buckner is an enigma—apparently he was a real virtuoso organist, but he wrote very little for the instrument. There are some early preludes and fugues, and I believe there’s an improvisation but no really major works for the organ. Many folks have made transcriptions of his symphonies, especially the beautiful Adagio from the 7th Symphony. There’s even a theory that it was originally an organ work and transcribed for the orchestra—a sort of reverse transcription. How valid this notion is I don’t know, but you should have a listen to it on the organ—works brilliantly. All of the symphonies have been transcribed for the organ and are played regularly—usually just a single movement not an entire symphony in recital. It’s interesting he didn’t include the organ in the orchestration (as Mahler did in two symphonies)—perhaps because not all concert halls have organs? I especially like Bruckner’s choral music—the Te Deum is an amazing piece. I’m afraid I’m more knowledgeable about Mahler, going back to my days with Bernstein post Yale.
“All of the symphonies have been transcribed for the organ and are played regularly [. . .]”?! Who knew?! I was flabbergasted—but in this revelation I also found a modicum of musical affirmation, having “heard” without anyone’s suggestion, the organ playing during the Bruckner performance Friday.
Then quite apart from Bruckner, in his email Bill touched on his work as an ardent conservationist.
Yet another member of my college class, I thought, whose life’s work and interests inspire me to strive harder to learn and do more within the scope of my own life. I considered the many other classmates with whom I’ve re-connected over the past several years, and how they serve as an enriching consortium for my continuing educational benefit, inspiration and advancement. They, as it turns out, are the best answer to “Why I went to Bowdoin College.”
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
