What’s most striking about the campus is that its buildings are tremendously, fascinatingly ugly. My new favorite activity is walking along the main promenade, red backpack in tow, and taking it all in, leisurely, comfortably, like I’m wandering through a museum of the grotesque. Muted black steeples and clouded cement blocks densely veined with moisture damage. Off-white tiles lining the indoor walls and flooring. Carpeted elevators. Flat roofs unattractively combined with harsh angles. There’s a touch of Brutalist chic in the squat, rectangular, dark brick structures that are distinguished from one another not by name, but by number.
Thankfully, I’ve always been the type to enjoy ugliness; mismatched clothes, uncoordinated colors. But even if I wasn’t, the campus would be fully redeemed in my eyes by the fleet of cypress trees that shroud the area in an immense, touchable green. The tiny nubs of moss threaded through softened bark. Opalescent pools of rainwater like scattered mirrors of divination. The sky through the trees, dotted with constellations of sea green leaves. Tropical rain thudding against the dome of a hastily borrowed umbrella. The dusky shadow cast by my body onto damp, verdant tree trunks, moving to a rhythm dictated by nature.
I read a headline recently about the several degree rise in temperature the planet will experience by the end of this century. I don’t know how to deal with my existence, and therefore my participation, however innocent and involuntary, in this plot to kill and consume Gaia. But, if I am as ashamed I claim, it’s a million times worse to pay lip service by admitting the guilt without committing to action. I find myself discussing how every form of being is a form of violence, and in vain I look for a way to live like a pacifist. And yet, there can be no such thing as a peaceful Anthropocene. To examine the solution to the damage I’ve inflicted on the Earth is to also, necessarily, to envision a world without me in it.
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