you asked me what my favorite thing was about yale
and i actually had an answer
[image: a niche outside of Branford that I saw before I even ate breakfast this morning. Isn’t that incredible? Look at the leaves of those flowers! Look at the way sunlight hits the lip of the shelf! Look at the texture on the walls! I love Yale!]
You asked me what my favorite thing was about Yale.
And I said,
Over COVID, I went home, and I’d try to draw—but I ran out of things to draw so quickly. I’d draw the stairs or the kitchen or I’d sit on the driveway sketching my neighbor’s house— but it’s all just boxes and triangles and after a few hours I get bored.
But at Yale, I’ll fall in love with a certain window or tower or corner—and when I finally sit down to draw it I’m just too overwhelmed. I realize that the thing I loved was so much more detailed than I’d ever noticed. I can spend an hour just trying to draw the way two cornices meet and never capture the way that the windows form a bay.
And that’s just a single window of an entire building. And there are so many buildings. I could never draw all of Yale. But some architect did draw all these buildings at some point. Someone put thought into everything.
Being at Yale is like living in one of those books you read in English class with themes and symbolism and everything. The whole book is intentional. Nothing is coincidence, every detail means something. The whole thing is art.
The thing is, you just can’t process that much.
You know those cheap romance novels where the author publishes like fifty books a year because they’re basically all the same plot with different names? Sometimes you need those. You just can’t read Moby Dick and Macbeth all day every day. And that’s the hard thing about being here—I just can’t handle that all the time.
It would take me longer to draw my bedroom window at Yale than to draw my neighbor’s entire house. I could draw my whole street before I could draw the building I live in. In a single day I see and do enough to keep me busy for a week.
And it’s overwhelming, but that’s also the thing I love about this place. I love that everything is intentional. I love living in art. I love being surrounded by poets and coders and chemists and singers. I love the richness of Yale. I love that this place is poetry.
Later that night I came home again, and as I stood in the open door I realized that I told you all of this, but you would have sat in my common room and seen a window seat covered in architectural drawings of doorways, and charcoal sketches of sunny libraries leaning against the chair. You would have seen haphazard stacks of notebooks and novels and a pile of books about my hometown.
I wondered if you realized the thing I hadn’t: somewhere along the way, I learned how to draw Yale.
