Books, Buildings, and the Yard

Parting shots, by definition, should not be over-prepared. Mine have to do with modest activities and modest messages.

What, for example, do I do in Cambridge if I find myself with some genuinely free time? Mostly, I haunt bookshops, even if for 30 or 40 minutes. This is therapeutic—“retail therapy” one might say.

I have no one favorite shop, but tend to do the equivalent of a pub-crawl—moving slowly place to place, making the rounds. I’m fairly omnivorous. Almost always, I enter with no plans to buy anything. Invariably, I end up with something, and usually far more than even I might have imagined.

Why are bookstores and book browsing so irresistible? Well, there are some reasons, but reasons rarely tell all the story. Nonetheless, when it became clear to me—long ago—that I was likely to remain in academic administration indefinitely, I decided that I could not possibly keep up my scholarly existence, but that I could and would keep up my intellectual existence.

I did this essentially by giving myself permission to read as much and as widely as I wanted in any field, on the theory that all of it would sooner or later be valuable (quite apart from being enjoyable) if I were going to spend the rest of my time thinking about universities and knowledge as a whole, rather than mainly from my own specialized area.

This decision proved to be the right one, at least for me. Browsing through bookshelves can be a mini form of education in itself—one sees, if only through a small window, what’s coming out in many different fields. It’s a bit like reading the Times Literary Supplement, or the London Review, or the New York Review of Books.

Having a library of my own, however, is the real point, as is keeping it well ordered and well stocked. If my books aren’t in order, then I feel that my mind is slightly disheveled—I can’t find much in it. But having the shelves filled in a coherent way keeps my intellectual life, and especially its history, visible and accessible. The library is for me a kind of proxy for an active memory—an index, and a geography that enables me to keep a great deal of what I have read and thought in a form that is alive and ready at hand.

Fortunately, out of all the existing addictions in the world, the one that has bewitched me—book buying—is entirely legal, fairly inexpensive, potentially beneficial, not especially perishable and completely free of calories or deleterious side effects. And, since I have never ventured into the territory of trying to collect rare books, I have been saved yet again from something potentially ruinous.

When I walk out of Massachusetts Hall, and do not go to the bookstores, then what? Mostly, I look at the buildings, trying to discover details that I have overlooked and compare small differences. Our three Georgian dormitories in the Yard, for instance, are really very different from one another, and I now have a reasonably clear idea of which one seems to me to be the best architecturally, which next, and which last.

Looking at the different forms of bricks and mortar is also important. The size, color, texture and patterns of brick vary from building to building—and of course the color, amount and “relief” of the mortar can make all the difference. Most of the brick in the Yard, and the mortar, works quite well. Looking at a wall in “raking” sunlight is particularly revealing and often beautiful. After a while, you want to look at some of the brick over and over again—and you want to tear some of down, and start again from scratch.

Favorites? It doesn’t get much better—in terms of rather simple, unadorned buildings—than Massachusetts Hall. Sever is also wonderful. For stone, University Hall and Austin Hall are, in different ways, stunning. Memorial Hall is a gem—a rather large and ungainly gem, but still quite wonderful, intricate, large-minded and spirited.

Seeing the spire of Memorial Church alight, at dusk or in darkness, as I leave Mass. Hall in the evenings—that is very beautiful, especially because the Memorial Hall Tower, also alight, is in the same sight line, and both look even better with the glimmer of University Hall’s now cleaned white stone below.

The place, the setting, matters. The Yard is in many ways unique—historically, as well as in terms of the complicated balance between openness and closure. Just in that one characteristic, one could write a great deal about the implicit ideology of the College and the University.

What else? Students. At heart, I have for almost four decades thought of myself as an undergraduate teacher. It is still my most invigorating occupation. Fortunately, I have been able to be more and more relaxed, and less and less concerned to make sure that certain specific “points” were definitively “made” in a given class.

This approach does not mean that it is unimportant to cover “material” or make significant points, just that there are various ways to do so, and the more confident one feels as a teacher, the more one can trust to the conversational, Socratic process to bring everyone around, eventually, to whatever is necessary for the class to be a success.

So I feel much freer in the classroom now, and I’m more inclined to let the literature—especially the poetry—speak a good deal for itself, in conversation with my students. For this to happen, one needs very fine students. Bright, yes. But also with considerable ability to understand human beings and experience, since reading literature requires that—a good ear, a relish for words and rhythms and a feel for syntax.

In all these respects, Harvard undergraduates are ideal. They usually have real knowledge and passion. They want to engage, if one will only let them. They are not afraid to ask questions, to risk interpretations, to read poems aloud and to listen. So my finest experiences since 1991 teaching (briefly) lyric poetry to first-year students at Harvard have been whipped cream on top of chocolate cake. For those who wonder whether education is alive and well, or who question whether the future will be in good hands, I exhort them to come, to watch and to listen to our students.

In sum, choose your addictions carefully. Notice the space you live in, and think about its possible meanings. Engage with some significant works of literature—defined in the broadest sense to include really any field of study: when you are directly in touch with profound writing and thought, when you are talking in an engaged way with others about such work, then you are likely to feel completely alert, alive and enlarged. And that is education.

Neil L. Rudenstine is the twenty-sixth president of Harvard University.