days like today make cynicism inconceivable
In American Literature, we are reading misanthropic T.S. Elliot's epic poem The Wasteland, which begins with the famous line "April is the cruelest month". Elliot appealed to the anti-Romantic sentiment, April (spring) being the time of year connected with rebirth, happiness and love as ideals ideals (often discussed in the poetry of Byron or Keats). After a day like today I cannot say I connected well with this sentiment.
It was seventy-four degrees outside today. That is sunshine that is strong and warm. Seventy-four is skirts, sandals and shorts. It is taking your lunch outside and running further just because you need to be outside. It is laying on a light blue blanket reading in the courtyard of your dorm. It is staying in your shorts to go to Tertullias even though you'll be out past eight at night.
Yet a day like today at Wesleyan goes so much further. The winter was long and cold. There was a time when Caroline had a full face mask that she had to cut a little hole in to smoke cigarettes through. My warmest coat wasn't warm enough without a sweatshirt or a fleece underneath. The worst part about the winter was its length, from mid-November through March. Day after day you couldn't expose any skin, being outside was painful. It was relentless. The winter lasts so long that it becomes mentally oppressive. People are secluded, tediously working and moody. Parties slow down, dining halls thin out and there is collective lull that pervades.
That is why this April morning means so much, it is physcial and mental freedom, and it is clearly evident.
Everyone's eyes are singing. Girls are in dresses and long flowing skirts, workout clothes are worn to class, jeans are rolled up and many go barefoot. There are boys playing gituar on the Summerfields patio. Classes are held outside in wide circles where you spread your readings out on the grass. Professors joyously declare that attendence won't be taken. Suddenly the campus is packed with people simply walking, more than there ever seem to be. Then there is Foss Hill. Approaching Foss Hill on a spring day was an incredible phenemonen. There were about three hundred students on the hill (many that you know, more that you recognize). There are so many varied activies: frisbee team practice, someone playing a sitar, the steel drum band giving an outdoor concert, a group smoking from a hookah, people reading shakespeare out loud, people rolling down the hill, people dancing... There is a surge of excitement and happiness so fresh and pure that the air tingles with its fervor. I laid back, running my hands through the cool grass and feeling the sun cover my body while listening to the music, bubbly chatter, laughter and song. I had a moment of euphoria, a sensation that I could not conceive of anything better in life than to be where I was at that exact moment.