As for the graduate student, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
In these last few weeks at Notre Dame, now that my recital is over and I have only seven more pages to write about Sarum chant and its influence on English polyphony, things have turned bittersweet. ("Bittersweet": another overused word. Oh well.) One becomes aware of how brief two years actually is. Yesterday I had my last class; today I had my last lesson and cantored for the last time at the Basilica. Wandering around before Mass, I saw some saints in the windows I hadn't noticed before: Margaret (with snake), Mechtilde, Jerome. At lunch I happened to run into some fellow sacred music students, and afterwards we basked in the sun and shot the breeze, enjoying some Gemütlichkeit. (An aside: the first recorded use of "shoot the breeze" is from 1941, but beyond that nobody is quite sure where the expression comes from. How many other etymologies have we lost?) This is exactly the sort of thing one can do in a community, and it is exactly the sort of thing that is cut short when graduate study concludes and we scatter to the ends of the earth. How can we hope to have real community without some semblance of rootedness? The Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of manners, and obedience are much better things than we give them credit for.
That seems the problem with college - or college, anyway, as we do it. Doesn't it? We're lucky enough to be cloistered for long enough to love those we're cloistered with. And then? And then, I expect, we're lucky if the others coming home care for us as much as they did before we left them.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting, though. How the most deracinated institution our culture has birthed is the last one that you, I, our friends, the last one that will ever teach us what a real community can be like.
Yes, that's it, exactly. We have, in some ways, the benefits of an ideal community -- one in which like-minded people are striving towards the same goal -- and then we're sent forth to live among real people, most of whom have no idea what we're talking about most of the time, to try and recreate some semblance of community there.
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