Daniel LaPointe

This past Saturday it was 75 degrees where I live, with not a cloud in the sky. I sat under the tree in my backyard and took it all in. Birds. Chipmunks. Rabbits. Kids playing in the street. Neighbors walking dogs. Expose yourself to this sort of thing for an hour and your motivation to complete problem sets will collapse. Who needs “innovation” when the world is bountiful and beautiful as it is? The Harvard grind, it seems, is rather silly.

This was always my problem on campus. It astounded me that Harvard students were not constantly in awe of their surroundings. Every building, every person, every pigeon you pass is a fascinating thing. The city of Boston is ineffably dense and wonderful. Perhaps it takes a rural mind to understand this. I don’t know. But to tune all of this out – to keep your “eyes on the prize” – feels like a pathology. What promised land could possibly be better than the one right in front of you? Our best and brightest, apparently, are blind.

Unlike most juniors, I began at Harvard in the fall of 2016. On two separate occasions I’ve had academically poor semesters and have been told to take time off. The pattern, it seems, is a collapse in motivation come April. Though I don’t anticipate similar problems this semester (the prefrontal cortex having developed somewhat), a beautiful weekend has afforded a moment of reflection. In this productive equilibrium, has something been lost?

Invariably, these disaster semesters would be accompanied by protracted, whimmy walks, the longest of these bringing me to the Atlantic and back again in a nine-mile round trip. Consider me among the “crowds of water-gazers” in the opening chapter of Moby Dick. As Melville put it: “Nothing will content them but the exteremest limit of the land… They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.”

For a more modern reference, it’s no coincidence 2017-me was obsessed with Animal Collective’s “Summertime Clothes.” The entire song is infectious, e.g.,

    “When restlessness calls, says that I cannot hide
    So much on my mind that it spills outside
    Do you want to go stroll down the financial street?
    Our clothes might get soaked, but the buildings sleep”

So the song is about a guy who goes for a walk with a significant other.1 He treats this simple event as a sacred thing, as would I. The man’s walks are born out of insomnia, and mine from something similar. The only difference, it seems, is that my walks were in isolation. We note that the walk is not a planned activity, nor is it done for the purpose of exercise. It is spontaneity. It is freedom. It is undiluted emotion.

To see what led to my random walks, it helps to go back to the source. Thankfully, I still have some old journal entries from back then. The only explicit reference to a walk comes on April 24th of 2017. We have the following:

“Right now, I would very much like to go for a walk around Cambridge. I just want to take in the surroundings, think about how the streets interconnect, and imagine where I am in relation to everything else. I want to get an intuitive sense of the area. I’m sick of sitting around and thinking all day. I need to move. I need stimulation of a new sort. Laying in my bed and thinking all day is making me insane. I need to get my blood flowing.”

Taken by Daniel LaPointe, April 22, 2017

The rest of the entry is an angsty rant typical of that period, and the abrupt ending suggests that I did, in fact, go for a walk. The latter half of the quoted paragraph provides a common motivation for walks.2 In fact, it recalls the beginning of “Summertime Clothes.”3 The first half of the paragraph, meanwhile, hints at something far more interesting: “I just want to… imagine where I am in relation to everything else.” This complex – and, I think, profound – emotion is described in more detail in an entry dated February 14th, 2017. As far as personal documents go, this is something of a canonical text.


“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been flipping through books. The density of the text would appeal to me, as would the chapter titles and the overall organization. I have flipped through the pages of the Harry Potter books for more hours than I have actually spent reading them. For the past few months, I have been doing much the same with The Brothers Karamazov.

“Whenever I do this, I can’t help but think of it as a guilty pleasure. I ought to be reading, not thinking about reading. The text should be a means of transportation – something for the eyes to automatically gloss over and for the brain to subconsciously interpret. But all too often I treat the text – the black ink and white paper – as something worthwhile in itself. This feeling, I may add, is not confined to books. Faithfully and accurately generalizing this feeling, however, may not be the easiest of things for me to do. Though I will try.

