Though a house is not a home, a library may be

Talk of the Quad: Life per second

I didn’t mean to graduate. I did a pretty good job of forestalling it, finding every impediment to arrest the current. But time glides on, nature abhors a vacuum, and I am left with little time to even ask if it was the Best Five Years! Well, except now, at 3:40 a.m., alone in the office.
In the morning I’ll take the train from 116th to 59th Street. I’ll turn East and walk from 8th Avenue until I reach this building, at Lexington. It is tall, a convenient landmark. There’s an emergency kit with a respirator and 250 mL of water under every desk.
I’ll pass many people and recognize none. More people work for this company in this office (one of our 192) than attend Bowdoin. I’ll take the elevator up to six, then walk down to three, sit down in 03E-113 (in the fun wing, f.y.i.), and work. Gladly! For years.
When I arrived at Bowdoin I thought only of work. By the time I left, I thought only of people. Today I am young again, and think mostly of work. It can take anywhere from three months to three years to get together with a friend. There is a lot I still owe you all.
There is one difference between Bowdoin and the world outside. The world is sparse, big and slow. Yes, even here in bustling New York City, there is a deep slowness. Bowdoin is dense, small and fast. Yes, I mean fast. It’s a supercritical chain reaction of people and ideas. You cannot help but run into friends, and Searles Science Building is thirty seconds from the Visual Arts Center and three minutes from your dorm (depending). Now, I can’t even get out of this building in three minutes.
So, yes, I miss the clichéd intimate liberal-artsiness of it all. You do a lot of living per second.Alumni tend to tell students that you don’t know how good you have it, and to make the most of it. But that seems neither insightful nor actionable. I actually have great faith in Bowdoin students’ ability to make the most of it. Moreover, the first thing any alumnus should acknowledge is that our experiences are a poor predictor of yours.
Graduation is divergent. With its bigness comes real life’s particularity, its incoherence. Our cohort dissolves; a generation falls out of phase with itself. Other threads, personal and professional, come to dominate. Life individualizes, independently.
Maybe they were the best fourish years. People rightly disagree. Regardless, the best of the rest of your life will not be so neatly circumscribed by spatiotemporal boundaries, a contiguous place and time with a name you can wear on your back. There are no more semesters.
At homecomings, this stings. For a moment it seems everyone is together again — but it is soon revealed as a mirage, like crossing shadows. What you recapture is a pale imitation. I described this to a friend. “You just have to learn to be happy with less,” she said.
I found that blunt, beautiful, and true. But “less” what? Not less friendship, less learning, or less meaning. Less density.
The campus was and remains a focal point, but the authentic alumni experience is not the ghost we grasp at on campus. It does not play out at the place we mistakenly call “Bowdoin.” Bowdoin exists in the fleeting, contingent reunions, but it isn’t encapsulated by them.
The authentic experience plays out subtly, quietly, for the rest of our lives. Our Bowdoin is diffuse, radiating out 10,000 miles. It has been there all along, but we only see it when our pupils dilate in the twilight of what we’ve known.
What do we see?
We see what Bowdoin teaches, what remains when the cramming fades and the lessons are distilled. We see the true Bowdoin Hello, exchanged between acquaintances who only appreciate the extent of their shared experience once they’re removed from it. We see Bowdoin.
And we begin to notice new lights, in the distance, dotting the sparse expanse in myriad signature colors. We hope we’ve packed what we need for the journey.

