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Exclusives: Comparative Life November
7, 2001: By Kristen Albertsen
'02 As the campus begins
to hunker down in parkas and a blanket of crunchy leaves in preparation
for the winter months ahead, I note that it's not only the attire
of students and trees that's changing. Indeed, buildings and spaces
on the Princeton campus seem to change as fast as the seasons. Dod
Hall, the dormitory I called home my junior year, is under construction;
the bright big windows that heralded warmth and shelter for me last
year are now dark, cold, gutted, plastic tarps whipping in the November
wind. The courtyard of Mathey College, where I lived my first two
years, seems strangely new and alien, cleansed and sterilized by
the renovation of Blair Hall. East Pyne, which formerly housed my
department offices in its quirky hallways and secret passages, is
shrouded from view by construction materials and fencing as it,
too, is closed, gutted, and being rendered more practical, more
generic, and more mundane. After three and half
years here I've adopted spaces that I call my own; some have survived
the unending wave of campus improvement, some have changed with
me, and others have been completely obliterated entirely, alive
only in pictures and memory. My senior year has brought
with it a host of new spaces to explore, adopt, and make my own;
my B-floor thesis carrel in Firestone is one such strange new territory.
It is a hospital-scrub green, and the metallic work area reminds
me of an operating table — appropriate for the messy surgical
procedure of writing a thesis, I suppose. My carrel-mate and I joke
about how we should decorate: perhaps a black-and-white portrait
of a disdainfully frowning Nietzsche, or an enigmatically smiling
Proust. We've already stocked up on enough jellybeans to sustain
us well past April. But even as we procrastinate and laugh, dreams
of an Ikea-outfitted carrel dancing in our heads, I glance wistfully
at the thumbtack holes on the bare walls, the only traces left behind
of past seniors who had inhabited the carrel before us. In just
a few short months, our valiant decorative efforts will have also
been in vain, expunged to prepare for the next influx of seniors,
and then the next. It's strange to think
that at the end of this year, when I vacate my favorite stool in
the Tower taproom and my favorite corner table in Small World coffee
shop, that the beer and coffee will continue to flow in my absence,
as it always has. That a new-and-improved Dod Hall and East Pyne
will open and a new crop of juniors will sign in. That long after
I have stopped running the well-worn towpath by Lake Carnegie, the
morning mists will continue to be pierced by the rising sun and
the coxswain's shrill shouts of "Stroke!" And that the next time
I see campus following graduation it will have changed almost beyond
my recognition: wooden barricades will obstruct the expanses of
my courtyards, music and fireworks will disrupt my footsteps now
muffled by the snow and darkness of winter afternoons. And even
those memories which now seem so clear and vivid as to render reality
strange and unreal will change and wither, ravaged by a nostalgic
imagination and, of course, time. For me it's late fall already,
here at Princeton, and come spring I'll be gone. Kristen is majoring in comparative literature and can be reached at albertsn@princeton.edu
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