"Autum, to me the most congenial of seasons: the University, to me the most congenial of lives." --Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (1981)
Now, understand this from the get-go: most days I love my job and enjoy the neighborhood in which I live. I love being a professor. I like being close to campus. I like the morning walk that takes me from my home to the university at which I teach. I like greeting the day by passing stately brick buildings and eventually entering the stately brick building that houses my office and the classrooms in which I teach.
But I also fear that I'm becoming a curmudgeon at age thirty-two. I find myself frustrated often by the undergraduates that surround me. I forgot about it over the summer, I think, but with their return to town en masse over the past week that frustration has re-emerged. Part of the problem might be that I entered this career expecting that undergraduates would tend to be the way I was as an undergraduate: that is, not insanely ambitious, but at least intellectually curious. The type of kids who read The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the weekends not because it's been assigned to them, but because it's fun to read. Students who check out Ingmar Bergman films when they show near campus because it's exciting to discover great art...
Alas--
Last night, walking the dog in the early evening, I saw a pile of undergraduates piling into an SUV with an open bottle of vodka and uncapped beers all around. (And this in a college town that--as I posted earlier--seems to lead the universe in drunk-driving catastrophes.) Then turning back onto my own street, I saw my neighbors from two doors down amusing themselves with a giant water balloon slingshot, taking turns dousing each other with the explosive splash of landing-balloons-plus-gravity, laughing like hyenas all the while.
Sigh.
Trust me, I wasn't a prudish undergrad. (Rather, I was enamored with the idea of a "studious by day, dissolute by night" Byronic balance.) Nor was I a humorless student. But I did aspire to be smart, cool, thoughtful.
Maybe it's narcissism, certainly it's idealistic, but I continue to search the neighborhood and the campus for visions of a younger me.
1 comment:
I love this post -- it resounds well with my observations of undergraduate life. Don't be too frustrated with the loud, empty hyenas, though. You just don't see the other type of student because they are elsewhere, discovering literature, instead of swilling vodka in the middle of the street.
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