It was like Christmas—although for once I actually felt included—as I ascended the steps from the Campus Center and the brand new Olin lights shone gaily upon the scene for the first time. As I approached the Club O smoking lounge, I started planning what I would say to the gathered crowd, as I always do when I am about to see a bunch of people I secretly want to impress. (First I decide what I am going to say, then I figure how to say it without it sounding rehearsed.) My lips were quivering on the brink of what I thought was a brilliant, “Okay, so which one of us is going to write the wespeak?,” when I gradually realized no one was there. Olin steps. There in front of me. Empty. I slowly about-faced in bewilderment, and was struck in the face with the reason why. While the lampposts are quite quaint, the floodlights mounted at their bases are blinding. Olin steps are now a very inhospitable place, a bona fide health risk, if you ask me. My lips relaxed into a frown and I murmured, “I think I’ll write the wespeak myself.”
First, and most importantly, I truly appreciate the execution of any projects on campus that are done in the name of visibility, as this new lighting contraption ostensibly is. In fact, last year when I served on the WSA, I probably voted on or may have even sponsored a resolution calling for better lighting in front of Olin. If I learned one thing on the WSA, it’s that money for things like this is not easy to come by, and the bureaucracy involved makes these projects fairly impossible. Indeed, the new lights have probably been on order for several years now, and it’s entirely possible that the lampposts’ 19th century look is not retro, but rather fashionably late. In any case, I salute the work and initiative it took to make this happen, and hope to avoid sounding like the whiny, spoiled Wesleyan student that I most certainly am.
Having said that, I wish to point my criticism back at the frigging floodlights. Is there a clause somewhere in the campus master plan requiring that all funding dedicated to campus safety be matched by efforts to make Wesleyan’s crown jewels more conspicuous? Or was the stipulation that if we make the Olin lawn more visible, we’ll also have to do something about all those dirty hippies loitering about? If that’s the case, it seems to have worked out pretty well.
But oh, how we will miss those old floodlights, the ones right up against the colonnade. They only blinded you if you went right up there and looked straight down into them. In the winter, they were our campfires, and in the summer, just regular lights. Plus, they looked so rad streaming up the columns like that, especially when they were all rainbow-colored.
But the loss of the old floodlights is barely felt through the cutting pain that one feels glancing into the new. And it’s hard to avoid, sitting out there. Whether we like it or not, the human eyes are like moths, hardwired to seek light, incapable of learning from experience, no matter how debilitating. For the first time, we are reminded how undisciplined we are, moreso while sitting outside than we are within the library walls.
The question is, will the step subculture survive?
If it does, it will consist mainly of fools, or those with sunglasses, and it will be infinitely more entertaining to stand behind the floodlights, obscured from the stoop-sitters’ view, periodically wandering out in front just to see them all squint and shield eyes with hands, anxiously trying to determine whether you are somebody for whom they should be planning a pithy saluation.
Some of my best moments at Wesleyan, and certainly my best conversations (significant because of the setting, yet terse because of the clock) took place in the warm upward glow of the old lights. The laughter there always sounded relished, and the sympathy sincere. Call me sentimental and you’d be right. I’m just a senior who loves this place, and I’ve been a little choked up of late. But I’ve been out there four times already tonight, just to make sure my complaints about the floodlights are really warranted. So far, I’ve found an empty stoop every time. Well-lit, but empty. You tell me the last time that happened to you.
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