A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [24]
I did them well enough to pass through calculus in high school, and then I did what most people who finish calculus in high school do; which is to study science in college. I had learned by this time to keep my mouth shut, at least on occasion, and had even learned to quiet the inner voice always asking why. Still I gained enough of a reputation among my physics instructors to cause some to laugh good-naturedly each time I raised my hand, and say, "Let me guess: Derrick wants to know why we're doing this. He's going to ask how it applies to his own life." I would smile back, and they would tell me (when they could).
But I still didn't fit in. Although the stars had long since stopped speaking to me—as had trees, horses, birds, garter snakes, crawdads—or at least I had long since stopped listening, when I tried to dive into this brave new world of equations I couldn't fully do it. If the statement "Do this or I will flunk you" characterizes my formative schooling, a weekend assignment for an advanced physics class characterizes the later years.
The assignment, interesting enough on its own, was this: If you spin a coin on its edge atop a flat surface, it will follow a looping pattern of small and large circles. Given a host of initial conditions and simplifying assumptions, we were supposed to find an equation that would describe this path. I spent much of the weekend doing page after page of calculus, differential equations, and lots of old-fashioned algebra (Yes, Mrs. Glass, I eventually did learn my algebra), and finally arrived at an answer. The answer—an indecipherable mass of variables, constants, and integrals that covered the better half of a page—is as meaningless to me now as it was at the time. I see no hint of silver in those symbols, no relation to the sound of a coin as it spins, then slows, then collapses on the Formica with its metallic cicada chatter.
Although by that time I was for the most part inured to the abstract nature of much of what I was being taught, this time something snapped. Maybe the sun was shining that weekend, and I watched it too much from the table where I worked, or I lost too much sleep over the assignment. Perhaps the hours I spent on this problem contrasted too sharply with the burgeoning awareness of my own mortality, and the knowledge that, whatever I may do with the rest of my life, the sun would never slant exactly this same way through these same trees, never again would precisely this air course through my twenty-one-year-old lungs. If I had possessed then the confidence and knowledge I have now—confidence in the validity of my own experience—I would have strode into class on Monday, pulled a coin out of my pocket, spun it on the teacher's desk, and said, "There's your answer."
Of course, if I then possessed the confidence and knowledge I have now, I probably would have flunked the class.
Most everyone I knew hated being at the Colorado School of Mines. Nearly all of us viewed it as a four- or five-year ordeal, something to be endured, like a mule endures the whip. A friend was fond of recalling that he first heard AC/DC's Highway to Hell while driving to register for classes. I'm certain the thought that college could be an enjoyable learning process never occurred to most of my peers: we merely wanted to survive it. This attitude was actively encouraged by many of the professors. I remember one class, a required part of everyone's sophomore core, that fully two-thirds of the 300 or so students each semester flunked or dropped. There was another class—quantum mechanics, an advanced physics elective no one in his (the student body was overwhelmingly male) right mind ever took—in which five of six students failed and the other received