Monastery Life

Today I did my laundry in the little porcelain sink set into one corner of my room. Above the sink is a mirror about one foot square with chips in it. Behind the flimsy headboard of my bed is an iron radiator that I hung one of my towels over to dry. The walls are white, and the paint is peeled off where former residents tacked up posters. I have a long desk, two chairs, and a nightstand just big enough to lay a pair of newly-washed boxers over. The round light fixture in the middle of the ceiling flickers for about two seconds before turning on. I can see the Minster rising over the apartments of north York. In the evening, I can hear the bears ring the call to evensong.

Professor Ward assigned some excerpts from Wordsworth for tomorrow. In the last book of his autobiographical saga The Prelude, he writes:

"... howsoe'er misled,

I never, in the quest of right and wrong,

Did tamper with myself from private aims;

Nor was in any of my hopes the dupe

Of selfish passions; nor did wilfully

Yield ever to mean cares and low pursuits;

But rather did with jealousy shrink back

From every combination that might aid

The tendency, too potent in itself,

Of habit to enslave the mind, I mean

Oppress it by the laws of vulgar sense,

And substitute a universe of death,

The falsest of all worlds, in place of that

Which is divine and true.

The last four lines especially struck as emblematic of my greatest frustrations with myself since starting College. Dorm life was characterized most of all by noise: Xboxes, stereo systems, TV shows, movies, and the general buffoonery of adolescent maledom. I love all of the above things to a degree, but I've also realized that they tend to distract me from the seriousness, sadness, and beauty of life. Reading these lines of poetry and thinking about the austerity of my living quarters gives me reason to hope for more out of this trip than a chance to get out of Grand Rapids for a semester, tour a few castles, and be over the legal drinking age. Four months of scrubbing my dirty clothes in an old sink might actually be my way of "living deliberately." It could be a means of abolishing "the laws of vulgar sense" in order to live by the anarchy of the divine and true.

Credit for the photos goes to William Overbeeke, a fellow YSJer.