EPTI
When God built the world
he wrinkled his forehead
calculated and calculated
hence the world is perfect
and impossible to live in.
--Zbigniew Herbert
Here was Cambridge, there was Boston. I'd snuck in with the understudies to know better the show. The Charles River gawked at the stranger in passing. I returned the favor. Seven stories above, six-feet-deep professors splayed against the skyscrapers their sets of five disembodied fingers from four-sided shrub planters to point to the three-ring circus. Two halves of every brain were being yoked that they might join in the one, interminate, hair-raising chorus of industry.
Taking the rail from the city of Boston proper to Cambridge had been simple enough, but I realized something invisible yet still perceptible had either come or left when I crossed northwest over the river. The memory of New York City's drivers was as fresh on my mind as the taste of the pizza I'd eaten there only hours before, which is why I was so surprised when my host, towing me through the alien ether of MIT, strode into a busy street as cars stopped for him. Something had changed. He sensed my incredulity and gave a wave of his hand.
"Yeah, things are different here. Nobody really cares."
He took me into a building and down a long hall. Turn after turn, one stately wooden door at a time, it stretched on. This and the "Hi, Tina"s and "What's up, Vinny"s made the university seem more like a large high school than the world's most celebrated technological institute. But surely it is not, I concluded, as we passed a gaggle of Korean tourists crackling like bulgogi on a grill fumbling over their iPads taking pictures. Only after I’d noticed their fascination did I really notice my own.
It seemed at least half of the rooms we passed were labs, peppered with tanks of liquid nitrogen, lathes, 3D printers, computers, sweat, and, above all, dogged determination, the type that slips under the cracks of the doors and sniffs and nibbles feverishly at your shoes and hands. This was surely the MIT I’d heard of, but not the one I’d envisioned: being in it and experiencing it firsthand all at once transubstantiated my conception of it from something nebulous and impersonal to something solid and friendly. Seeing the halls where MIT alumni like the spunky Richard Feynman, the zany Ray Kurzweil, and the inspirational Salman Khan had once fucked up, greeted friends, and cracked jokes made these disembodied names feel a bit more human to me. I could now be sure the innumerable papers published under that imposing MIT logo had come from somewhere real and not from some bodhisattva imparting scraps of cosmic knowledge from beyond.
II
Elected in 1914 to represent a school of ambitious engineers, the beaver mascot has been embraced by every subsequent generation of MIT students. One of the secrets of its success is its enduring appropriateness as a symbol of the community. Originally chosen for its engineering skills, industriousness, and nocturnal habits, the North American beaver has not changed much over the century, but its likeness on campus morphs from generation to generation.
We reached my host's dormitory. "MASEEH HALL" was engraved above the door, pronounced "ma" as in "manometer" and "seeh" as in "sequence". "Alex, this looks more like a hotel than a dorm." I said.
He smiled. "Actually, it was. Then it was graduate housing, and now it's for undergrads, I think." All of MIT’s on-campus undergraduate housing freely mix freshmen and upperclassmen, and all except the all-female house are coeducational. “Maseeh’s kind of normal,” he explained, “but like, Random Hall is full of LARPers and stuff. And each floor has their own thing, too. Some of them just play LOL and Magic. And Bexley is full of stoners, and McCormick is all girls, and yeah.”
It seemed to me that MIT students tend to be unafraid to violate convention if it should impose no penalties, unafraid to reinvent themselves if the environment should favor it, unafraid to sacrifice some form if it can buy some function.
We came to his room. A MacBook Air squatted on his desk like a pair of safety scissors hung up in a woodcarving shop. "What happened to Linux? That's all you used in high school."
Alex smiled, shook his head, hung up his North Face jacket. I didn't seem to recall ever seeing him with brand name clothes before. "All the startups in California these days use Macs, including Pinterest, where I’m gonna work this summer. Besides, Sublime is a great text editor."
Empty bottles of Jack Daniels and Jägermeister also sat quietly on his desk. I looked at his roommate's side. A couple beer bottles and an empty handle of Smirnoff were keeping watch. Textbooks and dirty clothes made sloppy love on the tile floor to the tune of trucks out the window. In one corner of the room, the smell of weed caught my nose.
But the ubiquity of alcohol and drugs must not be misunderstood. Whereas at many colleges students indulge and find time for work, at MIT it seemed that many students rather work and find time to indulge. A whiteboard reading "WEEKLY OCCURANCES" (sic) with reminders for problem sets and other work neatly lined up below it sticks on the wall, above the empty bottles. Squandering time that would have been dedicated to work seemed tantamount to embezzlement in the minds of some.
I went to dinner with my friend. We passed a painting of St. Peter’s Basilica and a grand piano on the way. We ran into an acquaintance of his with lips as lush as the guava juice in my cup and eyes as steely the spoon waltzing in her hand. The hat she’d taken off made her look decidedly like a flapper, but we were in a dining hall, not a speakeasy, and she assured me she and her dirty blond hair were from Oregon, not the 1920’s.
