House and Home

Maybe it’s the fact that we’re all just jittery, waiting on snow and the end of drudgery and the opportunity to go home in a week. Or maybe the cold is coaxing us into our rooms like turtles into shells. Or perhaps Christmas spirit really does exist. Whatever it is, I’ve noticed that house life at Harvard reaches its peak during the holidays. Girls lay out dresses for house formals, Secret Santas creep through corridors, and the dining halls smell like evergreen forests because of the wreaths we have put up and the trees we have decorated ourselves. Now more than ever, students are retreating into their houses and surrounding themselves with all the pleasures the holidays have to offer. Observing this sudden display of insouciance in the face of what would otherwise be a grueling week of schoolwork, I can’t help but marvel at the sense of community in Harvard houses and what it reveals about the students in them.

What really keeps the house system from being just a collection of dorms with fancy names and arbitrary traditions is the devotion of house members. In typical Harvard fashion, students often invest massive amounts of time and energy in their houses—from House Committees to intramural sports to house events to random displays of house pride. Although the extent certainly varies from house to house, it is safe to say that all houses contain groups of people who actively participate in house life.

But of all Harvard activities, house life is by far the most mystifying. Harvard students love summer internships in finance, panels arbitrated by Nobel laureates, and painful comp processes. Yet unlike any of these, house life is not for anything. You can’t put the fact that you went to a house formal on your resume. “IM dodgeball” is not a marketable skill. And the people you play pool with in the basement are never going to secure you a position with Goldman Sachs.

Sometimes I feel that house life is the purest expression of happiness we have at Harvard, because whatever we do within our houses, we do for our own enjoyment. Ordinarily, we are quick to sacrifice sleep and meals and socializing upon the altar of a distant future, but in our houses we celebrate the present. The fact that we give so much of our time—which we seem to value above all other things—to make our living environments better is as heartening as it is unexpected.

House life provides a counterexample to all the things cynics say about Harvard students: that we are neurotic, self-serving, pretentious automatons bent on winning prizes or ruling the world. That we are so concerned with success that we have forgotten how to live. I see none of that mindless careerism in the Christmas lights blinking from the privacy of common room windows, nor in the harried students lingering together over cups of hot chocolate in their dining halls. I see people as grounded as anyone at any other college, people who see each other as more than just stepping stones to a better place.


Marina S. Magloire ’11, a Crimson editorial writer, is a history and literature concentrator in Kirkland House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.