A friend once remarked to me that the ideal university would be a single building comprising a multitude of rooms. Lecture theaters, dormitories and cafeterias would be spread over the wide expanse of its many floors, with the location of one place never more than an elevator’s ride away from any other. The point was, he said, that there would be little time lost to commuting in such a place: One would simply step from one class to another, from the library to the lecture, and so on.
This was strange given who it came from. My friend attends an ornate institution on the Scottish coast, echoing with the churn of waves and set within miles of open country landscape — the sort of place I would long to visit. I failed to see how a ten-minute walk to a morning lecture, making one’s way against heady winds carrying the smell of sea brine, could be disagreeable to anyone.
And yet it is easy to understand. Efficiency is all the buzz these days. The commute hinders productivity by filling useful hours with dead time. The world at large is hurtling toward an ever more complete elimination of the in-between, with work-from-home schemes and takeaway deliveries reducing the idle moments of travel and waiting so that we can get on with more. And it is the same with our lives at Duke: We have surely all reasoned at one time or another that it would be more efficient not to go to lectures, or wished we could do without the West-to-East commute.
Pragmatically speaking, some division between events is absolutely necessary. A break soothes the creases of mental burden and prepares us to begin something new. The question is whether the breaks should take the form of a commute — which is, after all, a purely transitional exercise, the very manifestation of physical constraint, with little opportunity to be productive or even to catch a snooze. In the best case, the journey between our engagements is spent with friends in delighted conversation, but in the worst case, it is the source of much tired grumbling and a draining effort that we long to get over with.
But a stretch of time that forcibly precludes any pursuit of what is typically considered “useful” is also valuable in and of itself. The physical impossibility of squeezing every last drop of time during a journey for lecture preparations, sending emails and binging shows gives the mind crucial time for consolidation.
Such was my experience last semester when, for two days each week, travelling after my physics lecture to an evening philosophy seminar on East Campus, too exhausted to even look at my phone, I would mentally play over events from the previous class. Trees, streetlamps and houses passed before my eyes as I wrestled with concepts and equations and phenomena, noting connections and posing counterfactual situations, trying to fit everything together in my head. The inability to examine my notes or even to write on a piece of paper, far from hindering my study, enabled me to develop my physics intuition to a remarkable degree.
I was in for a realization. The constraints of the commute force us to reconsider the view that we must always be actively doing something and allow us to get down to the thing itself: the intellectual strain and exhilaration of holding an idea in one’s head for sustained probing.
The time for reflection which the commute affords is important in another way, in that it spurs inspiration. How often is it that we have been stuck on a problem or felt ourselves out of ideas, and a few steps from the desk proves to be all it takes to come up with the solution? A change of pace, an alteration of scenery, is sometimes all we need to restore our minds to full working order.
Perhaps it might be said that this idea of receptiveness to inspiration is only applicable to essay-writing in the humanities, and that for mathematics and the hard sciences, what is needed is an uninterrupted span of time for grinding through problem sets. Long walks and leisurely rumination are the stuff of poets, we tend to think, whereas the STEM major must confine himself to his work desk and “lock in.” Yet even here, the presence in our study time of some form of physical movement or commute promises benefits: Did it not take a trip to the island of Helgoland for Heisenberg to formulate his matrix mechanics approach, and was it not on a Greyhound bus that Freeman Dyson resolved the then-fundamental conundrum in quantum electrodynamics?
At the core of all this is a different view of efficiency — one that does not revolve purely around plugging times on either side of a division sign, as if the brain were a machine running on a constant clock cycle, but that is attuned to how the human mind really works. “The zipper displaces the button and man lacks just that much time to think while dressing,” so goes the line from Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.” What saves us time, which we at first consider efficient, may turn out to actually deprive us of invaluable moments for inspired thought and contemplation.
The wider picture is that there is value in living our lives to the constraints of physical rhythms, to order our narratives around commutes and distinct locations, as opposed to idealizing a dull uniformity as the peak of productive life. We should therefore relish the expansive physical environment that Duke provides.
Marc Wang is a Trinity sophomore.
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