5.3 seconds. That’s how much time you save by walking through the bushes between Lane and Kendall instead of following the sidewalk around the Civil War memorial. (I know because I timed it.) It should go without saying that the honored dead from this school should be remembered with reverence and that students here care about keeping campus beautiful. So quit walking through the middle of what is obviously not a highway but a memorial on your way to class.
But there is even more at stake here than giving the honored dead their due: I’m thinking of aesthetics, beauty and human nobility.
The capacity for rationality sets humans apart from animals. The root of rationality is “ratio,” which means a “counting” or “calculation.” Thinking can be described as merely counting up various factors. Presumably, when thinking about the best way to get from the door of Lane Hall to the door of Kendall, many students compute only one factor: Distance.
We all learned in third grade that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and many proudly display such mathematical analysis when they trench through the circle of grass in a straight line from door to door. I proffer another factor to consider when calculating decisions: Beauty.
Many animals exhibit a kind of rationality to attain their goals. Japanese crows, for example, drop shells onto busy roads so that cars can run them over, thus easily exposing the shell’s occupant to the appetite of the bird. Yet only humans care about beauty. There is an uncanny connection between beauty and human nobility, and a strange word denoting the contemplation of it: Aesthetics. When we are surrounded by beauty, when we pause and contemplate or revere beauty, we are lifted up to a higher level of humanity.
At this school, more than most places, is a collection of people pursuing various kinds of beauty, because we believe that classical poetry, history, theater, literature, music, etc. — pursuits that usually do not yield even the money it takes to study them — humanize us in some mysterious way. Remember something you know already: Beauty matters.
If you include beauty as a factor in your rational calculations of how to get from Lane to Kendall, you will find it only reasonable to follow the sidewalk around the memorial. This provides an excellent vantage point to admire not only the monument but also the beautiful green grass before it is covered in snow. Who knows: It might even inspire you to hold the door open for the person behind you when upon reaching the other side — another kind of beauty.
If you neglect beauty as a factor in your thinking here, then you will help kill the grass in front of the memorial, which is disrespectful, but you will also encourage other students to engage in your own limited thinking. Such thinking is inimical to the purpose of a community of learners, but especially to those who aspire to a higher learning than what is offered in most American colleges. Conserving blades of grass may seem a trifling matter, but it provides occasion to begin a consideration of a deeper concern. So let’s include beauty as a factor in our equations. It only takes 5.3 seconds.
