Why I always come back early

It is very easy to understand why people want to be on campus during freshman week, Intersession and Reunions. People love these times because, without the daunting stress of classes, papers and finals, they can hang out with their friends and party at their eating clubs or inside fenced paddocks (this will make more sense to my freshman readers in a few months). In short, you get to be at school without school, and really, what could be better than that?

It’s more difficult to defend why I’ve been holed up in Campbell Hall since Jan. 5, days before I am even loosely “required” to be here for reading period. It was something my family didn’t quite understand either when they dropped me off last week with a small supply of food to keep me from starving until the dining halls and eating clubs open. But when I stepped into the ice-cold and deserted Mathey courtyard, I knew exactly why I had come back early, knowing few others had. Princeton was a different place than than it will be a this week, and I truly think it’s vital to my experience here that I remember that.

The day after I got back, I took what I thought would be a familiar walk to Frist and back to pick up a package. But it could not have been less familiar. It was different in a few obvious ways — the people I passed were fewer and farther between, and mostly middle-aged tourists. But what was really uncanny to me was how different everything was for me. The buildings, archways and trees were more conspicuous, more massive, more overwhelmingly present. I was in a completely different mindset and saw things around me as barely recognizable. It’s a bit like going to an eating club in the daylight after having been out there the night before. Yes, it is the same space, but there is something so different about it.

It is different not just because I am in a different mindset, but because of the specific mindset I was in. I was not back early just to hang out or do a locomotive for the surviving members of the Class of 1935 (again, freshmen, just you wait), I was on campus mostly to finish my junior paper. So my thoughts were not far from Spinoza and Aquinas and whether religion is necessary for a moral life during my walk to Frist.

And yet these thoughts were still radically different from the ones I am trapped in during the semester. They felt somehow purer, like the landscape, unfettered by the fast-approaching deadlines and internship applications where I attempted to explain my worth as a philosophy major. I knew what I was here to do, I knew what work I have to get done, but the calm serenity of this place made me think of it not merely as work that has to be done, but something more.

With no one around, no one to make me feel guilty, I was able to look at the school as just that: a school. It is not a factory for stress, it is not an undone problem set or an unread book, it is a place of intellectual, emotional, personal (and spiritual if some of my JP sources have anything to say about it) growth.

So this is why I come back to campus early. Some breaks are for having a good time and forgetting the worries and cares of a semester long gone. But other times, like last week, are for just the opposite. I was not trying to forget that this is a school; I was trying to forget that it is anything but. There were no distractions, nothing I could possibly have been doing that would have been more fun than writing my JP. Which honestly made me realize just how fun natural theology can be.

I am very lucky to live within an hour’s driving distance of Princeton — I can decide to come back on a whim. For those who don’t have that luxury, I hope that you are able to come back early once or twice to see the secret Princeton in which I recently lived. I hope you get a chance to store in the back of your brain a Princeton that doesn’t demand that you finish your economics problem set then go to rehearsal then study for a Chinese test, but rather one that presents itself to you as nothing more or less than the beautiful architecture of a centuries-old institute for the pursuit of knowledge.

Then, next semester, when you are stressed out by that economics problem set and that rehearsal and that Chinese test, you can pause and bring this Princeton to mind. You can realize that this other, secret Princeton is not alien to you, the lofty ideals of pure learning embodied in it are not absent from this place, but rather that we are, as my adviser might say, “already on holy ground.”

Luke Massa is a philosophy major from Ridley Park, Pa. He can be reached at lmassa@princeton.edu.