It's All in the Context

The beginning of each academic year puts each of us in settings that are, to some degree or another, unfamiliar. As we meet the new classmates and neighbors that will populate our lives, we very quickly form lasting opinions of these people.

As I packed up to return to Cambridge this September, the prospect of these first impressions coincided with the image of my next-door neighbor’s house, the exterior of which is notoriously run-down. The more I thought about these two things, the more I resolved to keep that image in my mind this fall. My neighbor’s house illuminates an important aspect of first impressions: our opinion of others tends to rest heavily on how well these people seem to match their surroundings.

My hometown lies on the dense outskirts of Philadelphia. The houses on my block are closely packed, and our backyards are about the size of my single in Pfoho. Which is fine. My family grows potted plants on the porch, and we keep our backyard tree trimmed. My next-door neighbor, however, has not made the same aesthetic decision, and for this she creates and suffers under a variety of problems.

Her front yard contains half a dozen spindly trees. The shade chokes out the lawn, leaving just mud and weeds. My neighbor’s dogs, which number between three and five at any given time and are always of the larger variety, wander around the front yard, growling at passersby. The entire mess is barely contained by an old chain-link fence, over which grow ivy and morning glory so thick that the wires are no longer visible. The ivy hangs in a curtain around her porch and climbs up to the top of the house, twining itself around her chimney. Her walls are crumbling under the ivy’s grasp, and she repairs the holes in the windows with plastic.

My neighbor is now retired, but her house has been this way for years, and she has inspired much anger among my other neighbors on our block, as well as a few petty crimes—years back one of her dogs was poisoned.

In the face of such backlash, why does she continue to live as she does? Is she just a variation on the old lonely woman who keeps dozens of cats in her house?

No. My neighbor is just a woman who is severely out of context. She’s an immigrant from rural eastern Europe who moved to my town with the intention of retiring to a house in “the country”—in an open midwestern space where her dogs and trees and plants would be spread over several acres. She even bought an RV when she retired, made an attempt to sell her house and build her country life elsewhere, but has yet to actually do so. Instead, she stays next door, creating her own little pocket of country life in the middle of a densely populated town.

When we begin our lives at Harvard, our surroundings and our goals are, to varying degrees, at odds with one another. Each of us arrives with our own mental image of what our lives here should look like. Some have an easy time of matching their ideals with the reality of Harvard life. Others may be more like my neighbor, trying to build something that looks radically different from their surroundings.

To reconcile this difference, we struggle to create a proper context for ourselves. On a basic level, this means finding our communities: my desire to write rambling columns might seem out of context in the math department, so I gravitate toward the humanities. That’s a move that most of us make fairly early. In every aspect of our lives—academic, social, cultural, extracurricular—we try to find the places where it is least likely that people will think we’re crazy, the places where our goals and sentiments are most likely to make sense.

What makes things more difficult, however, is achieving a balance. No matter how many clubs or classes there are, there are still more people, each of whom is a unique and slightly insane combination of hopes, irrational fears, valid fears, goals and contradictions. As a result, either our environments or our goals must be compromised—or both, as in the case of my neighbor, who has done rather severe damage to her house, but has not created anything terribly similar to a countryside life.

It is important to be aware of the flexibility of Harvard life: to do our best to fit it to our individual needs, and not feel trapped in one particular mold. At the same time, however, as my neighbor’s house reminds me, there is one overriding principle: as we try to balance our classes, roommates, housing, clubs and concentrations with what we want and who we are, that we not break the house.

Catherine L. Tung ’06 is an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.