Small and beautiful things

Talk of the Quad: If you give a polar bear a rake

Another start to a fall semester is marked by another free T-shirt: grinning polar bears wearing overalls and wielding instruments of manual labor.
Common Good Day gets groups of students (teams, first-year floors and the rogue individual volunteer) together with faculty and staff for an afternoon of volunteer service in the greater Brunswick community. After a morning of pump-up talks and student musical performances in Farley Field House, participants lend about three hours of labor to local nonprofits and municipal organizations. The hope of the event is presumably to promote student engagement with the McKeen Center for the Common Good and long-term service.
It is a noble pursuit to strive for community engagement and service in the student body of a college. At Bowdoin, time is a scarce resource and service is not work that can be done in a day; it requires time and planning and critical thinking and reflection.
A major part of Bowdoin’s brand is its public commitment to the common good. As Joseph McKeen, Bowdoin’s first president, stated in his 1802 inaugural address: “Literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good, and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them.” Today, this commitment is restated in the Offer of the College, and understood as Bowdoin’s guiding philosophy. It can be easy to overlook, then, Bowdoin’s status in the world and the ways that, as an elite institution, it furthers private interests and privileges those already likely to succeed in a capitalist society.
As the 2013 National Association of Scholars report reminds us, Bowdoin is overwhelmingly liberal. That’s true. The problem with this liberalism, though, is that it is often surface-level, and focuses on doing small good deeds as opposed to transforming a system that roots itself in injustices and reproduces inequalities. Edward Abbey, the American essayist, wrote: “The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause.”
Common Good Day is a great example of this “cheap cause.” It is the supposedly selfless donation of time to support organizations in need of help: a small, musty historical society, a farm with immigrant workers an hour away, a food bank. We dip our toes into service, shake a hand or two, snap some photos and accept gratitude. But, are the organizations benefitting as much as Bowdoin is?
Without the surrounding rhetoric, Common Good Day is simply a safe group-bonding activity. It’s good for the College and it’s good for the students who walk away feeling as if they’ve done something meaningful. At best, it provides organizations with one afternoon of extra help that they wouldn’t have had otherwise. At worst, it burdens the organization and leaves students with a savior complex. Either way, it doesn’t create a meaningful impact unless it’s surrounded by comprehensive education and critical reflection, and followed up with continued service. In fact, the McKeen Center’s Alternative Break programs do this by holding weekly seminar discussions leading up to a seven-day service immersion program, and following the trip there is a debriefing conversation.
Although it’s easy to slip on an ethically-produced polar bear T-shirt once in a while, promoting the common good as a brand is hollow.
While we’ve written “common good” seven times in this article (now eight), the words themselves mean little. They can be used to justify almost any action. (Consider Bowdoin’s promotion of military service during WWII.) Go beyond the rhetoric and consider what the common good means at Bowdoin, as it’s imagined from the Ivory Tower. Consider, too, what it might mean after you’ve left Bowdoin. Interrogate whether it means anything to you at all.
Emily Weyrauch and Eliza Graumlich are both members of the Class of 2017.

Talk of the Quad: As an eagle towards the sky

I’ve heard that birds are disappearing. I don’t understand all the implications of mass extinction, but I’m sure that it does not augur well for us. Maybe it’s encouraging that birds have recently found refuge in the Orient. In response to three articles published two weeks ago, I wanted to share something I noticed.
I recently saw a Chukar partridge in Brunswick. I was walking by 52 Harpswell when I spotted two older men across the street, frozen with eyes fixed on something in the lawn next to me. They were pointing and talking excitedly to each other. I will not give a detailed description of the Chukar—the article 2 weeks ago did that well enough—but will say that it’s beautiful. It certainly stands out in a suburban landscape. For its size, it was extremely disruptive that afternoon: the two men all but ran into the road to get a closer look, stopping traffic, while I scrambled to take a picture of it. This encounter roughened an otherwise smooth walk home that had been completely sanded down by routine. It reminded me that there is more to the landscape than my usual walks reveal: there are worlds besides our own that we manage to distance ourselves from but cannot quite escape. Usually, however, it takes something as outwardly extraordinary as a Chukar to wake me to this fact.
A walk across campus is usually rushed—a way from A to B. The Bowdoin landscape is pretty but is rarely more than a background for our determined lives—and a predictable, safe background at that. An erratic squirrel is the most disruptive thing most of us encounter regularly and even that is hardly enough to free us from our busy heads. We rarely observe what we see.
This summer, I worked with a number of avid birders in a community where loafing is virtue. They walked slowly and paused frequently, keen on small details and nuances I could not perceive. They saw things I didn’t and loved the wildlife refuge in a way I could not. As Liam Taylor’s Talk of the Quad explained, going birding gives us the chance to observe and connect with beings radically different from us. Done well, it can be a hobby of humility: past plumage and species lies an experience alien but not entirely inaccessible to us. The distance implied by the difference need not be insurmountable.
In the solitary setting of a beach or forest, it may be natural to step into a more active, inquisitive mindset. But to assume the posture of a birder in our crowded human habitats is a spiritual challenge. It’s one thing to realize we share a planet with people and things with inner lives as rich and vibrant as our own—in theory or in momentary glimpses in the woods—but it’s another, much thornier thing to adjust ourselves according to this knowledge. To wake up and find our mundane surroundings solid and pulsing with meaning. This opening of ears and eyes seems to ask for a lot of heart.
But we don’t have to talk abstractly about what has practical implications and examples close to home. You don’t need to dwell on last year’s frustrating campus dialogue about race to begin to suspect that we aren’t good listeners: I think about any time I let prodding personal stress keep me from following a class discussion, having a conversation with an author or understanding a friend; or how fear of awkwardness and discomfort—truly self-centered concerns—shackle all modes of discourse. There is clearly a difference between ideas you listen to and noises you hear, just as there is between seeing a living thing and feeling yourself in its eyes. Good listening is like questioning: a pursuit of truth, valuable whether or not you get an answer. It should move us. In a community of bad listeners, my peers become a collection of background noises and decorations.
Last February, Marc Lamont Hill gave a talked titled “Fighting for Freedom in an Hour of Chaos” to a small Kresge audience. He talked about global politics, Black Lives Matter and our campus, which was struggling to make sense of itself at the time. I gather that we all want to feel safe and somewhat ordered. We want to know what’s happening and especially where we are going. Most of us plan courses of life on a clean piece of paper, letting our lives fall into place around a few formal activities. We even pencil-in Ivies: binge drinking and hookup culture are not distractions from but rather natural extensions of resume culture. Waxing effusive at meals about the week’s work or the weekend’s social chores, it’s easy to ignore the soft uneasiness in each other’s voices or sadness behind the customary cheer. Our lives are rigidly structured and our community unstable. Last year had many people questioning whether or not Bowdoin even is a community. At least last year people were questioning.
It’s possible that the way we order our personal lives has made the community ill; and it’s possible that below the C.V. and the hard athletic bodies, we are not so healthy and secure. Hill prescribed “radical listening” to our ailing nation and our wavering campus: only by seeking knowledge through other’s perspectives and vigorously questioning our own could we become a community. This, he implied, is the sort of knowledge that diversity and a liberal arts education offer, but hardly guarantee. It cannot be honestly pursued on the way to something else.
Now my point has barely fledged, but I’ve said more than enough: a refuge is a good thing, but it’s far from a home. Birds belong in conversation.
Ben Bristol is a member of the Class of 2017.

