Harper: the first existentialist?

I'm sitting in Uncle Joe's doing work. Behind me punk/alt/hipster music is blaring too loud from the stereo. Don't try to get them to change it though, they'll just get defiant - they work there, they get to choose the fucking music!

In front of me, a guy in dark blue jeans and a slightly too casual collared shirt lies sleeping on a couch by the window. His mouth is agape, his head resting on a puffy black coat. His hands are resting on the keyboard of his laptop. His fingers are still on the keys, frozen mid-word.

This is the U of C: working too much to actually be productive. How many times have I worked until the point where I started to doze as I was typing, only to force myself to alertness to find the last paragraph is filled with typos and grammatical mistakes?

It's spring: BA time, and this guy is probably on the 5th draft, revising page 25 of 35. But wouldn't it be more productive to just go home and sleep in a real bed? Or even just close the computer, and curl up by the always-on radiator?

Spring is usually a great quarter. In November, 50-degree weather is freezing, but in April it's balmy (though it's snowing right now). So everyone is outside, in light jackets, then sweaters, then t-shirts, playing frisbee and reading. Spring is a college catalog, more than fall, since we don't start fall quarter until the very end of September.

The flowers are out, too, which makes this gray city so much more bearable. Everyone's a birdwatcher in Spring, too, as the robins and cardinals come back. And yet there's still a collective exhaustion; the fourth-years are finishing their BAs and coming to terms with their inescapable graduation, while the underclassmen aren't used to the winter yet, so have been worn down more.

I always think, in spring, about the need for contrast in life, the misery and the joy being intrinsically connected. Spring would not be spring if it were not preceded by winter. I need to read more Camus, I think, though I've read most of his fiction, at least.

Maybe that's what the U of C is: a prescient embodiment of the absurd. Anticipating Camus, Rockefeller and Harper and their ilk decided to build this grand, old-looking institution in the New City of America, still on the frontiers of civilized America, in the middle of prairies and farms. They would use a radical view of education and Democracy to teach the likes of Aristotle and Augustine. And in the dead, cold, gray stone buildings, decorated with nonliving demon gargoyles, they conceived of great living, Holy Discourses being instilled within every mind, actually inspired to vigor by the stagnation around them.