Talk of the Quad: Beyond the slump

Walking through Smith Union two weeks ago, I saw more students crowded near the mail center than I’d ever seen before (even more so than the week before Spring Gala, when everyone seems to have a Nasty Gal clothing package). The sounds of S.U. box doors swinging open, paper crinkling and high-fives meant only one thing: College House decisions had been released.
As I navigated my way through all the commotion, I kept hearing one phrase pop up in conversations: “I’m so excited for next year.” Living in a House has been one of the best experiences I’ve had at Bowdoin, so it’s understandable that accepted applicants would feel the same thrill I felt one year ago.
But I couldn’t feel completely excited for them. I grew a little bit more uncomfortable with each text that came in carrying names of those who would be succeeding us at Reed. It was a look into the future, but what about the present?
It wasn’t until I was walking down a sunlit Boody Street later that week that I realized my time is coming to an end, just like the rapidly melting snow. These letters were more than just the announcement of the future of the Houses—they were a subtle reminder that my housemates and I only have a month left. Exactly one month from today, our OneCards will no longer open the doors to the place we all call home.
I feel as if we’re running out of time. Where did this year go? There’s still so much I want to do with the people I run into in the kitchen, so many late night conversations to be had in the living room and events I wish could take place in our yard. (We do have the best yard in the game, after all.)
The limited time I have left in Reed terrifies me because I feel as if I haven’t made the most of the year. Like trying to hold onto sand, so many months feel as if they just slipped between my fingers. I expected a tremendous year, and it was…for the most part. Returning to campus from the summer, my housemates and I laid out in the sun, cooked endless meals together and thoroughly took advantage of the fact we were all living under one roof—something we’d never get the chance to do again.
The elation and naïve hope with which I entered the school year quickly dissipated as the temperatures plummeted. I felt myself succumbing to the legendary “sophomore slump.” I grew increasingly disenchanted with the House system, with the winter months; Bowdoin began to feel stagnant, and I became increasingly stressed by the big decisions looming overhead and the smallest of things—like someone not returning a text message—would upset me more than it should have. My attempts to forge new friendships and to strengthen old ones, something for which the College Houses are the perfect platform, felt feeble.
I fixated on this slump as if it was the heart of being a sophomore on campus. For four to five months, one bad day would continuously lead to another until I had dug myself into a rut of debilitating loneliness.
Nights I didn’t go out I spent on my bedroom floor staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of the dark corners I hadn’t known my mind contained.
My personal sophomore slump pushed me into a severe depression—one I disguised with a heavy workload and “I’m just tired”—and I cannot say that I didn’t think about leaving Bowdoin, at least sometimes.
Sophomore year narrows your horizon. Friend groups grow closer—sometimes to an irritatingly insular degree—and study abroad and major declaration decisions feel burdensome and momentous. But my year has been so much more than just a slump—it’s been a year of youthful adventures, immense growth and lasting memories. Yes, it’s a year of ridiculous highs and lows, but I’d argue the highs overshadow any low.
It wasn’t until I looked through the photo album of candid moments from this year—in its entirety, for the first time—during Spring Break that I managed to pick my head up and remember how fulfilling living in Reed has been. Each memory came flooding back to me as I glimpsed at each 4” x 6” photograph. I used to compulsively upload these photos to Facebook at the end of each week, obsessed with not letting any hilarious incident or cute portrait be forgotten. I’m sorry if my mass uploading of midnight soccer, impromptu swimming-with-the-bioluminescence trips, or weekend revelry popped up on your newsfeed when you needed to study. Actually, I’m not sorry. These are the memories we need to cherish.
However, I noticed there was a big time frame missing in my album. Four to five months of the year were not documented because I was submerged in my sophomore slump, convinced that I was miserable with Bowdoin. These months are now time that I—with only a month left in Reed—wish I still had.
As the year winds down and my housemates and I prepare to pass the torch down to “New Reed,” I’m taking photos again because although we’re on our way out, this month is still the last chapter of our time at Reed and of our sophomore year.
When I return from being abroad in the spring, it’ll be a little odd not to walk down Boody Street to my room, let alone have half my grade off campus. But if there’s anything this year has taught me, it’s to make the most of the present because it will fly by you faster than you can realize.
To the new generation of Reed: Sophomore year will be one of the best—you just have to look beyond the slump.

Talk of the Quad

Though a house is not a home, a library may be

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Marisa McGarry

Orient Staff

April 4, 2014

There are some rivalries that just can’t be reconciled. Sparta and Troy. Ohio State and Michigan. The Red Sox and the Yankees. I’ve never had much of a stake in any of those. The only rivalry I’ve ever felt passionate about is the one between the Bowdoin libraries, and for me, Hawthorne-Longfellow (H-L) will always come out on top.

