Return from whence you came!

I accompanied Bright to Berkeley yesterday, and ensconced myself in North Reading Room for a productive couple of hours while she conducted her researches. I backward-planned (I cannot recommend this technique highly enough) two graphic novel projects, and made several sketches, including this one of the Reading Room:

Berkeley’s atmosphere seems to be good for me. No doubt it helps that it’s Spring Break, so the campus is quiet and uncrowded, but I also benefit from the countless other projects going on around campus at every given moment. It’s a place of work and inspiration, and I can feel that.

I get a pleasant feeling of mixed insider/outsider-ness when I’m on campus. On one hand, I’m an insider, because the school is my alma mater and I feel very at home there. Everywhere I go, I encounter happy memories, many of which remind me of working diligently on assignments that interested me. It’s almost Pavlovian; put me back near the history department or the libraries, and I feel a renewed sense of purpose: a desire to be making progress on something. On the other hand, I’m no longer a dues-paying member of the campus community. I feel I belong there, and yet… I don’t. I’m not enrolled in any classes, and I don’t have exams or papers to write. I’m not under the thumb of any employer or advisor. Moreover, I no longer have friends among the student body, and there is just a handful of professors who might know me. I feel anonymous, moving around campus unencumbered by many personal ties. As I tend to think overmuch about other people’s opinions, there’s something very freeing about this level of near-invisibility.* Nobody’s watching me, and even if they are, they’re no concern of mine. I can do as I please; I don’t have the total outsider’s handicap of having to learn the lay of the land and the local culture.

It’s funny, because I didn’t anticipate this enjoyable sensation before I returned to campus, though perhaps I should have. I don’t think there is anywhere else in the world where I could feel this way. Not at UCLA, certainly, where I never felt entirely comfortable, and not in San Jose, even though I grew up there, because the world of a K-12 person (then and now) moves too quickly; the passage of time is too obvious. I suspect this insider/outsider feeling will serve me well in the creative process. I look forward to coming back to campus more often.

I’ve also recently read a book that deals a bit with this sort of thing: Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night, one of her Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries. Wimsey’s soon-to-be wife, Harriet Vane, returns to her college at Oxford after many years, having lived a life many would consider shameful. Of course I loved the book because Peter and Harriet get engaged by the end, but I also really loved Harriet’s observations about coming back to a place where she once belonged and no longer quite fits in. The book perfectly suited my mood this week, and I’m following it up with Busman’s Honeymoon, the chronicle of Harriet and Peter’s first days of married life. (Aaah, it’s nice to be married to one’s perfect partner. I can complain of nothing.)

Bright’s visit has been full of music and food. Very satisfactory.

*This feeling of outsiderness emboldened me to sneak a drink of water while I was in the reading room. “Hah!” I thought. “What are they going to do, expel me?!” I know, I’m lame. But as a rule, I do not break them, even the trivial ones.