Carleton College - Algol Yearbook (Northfield, MN)

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at ih cr ere rr ie i tinea re ar i i i ak teh hE eryone is barefoot; everyone has a frisbee (or a softball, or football, or what-ever) and everyone is drinking in the delights of that most joyous celebration — the First Day of Spring. It’s Carleton’s own version of a Dionysiac festival, a bacchanal that can be found nowhere else on the earth. ‘A sharing ...’’ How often has this happened? You’re sitting in an airport or some other unlikely place, when all of a sudden you notice that the person sitting across from you and two seats down is vaguely fa- miliar. A moment or two of thought - -- Of course! Econ 10 Fall term. She sat in the front row next to the pre- med. It all comes back. A word or two of introduction, a few memories of the class, and all of a sudden you’ve discovered a new friend. “... OY participation.”’ Try ex- paining Rottblatt to someone who has never attended Carleton and most likely you'll get one of those “Well-gee-it must-be-nice’”’ expres- sions that people wear when they’re too polite to tell you how bored they are. If, on the other hand, you could plop them down on libefield, with a bottle of Hauenstein in one hand, and a Spaulding mitt (the Willie Mays autographed model) proudly worn on the other, then they might begin to understand the mystery and the glory of the game. But only then. The population of a small college is a strange thing. Hundreds of peo- ple, all with different interests, differ- ent backgrounds, different goals, are brought together into very close quarters and forced to co-exist. It seem impossoble: there are too (continued on page 8)

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“The Carleton Community”, it’s a slippery idea. Difficult to pin down. It defies definition, perhaps because it describes an enity whose bound- aries and structure are anything but precise. The College is so many things at once: an allegedly reputa- ble institution of academic endeav- or, a serene wasteland of arctic beauty, a continuing (but always changing battle between intitutional and radical politics, comps, a phan- tasmagoric maze of groups, clubs, committiees, associations, and spe- cial interests: inshort, anything but a community. How could any popula- tion so confusing, so consistently at odds with itself claim to be a ‘‘com- munity’? And yet the claim is still made, fueled by a very common feeling that there is something, well special about Carleton. Something unique, something that makes sense (if not order) out of the confu- sion. The College is an ubiquitous presence; in all its manifestations and various extensions, where it touches one, it touches all. And where all are touched, there is a shared sense, a commonality of ex- perience. A community. Look at it this way: Each Spring term there comes a day (early in the term in a good year, late in the term in a bad one) when the sun sudden- ly ups and shines for what seems like the first time since the previous September. The snow is gone and under the sun’s gentle prodding, the ground slowly warms to a point where it seems asin against all the gods of land and sky to keep your shoes on. Stereo speakers appear in dorm windows like rare flowers that only bloom once each year. Suddenly everyone is in shorts; ev-

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(continued from page 7) many cliques, too much provincial- ism, too many people who are just too different. But is works, some- how. Jocks room with geeks, a stu- dio art major plays Wombat with a pre-med, a small-town boy from darkest lowa puts together an oral presentation with a city-boy from Vi- enna. The differences don’t disap- pear, but they do begin to seem less important. Maybe because, once you've whiled away a stretch of time here, you start to realize the people you know here and the things you’ve done with them have affect- ed you, changed you. And you in turn have affected them. And that what has changed you has been your time at Carleton. A college is not a community; a college is an institution. What the college does is give people a chance to make a community, by giving them a chance to share in an infinite number of joys, pains and experiences. Not a bad basis for a community on the whole.