A Silence of Three Parts

It was night again.  Middlebury College lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.  The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking.  

Outside Hepburn Hall, a pair of students walked with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news.  In doing this, they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice.  If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the third floor dormitory bedroom overlooking abandoned tennis courts.  It was in the weight of black down feather comforter that held the heat of a long-evacuated sleeper.  It was in the slow back and forth of a pair of blue eyes, running along a bright computer screen.  And it was in the mind of the man who sat there, polishing a mouse pad that already gleamed in the lamplight, as he browsed the interwebs.

The single room was his, just as the third silence was his.  This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself.  It was deep and wide as a frozen-over pond.  It was heavy as a heavy hardcover book.  It was the distraught, cut-flower sound of a man whose hockey team just lost an important game.*

*Loosely adapted from the beginning Patrick Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind, which I do not own or pretend to own.  Good work, Pat.

References aside, I am at Middlebury with Derek, and he has not said anything in the last twenty minutes.  I feel very much like Bast, simultaneously afraid of the implications of this silence but too afraid to break it.  I think I will have to soon, because I don’t have an internet connection and that requires his intervention.

Middlebury is very cool.  I like many things about it.  If this seems like a simplification, it is.  (Interlude: Derek offered me Ritz crackers and the world seems to be turning again.)  I would not like to get very in depth yet, because I am still drawing my conclusions, and it is 11:40 and I am tired.

I went on a hike/walk today while Derek read Paradise Lost.  It was very pretty, though the route I attempted to follow ended up with me stumbling through a muddy riverbank after losing the trail.  The word ‘bog’ comes to mind, but that would be a melodramatic way to summarize the terrain.  Also, it reminds me of that essay we wrote about a poem to get into AP English, do you guys remember?

Anyway, I’m including some pictures from that walk as well as some vistas from the train north.  I left D.C. at 3:15 AM on Saturday and arrived in Middlebury on Sunday at 1:40 PM.  Needless to say, it was a long trip.  I managed to sleep nearly the entire first leg, then sat around one of the most miserable places I’ve ever been (Penn Station in NYC—truly, it was a very sad place to be.  Dirty, smelly, everyone was sad or old or poor and/or wanting to be somewhere else.  Even the pigeons, for all that they were well fed, were usually missing some toes.  How pigeons got into the depths of the train station is not something I understand.  Penn Station is sprawling, mazelike, and confusing.  I am impressed.) for an hour and a half, then got into the really beautiful part of the trip.

My life since then has been mellow in a good way.  Lots of sitting around, lots of eating, one short nap.  Mostly, lots of reading.  I have read over 300 pages of NoTW in the last 36 hours.  It is very good and I am happy that The Wise Man’s Fear is currently sitting less than three feet away from me.

I’ve been tangibly looking forward to this trip for three span, and by that I mean I’ve known I was coming here for that amount of time.  I’ve been metaphorically looking forward to this trip for much longer.  Derek is still a sasshole with an insatiable love of Spongebob, but he’s been a pretty good host despite that.

Bed time, or bag-on-the-ground time, at least.

Rachael