I spent my last Winter Carnival in the library with a series of chai tea lattes and a stack of philosophy books. Most of my friends and peers spent it sledding, ice-skating or drunk in fraternities. They looked at me with pity when we swapped anecdotes. Compare “I blacked in dancing on a table at Psi U!” with “I realized that thought experiments might be disanalagous with scientific experiments!” for a taste of the differential.
My senior year has been an exercise in thesis writing and academic discipline: long nights in the library, innumerable cups of coffee and an ever-lengthening litany of library renewals. For my friends, however, senior year is marked by preemptive nostalgia.
When a member of the outside world materializes in my corner of the library, I smile apologetically and gaze down, ashamed, into the depths of whatever caffeinated-beverage-soymilk-hybrid I’m nursing at the time. “Yeah, ragey weekend,” I say, maybe adding a nervous “haha” by way of ironic flourish — and justification.
Much of Dartmouth believes that concentrated intellectual passion is gauche, that one should take a healthy interest in a wide range of activities, network and apologize for weekend library sessions. Here, you’re either totally on board with the notion of well-rounded affability or you’re branded as an insufferable elitist.
Does everyone have this attitude? No, of course not. I suspect that many closet nerds identify with me. But anti-intellectualism is an unfortunately predominant attitude, and for the most part, I feel pigeonholed into a role that I don’t want to occupy. I don’t begrudge you your relentless social life, but I don’t envy it.
If I haven’t lived the idealized Dartmouth experience, it’s because I haven’t wanted to. I don’t want to hike that mountain, play that drinking game, buy matching Lululemons for our mass workout or guzzle Franzia like there’s no tomorrow (there is, and you’ll be upset you didn’t afford its imminence more respect when you wake up tomorrow morning). I want to sit in the library and read books about literary theory and philosophy. For all my embarrassed self-denigration, there is nowhere I would rather be on a Saturday night than snuggled up with a green tea and a sky-high pile of interesting reading materials.
I often hear that my college memories won’t feature my classes so much as my relationships. My friendships matter to me. But so does my lifelong relationship to literature and philosophy, which predates my Dartmouth acceptance by at least a decade. When I look back on Dartmouth, I’ll remember my friends. But I’ll also remember falling so in love with Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” that I forgot my dinner plans, realizing I spoke German well enough to read Rilke in the original and poring over “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” in awe of Putnam’s gorgeous precision.
These experiences aren’t “fun” in the traditional sense. They don’t photograph well (the caption might read “Girl with Horrible Posture Crouched Over 20-Page Paper, Pallid Skin Gleaming in Light of Computer”). But I love them. I’m in the library because I’m in a committed relationship with my thesis and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Literature and philosophy are relationships. Last week in my medieval English literature class, I touched a book from the 1300s that had been annotated by readers hundreds of years ago. My relationship with texts is a relationship with the thousands of other thinkers who read those same texts, turning to those same ideas for comfort in a chaotic world. And I wish that mainstream Dartmouth valued that relationship more.
My Dartmouth is not one that cares about Winter Carnival, the outcome of football games or the big party next weekend. My Dartmouth is something else entirely: two parts logical operators and one part poetry. But I’m not alone here, and I wish there were a more centralized intellectual community, a social space predominantly devoted to academic pursuits and a place where I could listen to others nerding out about their respective passions with open arms and an open mind. Right now, Dartmouth’s intellectual scene consists of disparate intellectual voices crying out in the wilderness of the stacks.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that my thesis and I are seeking a double date.
