Even an urban campus like mine
has leafy paths and flowering trees.
It’s not like Kenyon College, of
course, with its remarkable
Middle Path.
But in all seasons here, as at
Kenyon, there’s a sense of a
separate world, a beautiful world.
Yet the beauty of these college
worlds isn’t really about nature.
Take the two students with back-
packs out of this picture, the
students walking together along
those trees and into a mist, and
it’s any autumnal woods.
These particular worlds are beautiful
because youth is beautiful, and
thought is beautiful, and friendship
is beautiful, and potential is beautiful.
And those things – youth, thought,
friendship, potential – exist with
greater intensity in this setting than,
I think, anywhere else.
Students take the middle path and
then move into the mist at its end.
Professors watch them move off
into their futures; year after year
professors watch students step
off into their futures, and there’s
no knowing. But what professors
keep of their students – some of
their students – is a permanent
image of their perfection as they
walk along the middle path.
They walk at ease, in love, in lust,
curious, amused, charitable, fervent.
The college takes their intensity and
cools it a bit; it asks them to consider
how human beings have shaped their
energy into ideas and structures and
states. The discipline of a curriculum
cools and shapes their intensity.
Somewhat. Essentially they remain
high-spirited and unreachable and
enviably vivacious.
***********************
To follow the strange and beautiful
world of the university is to feel the
same shock and sorrow others do
when youthful intensity turns into
violence against the self or against
other people, when fervency becomes
the sort of inner turmoil that destroys.
It doesn’t just destroy a life. It
destroys a life at a kind of pinnacle
of inquiry into life. This
sky-high exuberance makes anything
possible. When it is shot down, or
when, inexplicably, it shoots itself
down, the fall is terrible.
May 5th, 2010 at 2:40PM
Thanks for that wonderful post. My own experience has been with a couple of student suicides rather than with death inflicted on others. You’ve caught just what makes that so terrible.
May 5th, 2010 at 2:51PM
Thank you, tony.