Talk of the Quad

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

September 16, 2016

I would love to go birding with all of you. I’ve developed this obsession, and I’m finding that I now need some friends to enable me. I can promise, first, that it really won’t take much work to start. Even binoculars, although helpful, are not required. All through the year we can find birds on campus or a short walk away, or take an easy drive to the coast for more excitement. When we arrive to school late in the summer, the marshes are full of herons and travelling hawks. Tiny shorebirds crowd beach edges, nervously out-stepping waves and falcons. As the heat fades, puffins and razorbills dissolve into the deeper Atlantic. Soon after, boldly colored winter ducks gather their breeding forces in the snow—a casual and apathetic audience to our holiday travel.

As the inland lakes freeze and the non-coastal ducks scatter south, remnant bands of black-capped chickadees (singing cheese-bur-ger, my cellphone text alert) and nuthatches (which I call meeps) supply more consistent comfort. Lonely brown creepers offer the occasional errant song (trees, beautiful trees!). After several weeks of frozen breath, it’s a relief when early spring birds trickle back towards our campus. Vireos and black-throated green warblers (zee-zee-zee-zoo-zee) begin their hopping in the Commons. By May, the Pines are heavy with singing warblers. Some ovenbirds (teacher-Teacher-TEAcher) and black-throated blue warblers (I am laz-ee-eey) stick around to commiserate with students during finals. The summer begins again.
It’s now been a year—perhaps a little less—since I really started birding. I’ve forgotten about twice as many songs as I remember and misidentified more shorebirds than I’m willing to count. Each time I go looking, I’m accompanied by a fear born of 20—plus years slogging through precisely marketed hobbies, each of which promised about 10 minutes of entertainment and supplied five. I mean to say that I have a millennial nervousness that the whole thing (the activity? The birds? The soil and the trees?) will sort of deconstruct like all my other products. About ten minutes ago I saw a fish crow (UH-uh, like an American crow with a cold and some sass). It remained solid and almost inexplicably realized.

And so there’s this other part to the whole birding thing. The objects of birds develop a form in and of themselves. We can step away from two near—equal transgressions. In the first crime, we capture an avian aesthetic as lifeless color and shape. They cover our hats, decorate our hair, fill our coats. We allow them status only as an image. In the other, more well-meaning offense, we regard them as patterned objects worth conserving.

“The role of avian fauna cannot be overstated in regards to seed dispersal, pest control and ecosystem management,” spoke one beleaguered scientist. But to gaze at them shifts something in the head. Their eyes become really like eyes. Beyond aesthetic, we allow them substance and sentience and will—as though they ever needed our permission. Conservation takes its rightful place as the protection of existence, of feeling, rather than the maintenance of equilibria.
How nice, Liam, how quaint. But the craziest part of all of this affection is how naturally it arrives. It takes the smallest gap and the whole thing breaks wide open. In some ways, I’m asking you to trust me. To trust that a glance away from the five-minute lights and noises that attend our lives will not fundamentally shatter our millennial philosophies. To trust that it really, really won’t feel silly to stand there and stare at a robin. It will be such an easy love. So come birding!

Liam Taylor is a member of the Class of 2017.

If you’re interested in joining the Huntington Bird Club or are interested in birds/birding in general, please contact Liam at ltaylor2@bowdoin.edu or Isaac Merson at imerson@bowdoin.edu.

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