So it is among trees--but more particularly, among groves, an arrangement of trees suggesting not the overgrown woods of fairy tales but instead an aesthetic convergence of like elements. Where better to chart the future of the world than in such a place of formal connection? Even the grove's center is a sudden space in the midst of growth: a clearing, a place where the air is less heavy, where one can look directly up and see the sky.
The particulars of a grove (Merriam-Webster: "a small wood without underbrush") are not immediate. How many trees are necessary, and of what kind; how old, how spreading? How must they give shade, and how look in the rain? We have no olive trees in Cambridge, and few citizens regularly in togas; why, then, should the University stand on ceremony as regards an actual tree?
Indeed, it might seem that by now the grove would have become largely symbolic: we are surrounded by as many books and pencils as we are saplings proper. Even indoors we admire smooth surfaces of wood: floors, shelves, bookcases lining our walls. Perhaps we've internalized the notions of academe to such an extent that the grove's use can remain entirely figurative.
But American groves impress with their very real presence. They are inseparable from the decadence of paths, spaces, ivy, walking; these in turn are bound up in the spirit of freedom and reverence that inform our very notions of academicity. And the illusion of natural permanence--of living structures which surpass us in height, breadth and reach--is itself a metaphor vital to the structure of the university.
But perhaps this is a relic of my vantage point; the image I wake to this year is one of branches framing a skimmed path to the Yard. I cannot dissociate these two in my memory: the imposition of branches with its necessary fragmentation of the image, and the street with its incessant parade of students moving between the tree's spaces.
Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.