Flashback to late one afternoon this autumn, just before classes began. I'm returning from a half-hearted run, hungover and full of thoughts. I pass that zen garden on Huntley Street, which I do often. Though I've never stopped, this time I do.
I descend the off-kilter steps. I sit on the cedar bench, bask in the September sunlight and wonder who could actually come here and rake lines in the pebbles and still take themselves seriously as a human being.
I notice there's a notebook, in a weatherproof envelope, for visitors to leave their musings. Joyrapture, I think to myself, expecting to find some deliciously bad haikus by angsty Hanover housewives.
So I whittle away the remainder of the afternoon, reading page after page of other people's reflections. I get what I expect: jaunty tidbits about birds and flowers; the occasional midlife crisis. Gary Snyder's name comes up about 14 times. Awful, funny, awful, sad. But then I am stopped dead by a very long, very serious missive about a meta-historical view of the progression of humanity.
It is written in the handwriting of one of my best friends. I know it's his before I even turn the page, but sure enough, there it is, at the bottom of his very thoughtful entry, his signature.
Dissolve to 1920. An alum and member of Psi Upsilon fraternity is penning a letter to then-President of the College Ernest Martin Hopkins. He writes:
"I believe it to be a fact that fraternities are now definitely injurious to the student-body life. It has grown so slowly and insidiously and has so deep a hold on all the undergraduate student body that they silently accept it, as if it were an essential part of Dartmouth life; and feel that any protest or criticism of the present status of fraternity and non-fraternity students would be injurious to them."
The camera pans to me, reading these words on the second floor of Rauner, this morning, in November 2009. The sunlight is pouring onto the page through those towering windows. I read that paragraph, and I read it again. Eighty-nine years.
Flashback again, it's early evening on the porch at Collis, after I've read my friend's notebook entry on meta-history and the progression of humanity. The Green is quiet and the twilight is blue and lingering. I ask him about his thoughts from the notebook. I had no idea. We talk it through. The iron chairs are growing cold. We head off for dinner and then to watch one of the first soccer games of the season, under the lights. Our excitement for senior year is buzzing like those fluorescent lights.
Cut to Rauner again, and I'm writing this to you. I would like to bring this chapter to a close. Next week I will return to writing about things like campus celebrities, or the fine line between compost and Collis soup, or whatever it takes to make you chuckle.
Sure, the week of rush, I wanted to stir debate about the demeanor of fraternity life at Dartmouth. I then found that the letters students wrote to me in response were too poignant to ignore. I changed my mind. I changed it again. I attempted to propose one positive way we might revise the system, even ever-so-slightly (namely by transforming one or two frats into coed spaces). There have been countless op-eds published in response. Well, I've lost count, anyway.
The vehemence of the defense of the status quo on all fronts seems only to assure me that the staus quo is indefensible. But maybe it doesn't seem that way to you.
Dissolve to Collis, eating breakfast sandwiches and sipping a smoothie with my friend of the meta-histories. Nothing has changed. Nothing except that we had a particularly interesting conversation, and came to know each other a little bit better. Just one of countless moments and conversations, which flow together into the general confluence of our friendship.
Nothing at Dartmouth has changed either. Not between that afternoon in September to this afternoon in November, anyway. Nothing, perhaps, except that we have had one particularly interesting conversation, and come to know each other a little bit better.
It's been one of many such moments, like that letter to President Hopkins from a student in 1920, or like all the countless times this issue in its various incarnations has come to light before or since. Just one flicker flowing into the confluence of our community.
Flash forward to Dartmouth in 2020, or 2030. What about this place do you think will be different? If we believe it will have changed by then, why are we not willing to fight for it now? I can't claim to understand, or to see the future, but I do hope for a few things.
I hope that the Connecticut remains exactly the same. I hope it slides by as always, perfect as glass. I hope that, some moonlit summer nights, there are still students going skinny-dipping. I hope that, on some of these nights, they sit there shivering on the shore, wrapped up in some unforgettable conversation. I hope there are many of these nights, until they all swim together, into one memory of four particular years, among many, in the life of one place, the life of one another.
I know I'll see you there.