“So what major are you?” I ask. They’re numbered, though, as are the buildings, as are the courses. A physics major anywhere else goes to his PHYS 320 class in Smith Hall. A student on course 8 at MIT goes to his 8.044 class in Building 12.
“You know, I’m still not sure.” she says with a full smile. “My parents tell me to do what I want, and I really like writing, so I was thinking maybe the comparative media studies track, but I don’t know...” She prods her porkchop looking for answers. I look around at the Indians and Asians in the hall, some of whom have undoubtedly already had their answers thrust upon them.
I turn to my friend and ask him the same.
He looks around and shrugs. “Computer science, like 40 percent of the school, probably. Or maybe physics. We’ll see.”
MIT students, for all their caricatures make them out to be, are really quite diverse, a feat that becomes attainable when a school attracts an application pool as large as MIT’s. Each class is not an accident, but a conscious effort to orchestrate and optimize a concoction that will react with itself to produce excellent alumni—which lead to excellent endowments.
III
Two donkeys graze in a meadow of wild golden buttons.
Scents of eucalyptus and honeysuckle mingle in morning air.
Distantly, down at the shore, rise the voices of children discovering
things.
Childhood burned with a long wick, I have returned here to
examine the ashes.
The gulls lament some tedious, age-old woe
as they skim off toward the harbor
while the sun bores into and into the petalled whorls of the golden
flowers
like radiation, the whole meadow bristling with a heat that destroys
and sustains.
This doesn’t matter to the donkeys, who munch on, regardless.
--Rosanna Warren
Hard work done socially, with alcohol being a close second, seems the intoxicant of choice, maybe out of necessity: everywhere I went I saw groups of students slaving away on problem sets. White boards and lounges and work spaces had been set up everywhere in recognition of this. Most would agree MIT students are distinguished from others by their diligence, but I found that it comes less naturally in some than others.
I sat in chairs in a hall—the only common space not being used for work at the time—chatting with my friend, his friend, and passersby. “Jin!” I exclaimed when I saw an old friend of mine.
We caught up. “Work’s mellowed me out a little, I guess.” he said when I remarked on how he didn’t exude happiness as much as he used to anymore. (But his smile and beady eyes could still melt the heart.) His hair had gotten longer and it didn’t bounce like it used to. It fell across his forehead but took great care not to get in the way of his eyes. We said goodbye.
There seemed to be an undercurrent of either dissatisfaction, or disillusionment, or both, or maybe none, in some of the people I met. “You know, I get satisfaction when there’s a clear goal I can reach.” said Alex.
He looked at the thermodynamics equations on the whiteboard to his right.
“But with education, there’s just no end, so I have no motivation. And like, what’s the point of it all? After I’m dead nothing matters to me. So nothing really matters at all.” MIT students, I’d been shown conclusively, are just as susceptible to existential crises as the rest of us. I was tempted to tell him to read some Sartre. Nihilism is so close to existentialism! But I decided not to. An MIT student, of all people, can bear wrestling with a problem.
Everyone finds her own answer, it seems. Maybe those who enjoy work just bury themselves in their work, and the fraternity brothers immerse themselves in their fraternities. Maybe some reckon their answers will be clear once they get to trading, to developing, to exploring, to doing research, to writing, to touring. But one particular group caught my attention.
I was taken outside Bexley Hall, one of the on-campus residences, and guided in by a friend of my friend. All I knew was that at one point Bexley, according to legend, had been the site of 90% of the LSD production of the east coast, before an unsuccessful FBI bust forced it to relocate. But that alone didn’t prepare me for what I would see inside.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Kn84Rd4.jpg)
I felt as if a section of 4chan’s “random” board had been squeezed, concentrated, and reconstituted in this one residence hall. There was writing all over the walls, everywhere, except outside the housemaster’s room, an unadulterated, pristine stream of consciousness recorded for all to see.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/svqzvAv.jpg)
The students in Bexley were blazing their own trails with mushrooms, weed, acid, and all the rest. I looked, paused, and continued.
IV
THE DAY is no more, the shadow is upon the earth. It is
time that I go to the stream to fill my pitcher.
The evening air is eager with the sad music of the water.
Ah, it calls me out into the dusk. In the lonely lane
there is no passer by, the wind is up, the ripples are
rampant in the river.
I know not if I shall come back home. I know not whom
I shall chance to meet. There at the fording in the
little boat the unknown man plays upon his lute.
--Rabindranath Tagore
I’d been as high as the penthouse balcony of McCormick over the Charles I went to on my first day and as low as network of colligative tunnels I took back to the subway station. I was leaving with even more questions than I’d had when I came. MIT’s mystique, I’d found, was undeniable.
I put on my backpack, went through the turnstiles at Kendall station, and spoke from the other side: “I’ll see you—well, when I see you.”
(and were you here for HMMT? :D)
. They have such interesting personalities. I would love to analyze them
