On walking through the infinite
The first week of summer: when classes are out, the campus was an unusually barren landscape. There were hardly any students walking around, and I quickly started to question why I had decided to go home in the middle of the summer instead of the beginning.
At one point, I walked across the bridge and saw a friend. While running into a friend is normally a fun experience, in the one-week period when nearly everyone was visiting home, I was ecstatic, because I felt like I had found another of the few people in the world who existed.
Throughout the year, this was never the case. I took there being people around completely for granted. This was particularly the case for the infinite, the long hallway that allowed you to walk inside from any class to almost any other class. Here, each of us would pass hundreds of others every day.
What these people would be doing might vary. Some would be rushing late to class, some would be late to class but not rushing at all, some carrying rolls of posters, some with just backpacks, some happy and content, some downcast, some looking sharp in a suit for one reason or another, most in some variation of a career fair t-shirt or hoodie.
But there were always people, and now there weren’t.
In this one-week period, the giant pillars and posters in Lobby 7 still evoked a slight sense of awe, but in this time, it didn’t feel substantial. Without the students, it didn’t feel electric like it did back in the semester. Without the people, the long hallway of the infinite didn’t feel like a place where people went to cool places and Did Important Things. It simply felt like a place.
Now that one week has passed. People have been walking through the infinite for UROPs, heading back to their summer places from internships, and hanging out, and I know the incoming first-years will soon join us for Interphase, FPOPs and the like.
But I will always remember that I experienced for a moment what it was like to not have that, for the infinite to be nothing more than a long hallway. And while it was good to see that happen for a bit, I’m glad our infinite is back to normal.