Preemptive Nostalgia

It has happened: I am conscious enough that I am leaving Middlebury forever that it now seems to me completely wonderful and idyllic.

On Tuesday I went to a lecture by Eva Brann, an aged tutor at St. John’s College who writes books about Greek philosophy and such and is brilliant. She is a friend of Murray Dry, from whom I took Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy this fall. The lecture, on Plato’s Phaedo was excellent, and everyone there was excited about it. Lots of students from my class this fall were there, and professors I knew, and the atmosphere just seemed to be the ideal one for a university (which I guess we’re not, but it sounds better than college): a little awed, but festive, and students and professors furiously took notes about the eternal questions of philosophy, and asked good questions, an smiled and talked to each other. Then there was a dinner at the Ross commons house, and the festive intellectual atmosphere continued. It was so delightfully nerdy: the boy sitting next to me at dinner talked enthusiastically about Latin grammar, and Risk, and Pavlos talked to Ms. Brann about Greek archaeology, and Prof. Dry and the political science kids had some sort of dorky political science discussion that I half-way joined; none of it seemed artificial or for show, either. Part of its favorable impression on me, I think, was that it reminded me of Prof. Dry’s class, which was one of the most ideal-college-y ones I’ve had, and it was connected to Prof. Dry’s enthusiastically-communicated confidence that a community the enabled people to sit around and talk about Plato’s Republic was about the best thing that ever happened to the world.

This morning my Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian class met at the Town Hall Theater, where they have the farmer’s market until it’s moved outside (next week, actually), and bought Bosnian food from this very nice woman there who explained everything to us slowly and clearly in Bosnian and did not laugh at our attempts to answer. Then we sat out on the town green, where some high school boys were playing drums and an electric guitar in the gazebo, and St. Stephens was having some sort of Earth Day event with a giant revolving globe, and most of Middlebury was sitting around enjoying the beautiful weather. We had very funny, stumbling conversations in BCS.

The Philomethesians meeting last night was well-attended, and we discussed “the end of history,” with readings from Fukuyama, Leo Strauss, Marx, Hegel. It was exactly the topic of my recent melodramatic musings on Notes From the Underground, actually, and it seemed wonderfully fortuitous.

In general it seems to me like I didn’t really do college right. I’m not sure I could do it better if I went back and tried again, but my college career seems significantly lacking in the spontaneous craziness that it seems like it was supposed to have been full of. Plus, college often seems to involve a very odd, un-natural social structure, and have various other significant faults. Sometimes, though, it all seems more than worth it.