Only, that’s wrong. No matter how new and snazzy and modern a building looks, it will always get old. You can even find this in Lewis: Though it’s been open for little more than a year, it is already starting to decay. Not in big ways, of course, but the first encroachments of age and decrepitude are there if you know where to look. One of the stone stairs going up from the library level is chipped. The faucet handles in the guys’ bathroom on the same level are rusting. One of those cool cylindrical desk lamps has fallen apart. Eventually big things will break, and when they do, Lewis — that building that seems eternal and shiny and perpetually new — will change.
This sort of change is certainly not a bad thing. Indeed, it’s laudable how well-organized the University is when it comes to fixing campus, keeping things new and nice, plastering over the inevitable march of time. We have such nice dorms, for instance, because of a perpetual cycle of renovations that repeats every 30 years or so. (On this cycle, Wilson College is due for a face-lift.) It’s simple, really: New buildings become old, and the only way to deal with that is through an ongoing process of renewal.
On top of that, renewal need not always be synonymous with reconstruction: There’s no good reason to try to keep the buildings on campus frozen just as they are now. But, as all of campus goes through its crawl of life, death and rebirth, I find it jarring just how wide the scope of change can be.
Old Butler is perhaps the most salient example. Sure, some dorms called “Butler” are still around — but seniors, do you realize that we’re the only ones on campus who know what a waffle ceiling looks like? More subtle, but, to me, even more startling, are the smaller renovations. Do you realize that the U-Store has been rearranged three times in the past three years? Or that guy who used to work at the Wa? What was his name — Karim? He’s gone, and, indeed, the Wa itself — it too shall pass! Or, how about the most recent bonfire? Seniors are the only ones who can remember that. The Nude Olympics are all but forgotten. Ten eating clubs that were once open are now closed. There are so many landmarks here — things I take for granted — that might not be around even five years from now.
This past summer I visited my old elementary school. It was a dysfunctional start-up when I was there, always haphazard, based out of an old house and some trailers. Now they have their act together, with a permanent structure and everything — but the house and trailers are gone. It’s weird to think that the building where I spent my third- through sixth-grade years is never coming back. I walked around the campus and let the memories just pop out of the ground — but the real physical objects that corresponded to these memories had all but disappeared.
I thought Princeton was different. I spent most of my time here assuming that Princeton would, give or take, always look the same. But I realize now that so many of my memories are attached to such transient things. The CJL won’t always have green couches. That one door in Fine Hall won’t always slam and wake me up from a mid-lecture doze. The smell in the basement of Holder Hall will one day change. The pipes in Brown Hall won’t always make such a racket.
If there’s any message to take away from this column — any moral to the story at all — perhaps it’s this: When at Princeton (or anywhere) take a few moments every now and then to form your memories carefully and conscientiously. The physical world changes so much that, sooner or later, mental relics will be all that you have left.
Greg Burnham is a math major from Memphis, Tenn. He can be reached at gburnham@princeton.edu.
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