shakespeare at stanford.

It occurs to me that I like walking around at night, outside, and alone. it's somehow easier to think and let cool creative thoughts fill your head when you're alone and the world is dark and quiet than it is during the day, or when you're with someone. well, the latter is obvious, as you have to expend energy and thought to keep up a conversation most the time, but the day thing really matters too.

during the day everything's bright and you can see everything and everyone, and it all crushes in on your mind and takes up your attention. you walk down the street and you see stuff that triggers thought. you think, hmm do i want that CD or not? oh wow that smells good i'm hungry. nah wait i'm not, just greedy. damn nice car. shitload stereo, sucky song though. someone turn it off--yeowza, there goes hot girls in tight shirts.

stuff like that. you know? it clutters up your mind, and it's all mundane and everyday, and there's no room for anything else.

at night, though, it's different. it's all dark, so most of the world is murky and indistinct. most people are in their homes, and if you're walking in a place without stores, that sensory overload is taken away too. what's left is just yourself, your thoughts, and wherever they lead you.

i'm talking about this because i was walking from brianna's door to my car, and then from my car to my apartment building, and i was pretty late and everything was quiet. it was great. it was kinda cloudy today, partly cloudy i think it's called, and all these sort of soft, indistinct-edged clouds - they have them a lot in late summer/early fall in the bay, when the summer fog is just starting to turn into the winter clouds - were floating overhead, all nuclear orange from the city lights. that sounds awful, but it's beautiful in a odd sort of way. took me back.

all of a sudden i was remembering a summer i spent at stanford once. stanford has this church, the stanford memorial church, which is this huge, beautiful, spanish-influenced (all of stanford is spanish-influenced, which is great because it's not all faux-classical like most other big expensive good private schools are. it's a very californian school. everything's golden and red-tiled, and arches abound.)

anyway, i digress.

so, memorial church. mem-chu for short. the way stanford is set up, everything's concentric. heading into it, there's no mistake that you are entering Stanford University. you have this gate waaaay out, like a half mile, and then from there on out the road is straight and lined with humongous palm trees, each one worth like 50 grand. it goes straight up to the oval, which is where the road circles around in a, well, oval, the center of which is lined with flowers and a lawn.

beyond the oval, it's pedestrians only. you go through the big golden-stone arches into the outer quad, which has some rodin statues, and then you go through more arches into the huge, gorgeous inner quad. the ground is golden-brown flagstones, and there's a big sun or a compass or something laid down straight in the middle. f'ing amazing. this is all in a straight line, btw - palm drive (that's the name of the street), axis of the oval, middle arch of outer quad, middle arch of inner quad, and center of the church.

behind the church, off to the side, is a secluded little glade surrounded by trees, in which there are two semicircular stone benches. me and my friends would stay out all hours of the night in palo alto, and coming back toward the dorm, we'd pass through there at 3am, not a soul around, night's silence all around except for us and those nuclear orange clouds overhead, laughing and half-drunk on exhaustion, stumbling across the massive quad into the little glade that was a sort of refuge.

and this one night, me and my friends - two of them, jon and helen, were a couple - stopped in the glade and hung out and just talked about everything and nothing. helen was a drama major, or an english major, or both, and she had lines and lines from shakespeare memorized. so we were sitting there in this little glade on the stone benches, all in a loose circle, some laying down on the benches, looking up at the stars through the trees and the clouds, and helen recited shakespeare for us while jon lay with his head on her lap.

hamlet othello macbeth and caesar, lines and lines. i couldn't believe how many she knew. i think i was vaguely jealous. not enough to have any true enmity toward my friends, but i wished i had a girlfriend whose lap i could lay my head in, and watch her profile cast against the stars while she recited classical literature, the words of the ages, for me.