Anonymity. Brutalistism. Classrooms.

Currently sitting in the Chestnut Skylounge (TM) again. The weather's shifted in a more autumnal direction this last week and so today the air's a bit cooler and the entire city is covered in a fog that's been thinning out since dawn. This is a huge step up from last week's muggy heat, which made me seriously consider giving up showering for the sheer futility of the thing, but it leaves everything seeming pensive in ways it wasn't last week.

Classes started on Monday after a week of thoroughly pointless Orientation Activities (TM) that I mostly skipped. I'll write more on it at a later date, but suffice it to say, whoever decided that giving A type personalities complete control of the lives of impressionable young'uns was the best way to establish genuine community must have been (a) out of their mind or (b) themselves an A type personality. I know they put in a big effort and all, but the events resulting from their decisions are mostly just draining and stressful and didn't result in knowing other people any better. (And a waste of money; I asked one of the group leaders what they were getting from being group leader, and she looked at me funny and said it cost her 75 dollars to even be one in the first place. Bizarre.)

Putting froshweek aside, however, all of my classes seem promising. I got seriously lost on Tuesday hunting for my Medieval Philosophy class, but ultimately found it in time to hear the second half of a seriously interesting lecture about Peter Abelard's castration. 19th Century Europe looks likewise positive, especially since it's given in an awesome two-tiered lecture hall and the professor is a Greek sixty-something with a ponytail and fluorescent green shirts. This morning I had my first class on the Holocaust to 1941, which is taught in a gigantic lecture hall by a professor who obviously feeds off the energy of large groups of students and used to do religious history at Notre Dame. It was a strangely anonymous experience, despite the fact I found myself participating more than in all the previous classes I'd had... Lonely too, since there's no real intellectual community there just yet and I'm sort of doubtful it'll ever grow up outside of the tutorial sections.

Much like the classroom experience, Toronto's campus is both inspiring and rather hard to feel connected to. Architecturally it's a fascinating place, with a lot of the standard fake gothic next to the brick-colored Victorian style that Canada uses for most of its federal buildings next to huge glass cubes next to a big chessboard held up by multi-colored pillars. The two centerpieces of the campus make a really fascinating contrast, with Hart House, the student union, trying very hard to be from Oxford, and Robarts Library trying hard to disguise itself as a concrete turkey. (See fig 1.1)

Fig 1.1
Robarts Library



(I was very excited to discover that there is a name for this style of building: Brutalism. Derived from the French word for raw, it doesn't actually refer to the psychological effects these buildings have on people, though it certainly does nothing to run away from them, perhaps best embodied by Morris's own brutalist masterpiece, Gay Hall.)

Alright, that's all I have to say for the moment. Tonight I have my first lecture on Charles Taylor, and I am very, very excited. I may even put on a fancy shirt.