“I have spent far too many hours wandering around on Google Maps. What is meant to be a means of finding directions and locating places has, for me, become a pleasure in itself. The feeling is almost impossible to describe, but it is absolutely wonderful. Everyone else wants to quickly get on and off of Google Maps. I want to revel in it.

“Why is it that we find views from high up places beautiful? Why is it that we are willing to hike ten miles up a mountain for the sake of an expansive view? It isn’t simply the visual appeal of nature – the view of a city from the height of a mountain would be even more breathtaking. No. We humans crave information. We crave knowledge. An expansive view tells us everything we need to know about a landscape. Such a view is power. And for that reason, we have grown to love it over the eons.

“When the robots finally get around to taking our jobs, and the entirety of our capitalist society is up in arms trying to justify life without employment, I shall be satisfied with Google Earth. And with walking. And with flipping through the pages of books. And in general, with immersing myself in more information than I can possibly process. It was Spengler who said that the entirety of a culture can be summed up in a single symbol. For the Christians, it was the cavern. For the Enlightened West, it was the infinite line. For me, it is the sea. Because I am submerged in more information than I can ever comprehend, and because the material surrounding me is not a mutable substance, but an all-encompassing ether.”


Snippets of this passage make 2021-me cringe: the pop-sci evolutionary argument, an overreliance on the word “we”, and the usage of “society.”4 Nevertheless, there’s some interesting stuff going on here. The equating of city-beauty with nature-beauty is striking. There’s this common perception that “nature” and “humanity” are two separate things, and that cities are an aberration. With the right mindset, though, I think it’s possible to find a city every bit as beautiful as a forest. How to cultivate this mindset? This is where the book and map analogies come into play. You can view books as tools for accessing abstract ideas, or you can view them as physical objects. You could view a map as a tool for getting to the hotel on time, or you could view it as a detailed representation of the landscape. In short, the key is to stop viewing objects as referents to non-sensory thoughts. I’m tempted, at this point, to draw up a connection to neuroscience – the hippocampus in particular. But that is a talk for another day.

But back to the question from before. Have I lost something in becoming a productive Harvard student? Clearly the prospects for my future have improved. It isn’t clear, though, that life satisfaction in the moment has improved. Having maintained a daily journal since September of 2020, I’ve found the content of it to be less interesting than what you’ve just read.5 I seem to be highlighting actions instead of ideas. At times it delves into opinion, but I keep that sort of thing to a minimum. There’s work that needs to be done, and stuff like this takes time to write.

This essay is the first piece of personal writing I’ve done in a while. It’s nice for people drowning in math homework to have an outlet like this. It takes a peculiar mind to suppress the self and never be phased by that. You (James) could track down more humanities people for the blog, or you could track down “humanities sympathizers” hiding among the STEM crowd. The latter group would perhaps be more thankful for the opportunity. Also, the closeness of the name “Stim” to “STEM” is not lost on me. An acronym may be in order.

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Notes:

  1. The album containing this gem, Merriweather Post Pavilion, deals with hedonism more broadly. The spectacular opening track, “In the Flowers,” builds to an ecstatic – and painfully temporary – explosion of dance. The popular “My Girls” is a rejection of materialism. The turbulent “Lion in a Coma” climaxes with:

        “Please don’t leave me
        Things that feel good,
        I’ve been lucky
        Trying to feel good”

    There’s a sort of tug-of-war that permeates the entire album. Ecstasy on one hand, sheer exhaustion on the other. ↩

  2. This motivation is especially understandable in the current environment. Recall the violence of 2020, and the folk justification that people were “cooped up for too long.” ↩

  3.     “My bones have to move
        And my skin’s gotta breathe
        You pick up the phone
        And I’m so relieved” ↩

  4. Be careful with the words “we” and “society.” Also be wary of “masterpiece.” ↩

  5. The excerpts from above were from a different project. Those entries tended to be longer, more abstract, and less frequent. The 2020 journal is a catalogue of events with bullet points. ↩