Where is Your Roommate?

A year ago, my roommate fainted in our room. I was there, and I didn't notice. It was a long afternoon, during one of those horrible weeks when everyone has eight papers to write and an exam to take the next day. We lived in a five-person suite in Canaday, and three of us were home; I was studying in the common room, and two of my roommates were working in their singles, with the doors shut. I have no idea how long either of them had been there, or where they had been before that, or when they were planning on leaving. Because we were in the habit of retreating into our bedrooms and closing the doors, I only had the vaguest idea of when my roommates were home and when they were not. This wasn't because we weren't friends or because we didn't do things together. But we didn't go around keeping tabs on each other either.

At some point during the afternoon, one of my roommates came out of her room and told me, mostly as an interesting factoid, that she had just passed out. She had been trying to get something out from under the leg of the bed, and 20 minutes later, she woke up wondering what she was doing lying on the floor--the strain of lifting the bed had been too much for her back, which she had injured earlier while rowing crew. Strangely, I had been sitting in the common room and hadn't even noticed a thud. Neither had our other roommate, working in her room with the door closed less than 10 feet away. If she had remained unconscious for the rest of the day, I doubt I would have noticed--in fact, if she had fallen into a coma for the rest of the week, I might not have noticed either, unless the phone had rang for her and I would have been forced to go into her room. If her door was closed, I wouldn't have thought to bother her.

One could argue that such is the nature of freshman year, when we are thrown in with roommates we didn't choose who aren't necessarily our friends. But just because we choose our roommates as upperclassmen doesn't mean that we keep track of each other either. One day earlier this year, the phone rang in my suite on a Saturday at 7 a.m. The person calling asked for one of my roommates. Dazed and bleary-eyed, I peeked into her room and saw she wasn't there. I asked if I could take a message, but the person said no and hung up. I suddenly thought to myself that I hadn't seen my roommate for the past two days. She had been working at the Crimson the previous evening, and when I called the paper, they told me that she had gone home at around 2 a.m. Of course, there were several possibilities for where she might have been at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning (it turned out that she had to leave super-early that day for her job at the Business School Reunion), but at the time, the only one that seemed realistic to me was that she was lying mangled on Mt. Auburn Street under a large truck, her body rotting since two in the morning. How should I know where she was?

It's notoriously easy to slip through the cracks at Harvard. With a questionable advising system, large classes, weird entryways that seem built to isolate and schedules so busy that no one can even keep track of their own lives, let alone anyone else's, students have some reason to fear that they could become anonymous. But forget about slipping through the cracks for a moment. What if you were to jump into them?

Let's try the following thought experiment: Choose a day, wake up early and disappear for the duration. Take the day off--but don't tell anyone. If you have too much work, as most of us do, go sit in Widener, deep in the stacks, or in the giant reading room on the second floor, where the echo of a cough resounds louder than a wrecking ball. Stay there and study all day. Grab lunch or dinner at Loker, then go back to Widener again. Better yet, if you can afford a day away from your work, take a real break. Go to the beach in the middle of winter, to the Public Gardens, the Museum of Fine Arts, Mount Auburn Cemetery or the zoo. Skip town for the day or the weekend. Go to Providence, New Haven or New York. Stay off-line.

For that day, or that weekend, you have just become absolutely invisible. Unless you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, chances are that no one will ask where you've been or even notice that you were gone.

But surely this experiment is flawed, you say. If you neglect your responsibilities, won't people start to miss you? Most students who spend all day in the library or in Guam would return home to a slew of answering-machine messages. If you're the stage manager of a play, a reporter for the paper or if you were supposed to build a homeless shelter or organize the International Stomach Acid Convention that day, won't a few directors, editors and bile enthusiasts begin to wonder where you went?

Yes, but as much as those people may like you, they aren't calling because they miss you. They merely miss the function that you perform. Had you dropped out of the play, quit the paper or lost all interest in ulcers the previous week, you would probably never hear from them again. If you were to determine the ratio of the number of phone and e-mail messages you received in one day from people calling to say hello against the number of messages from people who wanted you to do something for them or their organization, the ratio would probably be extremely small.

Philosopher Martin Buber writes that there are two types of relationships between human beings, the I-It and the I-You. The I-You relationship entails appreciating another person as a person, with a unique history and voice unable to fit exactly into any labels other than his or her own name. But most of our relationships with others are of an I-It nature, which means that we treat the other person as we would an object or a system, expecting it to serve a certain purpose or perform a certain task (for example, I buy a newspaper from a vendor). I-It relationships are necessary for the world to work, and they don't imply any lack of respect. I have worked on many projects where I have been absolutely astounded with the achievements, talents, maturity and sheer responsibility of the people who have done things for me. I know that they excel at what they do and I admire them; I might even like what I have seen of their personalities. And if I ran into them in a dining hall, I would certainly sit down beside them. But none of this means that I would call them up and ask them out to lunch.

This is not to say that most people at Harvard don't have friends. In fact, for many of us, the friends who mean the most in our lives are right here on campus. But friendship is time-consuming and risky, and as people who pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency, we don't think that our friends really need us to look after them. We might even consider it patronizing or annoying if someone were to play parent with us and constantly ask us where we were going or what we're doing next.

Yet as much as I value my independence, the moments when I have felt most comfortable at college have been those when someone else has asked me where I've been. I can think of nothing nicer than coming home to people who care enough to ask me how my exam went without my having to mention it, who actually invite me somewhere instead of just assuming that they'll run into me sometime or who call just to say hello because we haven't seen each other in a few days. Most of all, I like knowing that if I were to pass out in my room, someone would find me--relatively quickly.

Harvard students are not usually the type of people who complain that they've fallen and can't get up, but when you realize how easy it would be to disappear, it's nice to know that people might miss you. If you hear a friend is sick, call him up later in the day and ask how he's feeling. If you haven't seen a friend for a week, stop by her room and ask where she's been. And if you haven't seen your roommate in a while, start looking.

Take the day off. Chances are that no one will even notice that you were gone.