Smith College, my Educational Passport; or, Back to School

The lone member of a fourth generation of reading women, I never know to where or when a book will take me, ergo, I never go anywhere without one.

My partner and I took the Mass Pike west into familiar territory, entered Northampton, passed the Grecourt Gates of Smith College, and parked on Green Street near the Mendenhall Center for the Performing Arts. When I was a dedicated red-headed thespian there thirty years ago, no one called it that--we called it the theatre building.

That cold mid-March day during Smith's spring break, my actor sweetheart had a summer theatre audition. The grounds were deserted by student and nature alike. Leafless tree limbs whipped about in the icy gusts slicing the surface of Paradise Pond. The Queen Anne silhouette of Tyler House rose unperturbed against the now sunny, now grey, day.

As my partner entered the labyrinth of studios to audition, I parked myself in the Gamut, the lobby of the theatre building, and pulled out my current book, Tor Nørretranders' The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, a dense tome about how human consciousness circuits through the brain. A hundred pages in, I was averaging about twenty pages per day. The brain is complicated, and I am no scientist. One of the things said of me when I was in college was that I didn't even know where the science building was. (I did, but only because there was a change machine in the lobby.)

The café tables, new when I was a student, wobbled in the scarlet-carpeted room. The chairs were no less precarious. I settled by a floor-to-ceiling window, began to read, and like Alice, I fell into a rabbit hole: I read forty pages in an hour. When my beloved finished her audition, we went to Fitzwilly's for lunch, and I marveled at my supernatural reading capacity.

Fast forward a couple of months. My sweetie had gotten the part, and I'd finished the brain book at home, albeit at a limping twenty daily pages when it occurred to me that maybe I had indeed fallen into a rabbit hole--a rabbit hole of expectation. The Gamut, the lobby of the theatre building, was where I studied when I was an undergraduate. I traveled the world, time and culture in my studies.

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My educational passport included a visit to Russia; I read Dostoevsky one semester. I deliberately faced the exit of the Gamut as I tasted France in the 1940s and Jean Paul Sartre's stark No Exit. Sitting at one of those café tables, I sketched costume renderings for Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal, his biting comedy of manners set in late 17th century England. As an imaginary guest artist at the long-defunct Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, I fell in love with the work of artist Robert Rauschenberg.

Enrolled in a Shakespeare-as-Literature course, I determined, in my vast nineteen year-old wisdom, that Shakespeare wasn't literature, not no way, not no how--he was, instead, performance. I learned Katharina's Act V, Scene ii obedience speech from Taming of the Shrew set in Padua, Italy in the Gamut; my final exam yielded my first ever standing ovation. In that very room, I flew through the world of art history from Greco-Roman sculpture, and thereby ancient Greece and Rome to Marcel Duchamp's 1912 "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2," and therefore, the Cubists and the Futurists, and the Abstract Expressionism of Willem De Kooning's women on bicycles.

Senior year, I took English 207, a history of literature from Beowulf to the present. I agonized through Beowulf: Scandinavia in Anglo-Saxon times. I romped through Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales weeping tears of hilarity at the Wife of Bath et peregrini during the Middle Ages.

Involved in five shows one semester, I had not read the assigned 16th century epic poem, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. I started reading it the night before the exam after a late-night rehearsal, sitting at a café table in the Gamut. Transported to Arthurian times and virtues, and only when security had to lock up for the night, I wandered home in a trance. Downing cups of coffee, I got through every word. Then I showered and dragged myself to Seelye Hall to collect my blue book and the exam questions; I had to read the page twice. Not one question on The Faerie Queene! You can believe me when I tell you that I referenced the neglected masterpiece in every single answer.

Back in the Gamut, on that grey March afternoon, it must have been the room itself that stirred me to learn as rapidly as I learned when I was a student. Unwittingly, I went back to school. It didn't matter that thirty years had elapsed.

In that room, I had been around the world. In that room, I had literally run the gamut, visiting places and times and cultures vastly different from my own. In that room thirty years later, twenty slogging pages per day became forty as my brain circuitry burst into accelerated assimilation for one magical hour. In that room, I went back to school and renewed my educational passport.

Once again, school is starting. Even if you're not a matriculated student, you are most definitely enrolled in the school called Life. Fall into a book and travel the world.

Comments

[wolfgangmo]

Excellent advice and an interesting viewpoint.

I really need to go back to a university and see if you are right. Maybe my brain will start working to speed again. Maybe I just need to stretch those muscles again.

An old professor of music of mine described the process of starting course in the fall after a summer off as dusting off the ears.