I had previously decided to write this week's column about the 10 things I love most about Dartmouth College, and I returned home this afternoon to do just that.
But it was a windy day, an incredibly windy day, and when I got back to my room the breeze had ripped through my open window and torn down the lobster-print sheets I have tacked up as a makeshift curtain. The curtain, in turn, had knocked down a stack of books on my window sill.
While picking up the books scattered on my desk and floor, I added a mental note to my list of things I love about Dartmouth: That I organize my shelves by topic, and that this line of reasoning groups together "War and Peace," "Literary Theory: An Anthology" and "The Bible"; in that order.
"The Complete Poems" by Randall Jarrell lay broken open on my floor, to a page that is torn nearly in half, right down the middle of one of my favorite poems.
Flashback to last week. While thinking about the day I realized I do not love Dartmouth College, I kept thinking of these beautiful lines from a poem I couldn't remember the title or author of. At first I thought it was by Galway Kinnell, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet I was lucky enough to have a workshop with last Winter; which brings me to another thing I love about Dartmouth my teachers. But no, it wasn't Kinnell, and Google failed me.
But now here it is! Here is the poem I had wanted to quote, the book having fallen open to this torn page. It is Jarrell's poem, A Man Meets A Woman in the Street.'
"We can't tell our life from our wish," Jarrell writes. "Really I began the day, not with a man's wish: May this day be different.' But instead with the bird's wish: May this day be the same day, the day of my life.'"
We can't tell our life from our wish. The night this page in my favorite book got nearly torn in half, for example.
It started in the afternoon, last Spring, post-graduation; or maybe during senior week I forget. Anyway a few friends and half-friends and I jumped in a car for a haphazard adventure: To hike the ridge in Franconia for the sunset, and then clamber back down the mountain by moonlight and headlamp.
Heading up the Falling Waters trail is as lovely as its name implies: Babbling brooks (streams of consciousness?) cascade down granite precipices, left and right. And the two mile stretch along Franconia Ridge, generally agreed to be the most spectacular two miles in the entire 2,000 miles of the Appalachian trail, is more spectacular than imaginable. The path skirts along a razor's edge with the mountain free-falling away on either side, and the White Mountains rippling away all around. The sunset, as I've said before, lit up the sky like a stained glass window.
Fast-forward into the middle of the night, and my friend Anna and I had finally, after hours descending with our headlamps through the darkness, gotten back to the parking lot. Huddling in the back of the car and waiting for our companions, I took out "The Complete Poems" by Randall Jarrell, which of course I had brought along. Caught in the wilderness without a heavy tome of poetry? I'd rather have left my headlamp.
So I read aloud some of my favorites, while we waited for the rest of our adventurers to make their way off the mountain. Somewhere in the kerfuffle of the car, those pages got torn, and the book stepped on. Finally though, we made our way back to Hanover, down the misty, pre-dawn, New Hampshire roads.
Where was I?
I was going to list the 10 things I love most about Dartmouth.
There is too much to love to even begin. I sit down to try but my life in this place moves so fast I can't even get to the first thing.
This week, I'm happy. Happiness, I think, can exist sometimes when you're moving too fast to let anything else in. And that is one of the reasons why I think we're so happy here, when the list is always unwritten, or at least unfinished. When you can't tell your life from your wish.
For better and worse, we're each so wrapped up inside our own microcosm of what and who we love within this place, that there is no time to appreciate all of it: All that there is to enjoy, but also anything there might be to criticize.
I've just finished scotch-taping this page in my favorite book back together, and I've closed it and put it back on the shelf, because I could lose a whole night rereading these poems I love them so much.
That's the thing. Caught up in what you love, you begin each day not with the wish that this day be different, not with any particular wish at all. Just: "Let this day be the same day, the day of my life."
