The past year has seen an explosion of construction on our campus, which seems to carry a message of new beginnings and reinvention in itself, but is more the context for my post this week. The new Engineering Building has become a second home for me in this my final year of undergraduate study, its glistening glass windows reflecting back the receding forests and the upturned faces of new students. Computers hum in the halls and classrooms, a babble of electrical jargon floats through the halls, resonating with the hardcore students and bypassing the pedestrian drones. I know everyone, it is my job; I have worked here for more than two years now. I know how to fix the multimeters and oscilloscopes when they break, but the new building and all its voices is not the home I want. Its sensation of fresh sterility and distillation of knowledge is not what I seek, but its people are the ones I know. Is home an idea created more by the people who fill a space? By the objects? Is home a static space? These disparate notions lead me to occasionally flee the building to submerge myself in the song of the campus. The melody is traffic and footsteps, the “vroom” of cars speeding around turns, the tip-tap of a lady’s heels on the sidewalk. The harmony is the wind and the trees, a “swish” as the lush deciduous canopy, now transforming to a flaming red color-storm, sways as one above our unseeing heads as we walk through our own little worlds. Worlds within the larger world of the university, and that within a larger world and on and on by many orders of magnitude until we are all as atoms of the universe, floating around each other, interacting, but never aware of the whole we make together.
And as I walk I seek the universe but I can’t find it, I only hear what my ears can tell me, and they are deaf to a voice that magnificent. So I wander back to the Engineering Building and decide as I am once more ensconced in the familiar sounds of electronics, a binary code of knowledge, perhaps this is my home and the universe can wait a while.