Tender is the morning

The favorite time of day for many undergraduates seems to be around and somewhat after midnight, especially on Thursdays and Saturdays. I confess that I don't really understand why — even when I was an undergraduate, I avoided cheap beer and disliked loud music — but I have ample opportunity to contemplate the habits of the young thanks to the sounds of revelry that carry through the night from Prospect Avenue to and then through the walls of my home. No, I don't go out to the Street myself to investigate (it's hard to know whether I should be thankful or not that advancing age means ever fewer invitations to play "Robo"), though some years ago, when East Pyne was being renovated, my colleagues and I were holed up in the old Elm Club. Is there a better way to understand what makes some undergraduates tick than working next to Tiger Inn?

But enough about you. My favorite time of day is not so many hours later, when the atmosphere could hardly be more different: There are only a few people up and about, no one's drinking or yelling and the traffic lights on Nassau Street have only just stopped blinking and gone back to their familiar traffic-monitoring cycle of red-yellow-green. I don't expect to win converts to a new way of life with this column — changing from night owl to early bird is not a matter of snapping your fingers — but I do recommend to all undergraduates that at least once before you graduate, you watch the sun rise (not because you've stayed up all night on your thesis) and experience Princeton at its tenderest.

What are the nicest outdoor spots in town? Along the trails of the Institute Woods, beneath the magnolias in Marquand Park, beside the Princeton Cemetery's older headstones, up and down the busy towpath and inside Richard Serra's vertigo-inducing sculpture "The Hedgehog and the Fox" — these spring to mind. All of them are lovely from dawn to dusk but especially fine, I think, early in the morning, when the sun is just up and the birds are warbling and the folks you meet on the street say "Good morning." A highlight of my day until Abel Bagel closed last month without warning was participating in the unacademic banter there at opening hour, 6 a.m. The puffy pucks of dough weren't what a New Yorker named Katz would call bagels, but the people behind the counter were cheerful and there was general bonhomie among the customers, nearly all of whom would be in their work-clothes: tailored suits for some, construction boots for others.

Since some of my fellow classicists are also early risers, there's academic banter in most of my mornings as well. (In contrast, the Greek historian Marc Domingo Gygax — who, since he is Catalan, prefers to eat dinner at midnight — has been known to leave the office for the day just when I get there.) But mostly it's peaceful: The light blazes through my east-facing windows, the janitorial staff (especially Bill Swain, who is retiring in June after 33 years of service to the University) go about their necessary but under-appreciated business and for a short period I receive email only from distant time zones.

I'd love to teach my classes at 6 a.m. (When I was in college, one of my great professors, Richard Garner '75, and I would meet at sunrise to study Cherokee; I considered this on the happy side of normal.) Alas, it is not allowed, though my experience with Princeton's earliest time-slots has been largely positive. Last semester, for example, I taught a linguistics seminar at 8:30 a.m., and most of the students showed up most of the time (one freshman really couldn't handle it and would regularly snore, but he's such a sweet boy that it was hard to be offended); right now I am teaching "Turbo Latin" five days a week at 9 a.m., and — I am not making this up — four of the students actively compete with one another each day to be the first to arrive, with the winner sometimes getting there before 7:30 a.m. It's a bit odd, but here's a competition I encourage!

With a mug of tea, a stack of papers to correct and a pretty book (at the moment, Stephanie Moser's "Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum") — that's how I spend most early mornings in the office. I treasure the quiet. But if you're up and are serious about learning Cherokee, stop by. Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics, Senior Fellow of Forbes College and the John Witherspoon Bicentennial Preceptor. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.