going back

Click here for the annual slideshow of Princeton reunions. I am sitting at my desk with tears streaming down my face. We’re past reunions time, into full-blown summer now, but only by a week or two. This slideshow drew me tonight to two very different pieces of writing about Princeton.

I went digging in my files to find an old essay by Anne Rivers Siddons called Reunions Make Me Cry. I can’t remember if I have blogged about it before (this, surely, is an inflection point: when I’ve been writing long enough here that I cannot recall when I’m repeating myself – nor can I muster the effort to look through all the old posts to see). I love this essay. It’s short, poignant, and deeply evocative of those strange, wonderful days called Princeton reunions. She describes going back with her husband for his 25th and experiences the spectacle by his side for the first time. This is the old-school Princeton, which, for all of its male-only descriptors, is much of what I love about the place: tradition, a sense of comforting permanence, and an enthusiastic, unabashed embrace of spirit and loyalty.

I also re-read Lisa Belkin’s 2003 New York Times magazine article, The Opt-Out Revolution. I remember the waves this piece caused, I remember how many people forwarded it to me, and I remember reading it as a 29 year old on my first child’s first birthday (it was published on October 26th) and finding it depressing, demoralizing. Tonight, I was curious to see how 4 1/2 years of additional perspective would change how I felt about the piece. This time I was most intrigued by the end of the article, which talks about Princeton itself. About Shirley Tilghman and her heavily female leadership, about her comments about choices she had made in her own life, and finally about her struggles to educate a new generation of students who may have different priorities and values than those that came before. This made me love, anew, the new Princeton, that reflects the things that are on my mind today. The Princeton whose leadership in financial aid makes me glow with pride. The Princeton that promotes women not because they are women but because they are the best candidates for the job. The Princeton that finds a way, within its much-lauded tradition, to shift and evolve as the world changes.

This is the Princeton I love: multi-faceted, complex, secure enough in its deep foundation to take risks to keep up with the present day.

I have to close with a few of Anne Rivers Siddons’ paragraphs from Reunions Make Me Cry – these make ME cry. In my view, though, these images are only part of what makes the place so exemplary.

“But it was another kind of week, too, one that touched a deep chord within me, a well of poignance and simple love of continuity and tradition that, having no special academic traditions of my own to draw from, I never knew I had. Already bemused by the long heat, the very tangible old spell of the university, and the strong undercurrent of nostalgia running through the week, I understood on the last Saturday at least part of what draws these men, brisk, productive, good grown men, back like children to a picnic every year…”

“We wives clung closer together, in tight knots, feeling our men draw away fro us at last and into the body of ’48, into a whole where we couldn’t follow, as if into the ranks of Eleusinian initiates. Into Princeton….we saw them all together for the first time, a tiered shoal of orange and black and pride … The rock band crashed into “Goin’ Back to Old Nassau,” and I heard it for the first time, this song I had giggled so gleefully at, rolling at me across Princeton University as it had, on this same day, for reunions out of mind. I couldn’t find my husband in the throng and wouldn’t have known him if I had; they were all gone away from us now.”

“And then you heard it, very faint, very far away, the percussion first. “Goin’ back … goin’ back…goin’ back to Nassau Hall…” and then a regular cadence, which turned out to be the feet of marching men, and then 1500 male voices, aged 21 to 91 … They were absolutely beautiful, these Princeton men marching by on a sunny June Saturday … Behind them came perhaps the most poignant and gallant of them all, the Old Guard. The very oldest living Princetonians, singing “Goin’ back…” for what surely must be, for some of them, the last time … some were waving jauntily to the crowd from an open limousine. But others walked every step of the way, swinging along erect and vibrant, with perhaps only the common cord of Princeton sustaining them … Roars of pure love swelled to meet them.”

“Trudging back to headquarters, steaming hot and sunburned and emptied of emotion, I got lost and had ample time, wandering through the maze of shady quadrangles, to ponder why this simple, almost simplistic ritual, this near-archaic tribal rite, had moved me so deeply. I came to no conclusion. It seemed to me then, lost on that campus itself lost to time, that it was simply a right and good thing to honor something you loved very much as loudly and wholeheartedly as you could, and the devil take sophistication, civilization, undue examination, or whatever else threatened to get between you and it.”