There are few materials I appreciate more in a building than brick. Burnt brick, leathered and stained with snaking cracks—there’s a promise in bricks, of stories, of intrigue.
I imagine this factored into my professor’s decision to collect us at the Woods-Gerry House last Thursday, rather than our typical meeting place inside. The class is Art of Craft (ENGL 1190Z); we examine material, style, essence, and what it means to shape and be shaped. I highly recommend anyone to take this course (if you will engage with it).
It was my first time visiting the Woods-Gerry House, a three-story center wrapped together by black trim and perched atop a tranquil garden overlooking downtown Providence. Rectangular inlays of red brick and gray stone curve around the house, shaded by a giant oak just beginning to sprout bright green bulbs. Now the cherries and daffodils are blooming too, lining a little trail flowing down the hill.
Our professor had laid out rich chocolate-frosted brownies and banana walnut muffins, and a classmate brought cider. Today’s class was workshopping; we were assigned partners to read over each other’s final essays. Small groups dispersed across the garden, laying out on blankets, leaning back into wooden chairs, turned to each other on stone benches.
I was partnered with a senior student, and largely our reading was prefaced by a conversation about the future—his post-grad plans, our summers, the unexpected. I think this year, much more than last, I have been confronted with that nebulous question of the future. Something that feels so far—graduation; yet I am reminded of how I felt the same in high school, and then the years had simply slipped away.
When people ask if I like Brown, I can’t just nod along and say ‘yes’—it feels like a lie. My response is always I love it! and often some variation of I couldn’t be more happy. Brown is a place so special and dear that I feel preemptive grief to leave it.
I always wish I could just absorb the culture here, and maybe that just takes a matter of time. But sitting outside in the sweet warmth of mid-April, after six months of bitter New England cold, you can’t help but feel that you’re touching some special energy.
Workshopping wrapped up and my friend and I made our way up the weathered gray fire escape clinging to the side of the house. From above we watched our classmates disperse, wandering out to the streets and libraries and monuments of College Hill.
My friend is an English concentrator—recently and officially declared!—but this has been my first course in the English department. Not a bad impression, in my opinion. As we were talking, I realized why it feels so valuable, so intimate. People engage. It’s a small group, so we all know each other. Every Thursday Professor Ward asks our weekend plans. I’ve read several people’s essays, deeply personal and well-crafted, and so them.
As a premed student, many of my courses have been large lectures, so fact–fact–fact and memorize and focus so hard on the slides that you don’t recognize the person sitting a row down, not even after two years. I love the people, but the course structure can be sterile. That’s part of why I took Art of Craft, even though it fulfills no requirements—it’s a reminder of why I chose Brown, the young version of me that wanted to be a fiction author.
On the fire escape I spoke with my friend and she explained some frustrations with her courses. They stem from something I’ve noticed in myself before: not critically engaging with readings, not giving myself the opportunity to think through them.
“That’s why I love English, why I came to Brown wanting to study it,” my friend explained. “The most valuable part is the unique perspective and background each individual brings to a conversation.”
I am concentrating in Public Health largely because it’s a blend of science and the humanities, two sides of myself I could never pick between. In another of my courses, on medication economics, I have come to spend more time engaging with the assigned readings throughout the course of the semester. And in turn, I feel more satisfied, more interested in what I’m doing, more enriched in my studies. It is a disservice to yourself and your education not to.
I have never been the student making astute observations, or particularly clever insights into an author’s intention or work process or implications. But it’s a group effort: what one person says sparks an idea in another, and catalyzes a richer conversation. So I am encouraging everyone, and especially myself, to not give into that temptation to find a summary of the readings, to not scramble to look over the first page when the professor asks us for our thoughts. To not have my laptop, or phone out; to be fully present, fully mindful.
After all, that’s what makes the humanities so special. The value isn’t being able to name the specific literary device one author used in the fourth paragraph of their nineteenth century manuscript. It’s a point of communication, a synthesis of how others think and approach the world, it’s a perpetual question and learning process.
It is, to some extent, why we all chose Brown.