When I walk out of Massachusetts Hall, and do not go to the bookstores, then what? Mostly, I look at the buildings, trying to discover details that I have overlooked and compare small differences. Our three Georgian dormitories in the Yard, for instance, are really very different from one another, and I now have a reasonably clear idea of which one seems to me to be the best architecturally, which next, and which last.

Looking at the different forms of bricks and mortar is also important. The size, color, texture and patterns of brick vary from building to building—and of course the color, amount and “relief” of the mortar can make all the difference. Most of the brick in the Yard, and the mortar, works quite well. Looking at a wall in “raking” sunlight is particularly revealing and often beautiful. After a while, you want to look at some of the brick over and over again—and you want to tear some of down, and start again from scratch.

Favorites? It doesn’t get much better—in terms of rather simple, unadorned buildings—than Massachusetts Hall. Sever is also wonderful. For stone, University Hall and Austin Hall are, in different ways, stunning. Memorial Hall is a gem—a rather large and ungainly gem, but still quite wonderful, intricate, large-minded and spirited.

Seeing the spire of Memorial Church alight, at dusk or in darkness, as I leave Mass. Hall in the evenings—that is very beautiful, especially because the Memorial Hall Tower, also alight, is in the same sight line, and both look even better with the glimmer of University Hall’s now cleaned white stone below.

The place, the setting, matters. The Yard is in many ways unique—historically, as well as in terms of the complicated balance between openness and closure. Just in that one characteristic, one could write a great deal about the implicit ideology of the College and the University.

What else? Students. At heart, I have for almost four decades thought of myself as an undergraduate teacher. It is still my most invigorating occupation. Fortunately, I have been able to be more and more relaxed, and less and less concerned to make sure that certain specific “points” were definitively “made” in a given class.

This approach does not mean that it is unimportant to cover “material” or make significant points, just that there are various ways to do so, and the more confident one feels as a teacher, the more one can trust to the conversational, Socratic process to bring everyone around, eventually, to whatever is necessary for the class to be a success.