To be alive is power,
Existence in itself,
Without a further function,
Omnipotence enough.
Emily Dickinson
(From Poems of Emily Dickinson, Centenary Edition. Edited by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Alfred Leete Hampson. Little, Brown & Company.)
Learn to sit with energy.
Mary Lyon
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they call their chart of courses, divisions, hours, and places of meeting the 'Tabular View.' At Mount Holyoke the same thing is called the 'Schedule.'
Chapel is not printed on the schedule. Nevertheless, several times a week, Chapel begins the day. Nobody is required to go every time. The programs are varied and posted in advance. Perhaps one day the President leads a regulation Chapel service with prayers and hymns and a talk. For example, one of Miss Woolley's Chapel talks was based on the scene in which Iago gives his reason for being envious of Cassio: 'He hath a daily beauty of his life that makes me ugly.' A life of 'daily beauty' was the subject of the talk. Another morning may bring a recital of music; another a speaker on public affairs.
It is worth while to be out early to watch the College running to Chapel.
The bell begins to ring for five minutes, at a quarter past eight in the morning. It then keeps silent for five minutes, and tolls steadily from twenty-five minutes past eight until half past, ending with three strokes and a chime. This gives plenty of warning. One soon learns just how to spend those three five-minute intervals in order to get there in one's own favorite way.
The Chapel choir arrives early. Also such music-loving girls as Agnes Wickfield, Elizabeth Bennet, Meg, Beth, and Brunhilde will usually be going in at the door to enjoy the preliminary organ music three minutes ahead of time. The rest, including Fleur and Titania, Rosalind, Pierrette, and all fleet runners and jumpers, are on their way. If you havea good eye for relative rates of speed, you can calculate your own chances of getting there by the velocities of the sprinting figures heading in from all parts of the campus. They all know how long it takes, to a fraction of a second; and at any given point each is aware how fast she will have to run. At the last millionth of a minute, the crowd leaping up the Rocky Chute takes the grade like a run of salmon going up a waterfall.
They get there too. Precisely as the last chime rings, into their seats slide all the salmon, right on the dot. To an observer in the gallery it does not look like an accident. It looks like a drill.
I think it is done a little better than we used to do it twenty-five years ago. We were sometimes late. Our long flapping skirts created a wind-resistance that was hard to allow for when the weathervane stood nor'east by north.
One other delightful change. At the end of the service the congregation does not need to sing more than three stanzas of the recessional to speed the seniors out. They do not march. They go at a lively clip, winging it down the aisle with their black robes flying - each for herself, not always bothering with partners.
We used to march out impressively in measured tread, keeping step conscientiously with each other and with the hymn. Those of us who later married found that these recessionals had been useful training for our wedding march. We took our performance seriously, and often the congregation had to sing 'The Son of God Goes Forth to War' throughout, several times, while we paced down the aisle.
The flitting of the seniors nowadays is more natural and much more sensible, and on the whole more attractive. But I will say there used to be a bigger crowd of parents and visitors in the gallery to watch us do it.
Many of us also used to keep on our senior gowns for classes. Not often so at present. Give the average college girl an academic gown and she wriggles out of it as soon as the recessional is over, hangs it up in the Mary Lyon gownroom, and makes off, lightly clad. A mediaeval detail is lost to the landscape, but of course it always was a bother to keep a mortar-board on in the wind.
At nine o'clock begins the first hour for classes, lectures, laboratories, studio, or study - according to the individual schedules.
If we were ghosts, we might drift around among the buildings, 'materializing' now and then inside the classrooms, and attending sessions in the Departments of Anthropology, Art and Archaeology, Astronomy, Botany, Chemistry, Economics and Sociology, Education, English, English Literature and Drama, French, Geology and Geography, German, Greek, History and Political Science, Hygiene and Physical Education, Italian, Latin, Mathematics, Music, Philosophy and Psychology, the History and Literature of Religion, Spanish, Speech, and Zoology.
That list actually 'tastes good' in cold type to anyone who is perpetually hungry for what college has to give. Such a person reads the 'Schedule' with the appetite of a garden-lover reading a flower catalogue, or of a music-lover turned loose with Oliver Ditson's price-list, or of a traveler with a sheaf of time-tables and booklets describing a cruise around the world.
No two students select exactly the same courses, any more than two students select exactly the same friends. (Twins are perhaps an exception. Mount Holyoke once had four pairs of twins going inseparably through college at the same time, to the enormous discomfiture of instructors who had to give them 'grades.')
Ordinarily each student creates a personally assembled college for herself, selecting its ingredients from the generous variety at hand. The great emphasis upon individuality of choice in 'honor work,' seminars, various 'unit plans,' and related courses can easily explain the complicated appearance of the daily program for each member of the Faculty, and of the full-scale 'Tabular View.'
Ghosts for the moment, we watch a class assembling. One girl has arrived early and has chosen a place by the casement window where she can review her notes. Seen against the leaded panes of the casement her profile is very still. Put her into a mediaeval pageant, and she could take the part of Heloise in the costume of an abbess. Her tense and delicate face does not change its expression when the rest of the class comes in. But if the interest of the discussion hour can free her from who shall say what inward rigors, she may offer something presently that the Last Priscilla yonder will remember all her life.
Not far from Priscilla, a girl from California and a girl from Kentucky are conferring about the probable condition of their fountain pens. There is grave reason to suspect that they are going dry. The modern pen is deficient in one matter. Of old, we used to be able to open the resources of our pens to the filling of less fortunate pens more conveniently than is the custom now. We would open our fountain pen barrel and hold it steady while another fountain pen would dip its beak into the ink - like a golden-billed humming bird investigating the corolla of a tulipe noire. Nowadays, one must dash around the buildings in search of a basic supply.
The dash is about to be made when in at the door comes a spiritual descendant of Abigail Adams, who has just been buying a bottle of Midnight Black at the bookstore. Cautiously and assisted by the gathering company, she unscrews the lid. Refreshments are passed around for many thirsty pens and the bottle finally returned to Abigail, who rescrews the top just as an exchange student from abroad enters the room, spies the ink, exclaims that her life is saved - whereupon Abigail unscrews it again . . . . Seventeen states in the Union and three foreign countries in tha tone classroom are represented among the patrons of Abigail's Massachusetts ink.
So the class assembles itself, not in conglomerate masses, but by ones; and the last man into the room is Dear Little Buttercup, fresh from Pinafore.
Buttercup in the same class with Abigail? Certainly, and very good students both. Buttercup may look like the very flower of simplicity, but she is bright.
According to the gifts of the professor in charge, this class may be made into an incongruous hodge-podge - (a student in one of the men's colleges once spelled that word 'hog-pog') - or it can be made into an educational Pilgrimage from the Known to the Unknown, everybody contributing something characteristic by the way.
Look at assorted young women in the mass and you lose the courage to start them off on the more difficult matters of a college day. Remember the individuals you know best, and nothing that could possibly be offered from all the highways and byways of great Literature and Knowledge could be too intricate and fine. The born teacher has no patience with the patronizing carelessness that would classify college students all together as 'the young.' They are not so very young. In class, with the real right magic, they stand forth singly, ageless, subject to thought. You notice that when one of them asks a question.
Almost always, nowadays, in a well-liberated classroom, the questions fly. There are a good many questions that the college student of today wants to ask, and some of them have no categorical answer. To discuss all sides of them would require the combined talents of Socrates, King Solomon, Confucius, the Delphic Oracle, the Wise Woman of Endor, Mary Lyon, and Mark Hopkins - all sitting together, on a log.