Where are We Happiest?

Hi, Everybody! 

I'm Nan and I have spent many decades taking classes at Bryn Mawr.  I am really happy to be here with all of you. My work is as a therapist, and my practice is in Swarthmore.  It is wonderful to be able to continue to come to Bryn Mawr and share in these conversations together!  Thank you so much for welcoming me!

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It was already 8:00 PM one evening last weekend when I happily marched off into the Morris Wood (with my husband still happily wandering after me).  This started off better than it ended, about an hour later in the vast deserted hallways of the science building where my husband, a composer and prof at Swarthmore College, had long since given up hope of finding me any time soon.

I was quite happy, diving into the darkening wood, perhaps even happiest as we explored deeper among a resplendent diversity of species, apparently unmanaged and relatively free on their stems as the sun was setting and the high beech trees and immense tulip poplars made a canopy catching the last rays.  The plants seemed happy as well, if I would like to allow myself that bit of projected anthropomorphic glee.  But even as new shoots were sprouting from fallen limbs, I thought I did hear something dark green giggle in planty pleasure on the evening air.  I and the plants were quite happy there.  And my husband had not yet started to complain that he was accompanying me in this quixotic undertaking.

#1 for me & #1 for the plants:  The Morris Woods

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It is always fun and a source of deep pleasure for me to escape from bugs.  It was dark when we walked into English house, lights ablaze, and apparently empty.  I am very familiar with these classrooms and feel a familiar homey indoor comfort here.  Classroom #1 is not a large room, relative to the woods or perhaps even to some larger classrooms that I might be happier in, but it is homey with large windows,  cosy and quivering with an energetic excitement of imminent thoughts and shared conversations about to make themselves known as the semester begins.

Even with the windows dark, I could remember how bright and cheerful a room this is, one where I am always happy to return.  I am not sure if plants would be happy here.  I suppose there are some plants, perhaps not unlike some domesticated animals, who have come to accept their indoor lot.  Perhaps not unlike someone who has been blind from birth, a potted plant may not know what it is missing, never having seen the woods.  If a plant were transplanted from the woods to the classroom, it might be even less happy, remembering in its fibers, the feeling of the wind through the pectin of its being.

#2 for me; #4 for plants:  English House in Classroom 1

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I could not enter the glassed-in stairway of Dalton at night because it was locked, but I could see it from the outside and could imagine its vast prisms of glass stretching above and below the stairway. I think that I might like that space a lot and be temporarily happy there if I did not get trampled by traffic.  I think a plant might be happy with the light and spaciousness as well, but perhaps in the flow of human traffic, the plant might be even more likely than I to be jostled or knocked by people on their way somewhere.  And unlike humans who can pass from glass into air on their own feet carrying them through a doorway, a plant would be incarcerated there like a prize zoo animal gazing through a transparent wall at a world it could not inhabit.

#3 for me; #3 for plants :  The Glassed-in Stairway

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It was quite late when I found my way to the parking lot, and I could not see well. I had gotten a little lost, had asked the night watchman for directions, wandered off, leaving my husband happier at this point to read in the car, resigned as he was to my completing this labyrinth of tasks.

So I have to admit, I was not happy in the parking lot.  Parking lots are ostensibly to make cars happy doing one of the things they are meant to do, and to the extent that their owners are eager to get rid of their cars, they are happy too.  But of what use is a parking lot to someone on foot, whose husband is beginning to get restless waiting in a parked car in some other parking lot ?  I did feel slightly silly wandering around in the dark staring at the small trees and plantings. And I'm pretty sure I felt some distain coming from the plants toward me.  Even if they were leading a severely restricted life within their concrete borders and controlled edges, they formed an outdoor community, albeit inhaling auto exhaust, but they still had some suburban sense of belonging, self-satisfied and homogeneous in their attractive ghetto.  I, however, was clearly lost and out of place.

#4 for me; #2 for plants:  The Parking Lot

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Now I was on my own and I tried every locked door to the Science building. I was getting tired and worn out but something about this undertaking still tickled my sense of humor.  This was a building I had never entered when I was at Bryn Mawr, though I took rat psychology somewhere along the line.  Could it have been here?  Nothing about the building pleased me -- I am definitely lab phobic.  I asked the security guard and he pointed to the handicapped entrance.  "That one's always open."  I staggered through the doorway and definitely needed a guide to find my way through the rat-maze to classroom #20.  An elderly physicist was pouring over his notes in one classroom.  "Have you heard of Lab 20?" I asked.  "Yes," he said and then proceeded to give me directions not unlike those that get people lost in the labyrinthian streets of Rome.  "It's a new Lab," he said. My thought:  Even if I become miserable in science buildings with vast deserted hallways, perhaps there is a happy plant in a bio lab.  Down the corridors and stairways to Lab 20, locked of course.  But I could see its shiny new tables and counters, sinks and sills, and a bank of windows, certainly bright in the day. Somebody, probably not a plant, was proud of this room. In fact I saw no plants, and would they be happy here either?  Delirious paranoid projections and prejudices gambled through my brain.  Plants cannot, as far as we know, anticipate their own deaths; so perhaps if eager botanists should operate upon them, they would remain blissfully unconscious.  Yet do we know that for sure?  There was a slight chill in the hallway, or was it in my body?  I beat a hasty retreat, happy for myself to leave, happy to see no plant about to succomb to a Mengele's blade.

#5 for me; #5 for plants:  The Science Lab