The real Heritage room.

When you go abroad, the tendency for many people when they are homesick is to become a hermit. They go to class, grab food and go home and listen to sad music and cry. I carefully tried to avoid this trap in my first few weeks here and was very proud of myself for only doing that the first day until I realized I just had a variation on this problem. I wanted to hole up not in my room, but in the library.

I blame Hillsdale entirely for this. Because of my time spent at Hillsdale, I have this absurd notion that all college experience looks something like this:

2 hrs of class/day + 2 hrs of eating/day + 5-6 hrs of sleep a day + 14-15 hrs of studying = education.

I am more and more convinced each semester I spend at Hillsdale that this is a gruesome, yet wonderful way to be educated. And I think every graduate would love to think that after they graduate they have one-upped every other undergraduate in the world because they have just spent four years searching for the good, the true, and the beautiful and because of that can answer obscure questions about the history of their preferred denomination of the Christian church. I would like to think this would be enough to thrive in a world who never has the opportunity to study in depth like we do, but I'm afraid that's not the case.

I've met a lot of people since I've been here. People from all different places and people who think all sorts of things, and I've had more time than I could have imagined to enjoy them and everything around me. Yet my first instinct is to go to the library and I think now I know the reason. When I study French grammar, I know when you conjugate "avoir" in the present tense it looks like this and in the imperfect like so, and I might not know the passe simple, but I can look it up and tell you exactly what it is. And it will look like that now and forever. 

When I talk to people in French, or in English, I don't have my books with me. I can't just look up anything I don't know. And when I talk, I will inevitably make some grievous mistake that I will see then or be thinking about when I'm supposed to be paying attention in lectures. Sometimes I can go look up the problem and know I will do better next time, but other times I can't.

I've only been to the library once this week and I'd like to say it was because I was out being super adventurous, but it wasn't. I was just tired. I took these pictures when I went last week. I was reading "Le Petit Prince" in those chairs and looking out at that view, listening to people walk the creaky floors behind me. I love this room and I think I could be content coming everyday and spending my afternoons reading, but I know I can't. And why should I? I'm in Paris! How many times in your life do you get to live in Paris?!

But as I realized and I see more an more everyday, a fox is just a fox if he is not tamed. The only way this trip will be worth it is if I leave the library. I'm going to find me some roses and I'm going to learn their names. Ready or not, here I come.