Dear reader,
One day, back in grade school, several friends and I stood at the base of the short, ramping hallway that lead to the teacher’s lounge. We stood there nudging each other with our elbows and hoping one of us would be brave enough to walk up and take a peek inside. The whole reason for our interest was simply because we were not allowed inside the teacher’s lounge, and we could only stand there, at the base of the ramp, and wonder what it contained.
I managed to see inside the lounge, but only twice – both times briefly and at the invitation of a teacher in need of some help. It was a plain room, with a few tables, cupboards, a microwave and a single window that looked out over the school’s makeshift basketball court. It may have been a plain room, but it was a wonderfully plain room all the same. It held no secret plans for annoying students, no backlogs of the most complex test questions, but it did not need to; it was just a place to sit and enjoy a cup of coffee or tea.
There were many other rooms in my grade school that likewise teased my imagination for years, like the boiler room, which for whatever reason was connected to the boys’ locker room: Every time we had to change for PE, we would hear it growling and banging like a ferocious caged animal.
So in high school I made it a goal to seek out the hidden rooms, to peek into offices and walk into those classrooms I never took classes in. I think I successfully managed to visit every room, save for one: the bomb shelter beneath sophomore hall (but, then again, such a room was only rumored to exist – which made it all the more tantalizing).
But now I am faced with the idea that in just over a week I graduate and leave, and it not only shocks me how little of the campus I have visited, it shocks me how little others know it as well. Just the other day I spoke with someone who, by virtue of having never lived in the residence halls on campus, had no idea where Carson Hall was, or even that it contained a buffet dining center. And – so the attitude went – why would anyone care to know about Carson if it was just a residence hall complex with an eatery attached?
It’s the same attitude that some travelers have, when they make their list of places to see and things to do at their destination, and they cannot list anything but the Great Sights (with a big capital G and S). They want to go see the Eiffel Tower, they want to walk across the Great Wall of China and they do all those Great Things you are supposed to do when you visit famous destinations. But one can spend hours atop the tower and days walking along the wall all without learning a thing about France or China.
I believe that whenever we are somewhere, we should be there for more than the doing or the seeing or the listening. We must also be there for the wandering. When we wander, we find a different kind of beauty, different from the Great Architecture and the Great Art, the kind of beauty that I saw in the teacher’s lounge back in my grade school: The beauty of simplicity.
The beauty of simplicity is the awe inspired by human ingenuity, to take what little we have and shape it into something to do the job. The teacher’s lounge was certainly a far cry from the lounges of Vegas and Reno, but it was comfortable, and that’s what matters. And the fact that it could feel so comfortable with so little made it beautiful.
I can understand not wishing to visit someplace just to keep one’s imagination about it open (I dearly wish I could still believe that the boiler room heated the school via a tamed dragon that our gym teacher had captured with her own two hands; alas, I know better). But I cannot understand not wanting to know out of a lack of interest.
True, a place like Carson Hall might not be one of the Great Sights that everyone must see. It might not even be on of the list of necessary places where we go because we must. But it is still there, used for its purposes by people, no matter how mundane they may be.
It may well be that the Great Sights make life worth living, but then the simple sights, the mundane doings, help us live from day to day. And we must learn about both.
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