"Questions of Interpretation of Abstract Art" was pretty much the wackest class I have ever taken at Dartmouth. Of course, it was my freshman seminar during my freshman Fall. So needless to say this was not a particularly sane time in my life, but this class was not helping matters.
We were trapped in the windowless bowels of Sherman during the 3B hour, which is what from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Mondays and every third Thursday? I never could and still haven't figured that one out.
Everything conspired to make this class the twilight zone.
The professor apparently couldn't hear his own alarm going off on his watch and would go right on delivering a discourse on Malevich until someone would tap him on the shoulder and be like, "You're blowing up." I would search the faces of the other kids in the class, for some confirmation that I was not hallucinating ...
But no, my classmates were also not real. Vlad spoke with an Eastern European accent and a voice so high-pitched I'm pretty sure only dogs could hear his diatribes about Brancusi; he could not possibly have existed. And Christina, this stunning wisp of a girl who seemed eternally light-headed from need of a sandwich also from her own, more beautiful world.
I remember stumbling out of Sherman in the evening one day after class, with the sun setting down Tuck Drive, and thinking to myself: If this is what the world of academia really is like, with all this insanity, and vanity then this is not for me.
Of course four years later here I am, another happy avatar in academic Pandora among all things insane and vain.
Although I have lost touch with the human boy I used to be, I did at least find someone I can rant to about those shadowed hours in Sherman learning about Suprematism: my thesis advisor in the English department, who is a '95, and who this being Dartmouth took the exact same freshman seminar, 15 years earlier. With the same professor. Turns out it was bizarro, even then.
We laughed. Sitting in his office, tucked away in a strange off-shoot corridor on the second floor of Sanborn with a view of the afternoon light streaming through the arches outside the 1902 room, I thought to myself for the millionth time: This place never changes.
I have changed, though. There used to be a boy who was at least partially disgusted by the navel gazing of academia, who wanted to do real things to help real people.
Lord knows I'm glad I haven't spent the past four years in Novack, manning a perpetual bake sale to save Haiti. But I also wonder if, as naive and hopeless as that seems, it's a little more hopeful than the two years I've spent with my head buried in the books on the sixth floor of the stacks. (The other two years having been spent with my head in a gin bucket.)
If it is true that this place never changes, then there is perhaps no better example than this weekend: It's Green Key! And yet, as I am sitting beneath the ghoulish murals in the Reserves, so looking forward to enjoying this Green Key in the sunshine, I am thinking that things DO change here.
They do. Even in the realm we think is most inert: the social. In my own four years here, for example, I've watched Bones Gate go from Rated-X to Sesame Street what was once a stable of the darkest horses has become a land of charming Muppet people. Or Panarchy: once so fringe, now totally celeb-infested. Or further back, Panarchy when it was steaky Phi Psi! How the mighty have become coed and sceney!
And look at Beta: when I was a freshman that house was a sorority the name of which I can't even remember. Now the place seems certainly to be the future of A-side and husband-hunting. Of course, maybe it is only the reputations of any of these places that have changed but still, that must mean something.
If there is any moment to just enjoy this place for what it is, or what it seems to be, it is Green Key. Whether you think this college is dynamic or static; whether you like how it is changing or how it has changed you there's nothing, for this weekend anyway, that you can do about it.
Well, there's one thing. On Saturday, from noon to 3 p.m., you can take a tour of the Baker Bell Tower. Wait in that line and climb those strange spiraling stairs, with so many names carved into them. Take a look at that enormous clock from the inside, those giant iron gears slowly cranking round and then step through that tiny door, out into the sun on the balcony and stand at the top of Baker Tower and look down at this College in this town in the hills in New Hampshire.
How it looks to you is up to you. I think it's just like I used to say, so insightfully, about the paintings in Questions of Interpretation of Abstract Art: "I think it's beautiful, and fucked up."
And it is beautiful, and it is fucked up. But this weekend at least, there's no other world I'd rather be in.
