In Praise of Guyot Hall

Writing my thesis, I discovered that one of the most important things I needed to be productive was isolation. It was terribly important to get away from other seniors, and particularly other social science and humanities majors. I did not want to hear how everyone's thesis was progressing better than mine.

At first, I tried writing in my room, but that did not work well. There were too many distractions. It was always more tempting to play another level of Civilization III, chat on IM or tidy my desk again, than it was to write pithy thoughts on political theory, transregional constitutionalism, the decline of the nation state or some similar weighty topic. I needed a place where I could work effectively, separated from the distractions of my room as well as the anxieties of my peers.

My secret haven was the geosciences library in Guyot Hall. I have fallen in love with this obscure place. Lying south of Frist, the Geosciences Library could, as far as most students in the social sciences or humanities students are concerned, be in the middle of the Karakoram mountains. (These mountains, by the way, are the product of orogenic uplift.)

Guyot Hall is a wonderful old maze of a building. The main lobby is high-ceilinged with grand staircases and comfortable study spaces. It is also a delight for the inner five year old. Display cases contain fossils of ancient fish, the skull of a Tyrannosaur, sabre-toothed tigers, and other prehistoric beasts. Best of all is the towering skeleton of an Allosaur who bares his rows of razor sharp teeth as you walk a little more quickly into the library.

I am not the only person who does this. I've seen lots of people walk a little faster past his gaping maw, especially near closing time. About the only thing missing is a store selling bags of plastic dinosaurs and an IMAX theater.

The library itself is a curious place. It basically takes the form of two long shoeboxes stacked on top of each other. These are lined with books like the International Mining Yearbook, 1986 and Manual of Field Paleontology, which can teach you, respectively, everything you ever needed to know about the Namibian uranium fields or how to discover an Allosaur of your own. At the end of the two hallways is the Map Room where you can find minutely-detailed scale maps of just about anything. Above, hang models of winged dinosaurs, evocative of the Pterodactyl scene in Jurassic Park III.

The best place to study is the upstairs lounge where you can find hot titles like Canadian Mineralogy Today and Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark as well as exotic cactuses. I also like the model of the R/V Hollis Hedberg, Gulf Oil's petroleum prospecting ship, named in memory of an emeritus Princeton geology professor. I like ships. Except for a very few wandering geologists and environmental scientists one can be totally alone here. Ensconced in the Guyot library, one can work in peace.

Why does a Woodrow Wilson School major, allergic to all things quantitative fall in love with a science library? Partly, the answer is simple: It is NOT Stokes. More importantly, though, there is a kind of comforting solidity to the place. Much of my thesis dealt with extremely abstract ideas like "democratic legitimacy," "supranational governance," and an assortment of paradigms, grundnorms, and weltanschauungs.

These things matter, of course, but you still can't set a paradigm down on the table in front of you and disassemble it. Moreover, what academics like to call "the literature," is often written in a deliberately opaque style that tries to sound scientific by being as removed from the tangible immediacies of actual politics as possible. In contrast, geology is the most tangible of all subjects. It's about rocks.

Whenever I got brain ache from working at something very abstract, I would relax and bask in the wonderful "solid" vibes that emanate from books about feldspar. If it wasn't a trip to a mountain retreat, at least it was a trip to a place filled with books about mountains. I don't want to imagine the tension that students working in their own departmental libraries endure. The geosciences calmed me.

It was good for my mental health at a difficult time, reminding me of the world beyond my thesis. When you're struggling to understand lofty concepts of politics or philosophy, dinosaurs can take you a long way.