The problem with travelling Europe as a student is that often, in the bid for the cheapest flight, you also end up with the weirdest possible transits. For example, it normally takes two and a half hours to fly from Madrid to London, a fact which did not account for my actual presence in Brussels, sitting in Starbucks and trying to figure out whether the end of free WiFi coincided with when I needed to get on the plane (good news: it did!). Add in the fact that the flight to Brussels alone takes the same time as the flight to London (and that the flight from Brussels to London takes half that time despite being a quarter of the distance), and that there’s still transit, and you have to do a security check at Brussels, and get your passport stamped…
You’re probably, unfortunately, still going to take that flight anyways because money is painfully painful to spend. #thecollegelife (side note: I calculated, using the assumption that a normal term consists of 17 weeks, that dues for a fraternity would roughly equate to buying a pint of B&Js every day (with input from Lab Assistant Leann Beard #hill4lyfe). I’m not entirely sure whether that says more about how expensive fraternity dues are, or that I basically translated brotherhood into how much ice cream I could be eating.) Which is how I stumbled into my window seat in Brussels, really dazed and jetlagged, praying that my row would be empty (bad news: it wasn’t), and stayed wide awake for an hour, my face pressed to the window.
So picture this: Brussels, in the softest possible dusky violet light, everything painted in purples. The runway, still dotted with puddles from the earlier rain, reflects the sky above: peach-yellow clouds, the champagne-white light, bits of brilliance scattered across wet tarmac. I knew we were flying at sunset, but as it is with flights, the sky is always a bit of a hit-and-miss; and this was beyond brilliant. And so, for a while at least, indulge me: let’s see a plane chasing the sunset.
The wings of the plane begin to arch backwards first, angling down, like hands pushing away from the ground. The plane hums, and you move; through the dusky violet light into the rose-pink we usually associate with sunsets, and then suddenly you are in the most surreal blue, everything now underwater in light. And with the gathering speed, you begin to fly; the plane angles itself upward and for that smallest, briefest moment, you feel weightless too. Watch the rim of the sky, peach-pink and yellow-green and the foamiest blue; watch the land underneath, how the curtains of light draw up zoning districts both unreal and distinctly so. Watch, until suddenly everything is pink; you’re flying through a funfair, the clouds are cotton candy pink and then blue and then tipped with the brightest, most intense orange glow. The world is magic; the wings retract in the air, and the arc of water gliding off it makes you wish you could fly.
What do I want to learn? I want you to be able to see the tide of the sky; the way the light of the sun gives and takes to all it touches, how the waves of the clouds are frozen in mist, a study in the movement of the sea. I want you to see what I saw; how the sky becomes an ocean, and you wish you could swim. When the shore of the clouds gives way to the water underneath, watch the bank; see where metaphor and reality collide, where names become the sounds we use inadequately to capture what truly lies underneath. Watch the ships travelling the ocean; watch how they wander too, like you do, through this immense, inescapable world.
I want to learn how to make the light sing. I want to learn engineering, how to create a body that can take on the sky and fly; or carpentry, how to make wood grow into itself, a shape like a table or a bed. I want to study literature, find the stories of the world encoded in the tongues we speak; I want to learn neuroscience, how synapses encode information and how the brain plays on itself. I want to learn the history of art, how Hokusai made the most brilliant tiny details in his prints; I want to study biology, how the disparate parts of the self break apart and come together again. I want to reach into every discipline and find where everything lies; I want to learn how the world is amazing, astounding in infinite ways and what our hands can do to reshape it.
There is so much that is still good about the world. So much that is still good, at the heart of things; and that’s what I want to figure out, slowly, how every single thing we find fits into a greater way forward. After travelling Europe I am convinced that there is something beyond all the protests, all the fighting and mud-slinging that goes on; that as much as we need to recognize all the problems inherent in institutions, in privilege, in everything that has led us to declare some things impossible, there lies something outside of that. Privilege is not something to be dismantled; governments are not meant to be toppled; extremists cannot simply be erased. There have to be reasons beyond simply good and bad for why things exist; there has to be a way to bring the good in everything together, to leverage on all that we see to find a way forward.
I don’t believe that the “straight white cisgender male” is simply the oppressor; I don’t think that governments are separate from the people, or that we should unite in solidarity against the tune of another cause. I think there has to be a way beyond this, beyond simply fighting against what we see as bad, beyond the endless cycles of protests and confrontations that lead to unrest; there has to be a way to find what makes everything tick, and how to use the good and the bad to move beyond what we have here. How do we skip what breaks us, which leaves cities broken, and move to what can only make us stronger? And that’s what I want to learn in college; not to use my voice to drum up passions, not to add to incandescent rage, but how to use my eyes to find what my hands can use to remake reality, to recreate the rules and parameters we take as governing the world. And maybe that’s an idealist’s dream; but should we really be content with saying that there’s always a price to pay?