Walkin' in Washington

At the beginning of my first year here, I read The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard and noted carefully the section about going on trips. It said that, although many Harvard students don't subscribe to this philosophy, one never has too much work to get away for the weekend. I thought the writers of the guide were being silly: Who would ever be so uptight as to not want to go away if the opportunity were offered?

Well, it's senior year, and in the midst of law school applications, my thesis, classes and Crimson work, that uptight person sounds all too much like me. Today, I'm scheduled to fly to meet my mother in Washington, D.C., for a weekend of walking through museums and eating well. It sounds blissful. Yet all I can think of is the work I have to do and the responsibilities I'm shirking. I have two papers due Tuesday. I have a meeting to run Monday. I have socks to wash. And the thought of being off-line for two days fills me with dread.

Harvard fosters this kind of paranoia. Since everyone lives on campus, including many teaching fellows, no one ever really goes home. Unlike people who work in New York City and take the train home to Westchester County on weekends, or those who work in Los Angeles and inch longingly toward the suburbs on Friday afternoons, we cannot escape. Those who live in the Quad are slightly luckier, because the Cambridge Common provides a physical break from the academic world, but even they are subject to the ebb tide of Hilles Library and the distant yet powerful influence of the river.

For Harvard students, one day is not unlike another. Saturday afternoon, while slightly more relaxed than Monday or Tuesday afternoon, is still for many a time for work. Friday night parties differ little from Thursdayfests. And there is always the possibility of running into your teaching fellow at Loker on Saturday or your professor walking his dog on Garden St. on Sunday. Time collapses into itself, and the days become not 24-hour blocks, but the amount of time between a class and a section, between one response paper and a term paper, between a late-night slice at Tommy's and an early morning burger at The Tasty.

A weekend, therefore, loses all meaning. While other, happy people in the real world are allowed to leave behind until Monday morning their file folders, their memos, their tired, their poor, we leave behind nothing. We come home from a party--and our Core sourcebook sits lonely on our desk. We return from an outing to Filene's Basement--and the fellowship applications lie desperately blank on our floor.

Management planners suggest that the bedroom should not be a place for work, that all signs of work should be placed in the study or the library so as to avoid sleeplessness and stress. But for most of us, our bedrooms are our only rooms, not counting the windowless common rooms littered with banana peels and CD jewel boxes. We have no place reserved for quiet and rest. The Harvard houses contain no saunas, no shrines for quiet contemplation. We are bereft of calming influence.

Thus we look away from campus, toward the fall colors of Vermont, the bright lights of New York, the twin town of Providence, R.I. We gaze as Gatsby did to the green light on the end of the dock, but for us, like him, it is inaccessible. It represents a certain freedom that we, as Harvard students, find it difficult to grant ourselves. To do so would mean going against the work ethic that Harvard's Puritan founders successfully instilled in cobblestones of the pavement and the bricks of the buildings--and the more modern ethic of mandatory 60-hour work weeks.

TThis afternoon, however, I will surmount those anxieties. As I step onto the Red Line T car, a layer of stress will lift off my shoulders and be subsumed by the whine of the tracks. Once I arrive in the Delta Shuttle terminal, I will pick up a magazine and watch CNN Airport News until Harvard seems positively foreign. And once I land at National Airport in Washington, D.C., I will vow not to let paltry academic concerns cast a shadow over my weekend. It will take effort, but it is doable and worth doing. Harvard is not contained in books alone, and sometimes it takes a weekend away to remind you what is truly important: browsing through history and reconnecting with family and friends, rather than sitting in front of a computer while the world goes by.