I can only vaguely recall the first time I stepped inside. It was a cool day in June and a dark-haired sophomore in jeans and flip flops rattled off a series of facts I did not care about. (Over one million volumes! Named for members of the Class of 1825! $60 in free printing each semester! Inter-Library Loans!)

It wasn’t—by a long shot—the most impressive of the libraries I’d seen on a college tour. It isn’t considered the most impressive of our campus buildings.

Patricia McGraw Anderson agrees. In her book, “The Architecture of Bowdoin College,” she writes, “The new library is neither a monumental building nor a competitive one.” Monumental and competitive are adjectives that accurately describe Hubbard Hall—Bowdoin’s library until H-L was completed in 1965.

Named for two of Bowdoin’s most prominent alumni, H-L was built over a period of two years and was designed by Steinman, Cain and White, the later incarnation of the same architecture firm that built Cleaveland Hall, Moulton Union and Gibson Hall. In 1982, the building was expanded to include, among other things, the underground passageway that connects H-L to the Hubbard stacks.

It is undoubtedly where I’ve spent the most time on campus over my four years. My dad warned me at the beginning of my college search that this would be the case, but I waved him off. The casual keg-side conversations I yearned for would not be found in a library.

I wish I could tell you that most of this time was spent completing assignments for my courses, but alas, I did not do all of the readings for my classes. (Except, of course, for the ones I’m taking this semester. Hi Professors!) Sure, I liked my courses and have great memories of them, but the time in H-L I treasure most wasn’t spent reading the Federalist Papers.

Instead, I explored old interests and cultivated new ones. Books came to Bowdoin from places like Presque Isle, Maine and Williamstown, Mass. and I devoured them over long breakfasts in Moulton. Those that had sat on shelves collecting dust came alive after I took them out of the library for the first time. I watched the raised seal on page 55 of every book the College owns morph as the years went on.

On the fourth and fifth floors of the stacks, I read the monologues of Spaulding Gray, the dramas of Eugene O’Neill and the short stories of Ann Beattie. I uncovered the history of ballet and the life of one of its greatest stars, Anna Pavlova, who would have rather died an early death than never be able to dance again.

When I should have been outlining papers, I snuck down to the basement to read old issues of Life and Time dating from the World Wars to the Kennedy assassinations. They taught me that “infographic” is just a new word for something their editors had mastered almost a century ago. As the years go on, type faces change and advertisements’ taglines dwindle from six paragraphs to six words.

I attempted deconstructions of the best newspaper and magazine writing with the vain hope that something would stick in my own writing. I fell in love with profiles of people famous and obscure, from John Wayne to Zell Kravinzky, the latter who donated a kidney and $45 million to those less fortunate than him.

I spent more time than anyone I know in the Special Collections reading room where you’re not allowed to have a pen. After a four-day search, I discovered that the marble statue in the landing of Hubbard is Ophelia, sculpted by Pasquale Romanelli and donated by Henry J. Furber of the Class of 1889.

When I was sure Bowdoin had made a mistake by granting me admission, the only thing that could turn my day around was looking out onto the Quad from couches by the third floor windows early on a Saturday morning and watching dogs play fetch and kids climb on the lions outside the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Libraries are time capsules that remain open for everyone and that’s especially true of H-L. Even its name harkens us back. And yes, the past wasn’t always an excellent one—the building was built at a time where its doors would have been closed to me.

Having time in the middle of the day to randomly wander into the stacks and spend an hour reading is one of the things I will miss most about Bowdoin. It’s the kind of thing that reinvigorates me in a way I’d never anticipated.

In the October 8, 1965 issue of the Orient, an anonymous student wrote a letter to the editor, lambasting the new library as a “good place to take your date, rather than a good place to study.”

The author hoped that change would come soon. He wrote, “In sixty years, the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library will be outgrown and Bowdoin can look forward to another, marvelously improved, designed-with-the-student-in-mind library.”

The next ten years could bring a new library to campus, but I could not imagine one that could have served me better.

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