Off the Campus
Recent grads look at life outside Princeton's gates...
Book ends: Reading
after college
A Socratic monologue
She gazed out the window at the Atlanta cityscape. Over the arch of highway
85, she could make out the spires of Ebenezer Baptist Church, and on the
sidewalk below she could see Georgia State University students passing from
class to bus stop as homeless men slept on benches. The view from the window
was a living panorama of history and sociology . . . the telephone rang.
The words of the disembodied voice may have had some deeper cultural significance,
but at that moment they meant she had to write a letter, send a memo to
her boss, and make three more phone calls. The contemplative world of college
had been yanked from under her.
Bah. She swiveled her chair to face the computer and began setting up a
mail merge. There had been a voice interrupting her college reveries as
she read and studied: the part of her brain taking notes for the papers
she had to write. Even as Estella spurned Pip yet again or the Cuban Missile
Crisis threatened the world with annihilation, there was that dry voice
analyzing narrative structure (if you still believe in such things), making
parallels to critical arguments, and marking passages for future reference.
In college -- at least in the humanities -- abstractions, fictions, and
the past are work.
Because reading and thinking are so central to college, to read or think about Princeton often means to think or read about reading or thinking. So much of the place's history is the history of the mind. To read about Albert Einstein's time at Princeton is to read about Einstein's brain thinking about matter being converted to energy; to read a work by a professor is to think about, say, Professor Rigolot's thinking about Rabelais's thinking.
How was it, then, if the essence of Princeton was so abstract, that she
could feel homesick for it? While their minds sort the world into logical
patterns, people on campus rub elbows. How people deal with each other on
a few acres of gothic and postmodern buildings in central New Jersey is
the subject of many an impromptu seminar, also known as gossip. In coffeeshops,
eating clubs, and faculty lounges, people turn their minds to reading and
interpreting the campus itself and the people in it: which departments are
in turmoil, who's feuding on the editorial page, what happened on Prospect
Street on Saturday night. Wasn't it really this intimate and familiar world
that she missed?
Would she find that again here in Atlanta? She was new in town, and here
she was behind a thick pane of glass, looking at a computer screen, and
talking on the phone to voices belonging to abstract people. What were the
dynamics of this new city? How did people and things connect, and how could
she find out?
She had amassed a stack of books about Atlanta, including Frederick Allen's
Atlanta Rising, Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in
the King Years, and John Lewis's Walking With the Wind: A Memoir
of the Movement. The books told the stories of familiar landscapes and
people. She worked in the Robert Woodruff building; here he was bottling
Coca-Cola and retreating into millionaire hermitude. At Ebenezer Baptist
Church, Daddy King built a family dynasty, and Martin Luther, Jr. led the
civil rights movement. In Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch casts
King as Moses (the title is a biblical reference), but the stories in the
book run from epic speeches and marches to office politics among the staff.
Why did Branch choose to tell the story this way? King believed that simple
actions by large numbers of people could change the world; Branch perhaps
wants to reflect that philosophy in his writing.
She was quizzing herself, but the questioning voice in her head was a composite
of professors and preceptors. It wasn't interrupting, but helping her to
understand the books, and to try and understand the world. Wasn't the act
of questioning whether she'd lost that mentality itself a sign that she
hadn't? Away from the physical classroom, wasn't it the abstract process
of reading and questioning that would really help her understand this new
place?
-- Snow Tempest '97
Snow Tempest '97's hobbies include reading and referring to herself in the third person.
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