Observing an ever-evolving university

Last week, I gave some account of my whirlwind tour of several Princeton Clubs in the Heartland. It needs to be balanced by some account of my gusty return. The imagery of wind, doubtless applicable to the talks I gave to the alumni, is even more appropriate for the aeronautical conditions of my homeward flight on a plane first long delayed on the Atlanta tarmac, and then blown about raggedly above the meandering spine of the Appalachian chain.

So wind was one unifying leitmotiv of outward and inward journey. A second was change, mutation. Alumni always want to hear about "all the changes that are taking place on campus." While speakers from the Alumni Council are prepared to address this question, we are of course strictly constrained by Princeton's institutional party line concerning change at Princeton. That is codified in McCosh's Theorem of Ameliorative Mutation, sometimes known as Dodd's Doctrine of Interminable Improvement. This proposition holds that while there may be apparent change in Princeton University, it is not really change but incremental "improvement" that leaves what is good better, what is better best, and what is already best — most things, naturally — even bester. Hence the "changes" we are allowed to talk about are new buildings, new programs and new faculty appointments even more intergalatically incandescent than the last wave.

However, on the very first instant of my return to campus I was nearly overwhelmed by the manifestation of dramatic change. Several thousand trees seemed to have burst into bloom, and the plaza in front of Firestone Library, which for at least a year has presented the affect of Dresden after the firestorm, was looking sensationally great. A chaos of rusting fences, piles of rubble and singularly ugly machinery — a chaos of such of long duration that I had come to regard it as permanent — had been transformed overnight, or at most a few nights, into one of the more handsome public spaces on campus. Gone is most of the junkyard of old flat-tired bicycles, chained forever to their racks in lieu of annual giving by seniors of the late seventies and early eighties. We now have two parterres of what will be greensward, almost like medieval turf benches. These are contained within retaining walls in the form of real benches — long, thick, squat benches in what looks like polished granite, generously butt-sized and exactly the right height for hanging out on a spring or autumn afternoon.

These new stone benches are in every way superior to their predecessors, and conspicuously so in their increased distance from the doors of Firestone. Already the nicotine exiles have transferred activities from the library portals to the granite walls, making access to scholarship somewhat less life-threatening for the rest of us. I shall think of this new space as sacred to Diana, whose attribute, the crescent moon, often appears in her artistic representations. The chief characteristic of the moon commented upon by ancient astronomers, its alternation of waxings and wanings, defined the old pessimism concerning all sublunary (literally "below the moon") existence. In the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh fancifully derived the word "world" from the phrase "wear old" — meaning "that thing that groweth the worse as it groweth the older." That was Raleigh's Principle of Perpetual Pejoration.

The fact is that in a very old, very stable, very traditional place like ours, it is often easier to catch the grass growing than to chart real "change." Yet it constantly occurs There is an ancient sophism, recorded by Cicero and other classical writers, called the riddle or paradox of the heap. It is related to the legend of the straw that broke the camel's back. The question is this: how many grains of corn does it take to make a heap? The answer, of course, is one. Start dropping kernels of cereal grain onto a flat surface, one by one. At some point you drop the individual grain that transforms the growing pile into a "heap." The process, rather like aging itself, is imperceptible in its progression but blatant in its accomplishment. Nothing seems to happen for half an eon. But just leave town for a few days, and you're likely to find a new Piazza Diana in front of the library when you return. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.