January 22, 1999
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Making Love in the Cold
Opinion
This is a State of the Love Report at Cornell University, served up fresh in the wake of winter break. This report does not deal with "tough love" - we leave that to the Cornell Review.
Instead it talks about Michael Jordan, Thomas Edison, the Beastie Boys and William Shakespeare, who have almost nothing in common except for one thing: they all have "the Love" for what they do.
Cornell is fortunate because we are surrounded by a faculty pregnant with true Love for pretty much the entire spectrum of occupational fields. In fact, I would go so far as to proclaim Cornell one of the Love capitals of planet Earth.
Our professors may study obscure things that some of us don't care to explore, but we can learn from them about Love, since they are absolute fanatics about what they do.
From what I've seen, when you're in Love with your job work is a game, and it's an addictive one, like James Bond on the Nintendo 64. For our professors, it's not about success or paychecks - it's about the process itself.
And when they get inspired, just like in love, nothing else matters. Desperately scribbling on the back of an envelope, success sends them soaring, while failure monopolizes their mind. They do not die when they go to work only to be resurrected on the ride home; they never stop experiencing or feeling.
We obviously don't need a medicine man to teach us that this is part of the path to an optimum life. Yet it seems that currently very few Cornellians are truly imbued with the Love.
I know a kid that takes as many electives in Africana Studies as he can, not because he gives a damn about the culture, but solely because he thinks they bolster his G.P.A. Last semester someone wrote a whole column encouraginng everyone to use the median grade reports to find and take the easiest classes.
This is sick. If your course of study is based more on your transcript than its content, then it's not True Love. There's no reason why we need to settle. As for anyone that boasts how cunning they are while they sidestep personal development, let's cleanse the campus of that bullshit mentality and get back to the learning.
We must challenge the threats that arise to Love, from Cornell to Capitol Hill. The National Endowment for the Arts, which sustains a lot of projects that are born out of passion and not sheer productivity, is under attack.
Our Republican Congress tells us that certain expressions of Love, in this case the arts, are no longer a high enough priority for a globalizing America.
The N.E.A. basically is the government subsidy for culture. Without it, we're left with the civilization the market gives us. That means Lite 97, People Magazine, Hoyts Cinema, and a general homogeny that is as absent in bold statement as it is in variety.
The fine arts are what have always made us human. In a world where people have produced almost exclusively what they need to survive, artisans have been there with works that let us derive feeling from a world based on economics and sheer existence.
Of course there's a practical side to the arts. Diego Rivera constructed murals that mobilized masses. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in his spare time, literally sparked the American Revolution.
The rules behind the Constitution, now a blueprint for our country and much of the rest of the world, were arrived at by the philosopher John Locke as he sat under a tree making nothing that could be sold. A strong culture makes for a strong nation, and anyone with American interests in mind needs to realize this.
Meanwhile, our professors and their Love, protected largely by agencies like the National Science Foundation, are facing more and more pressure to cheat their love for pure research through infidelity with corporate marketability.
And yet the reason Americans have been the ones making the major post-war discoveries and developing things like computers and televisions is because the government has always let eggheads play to their hearts content. Try and count how many major innovations came out of Japan in the last 50 years.
We must understand that all exploration, whether artistic or scientific, is important for its own sake. Cutting key programs like the NEA and the NSF kills passion, which is as bad for the development of a nation as it is for a precocious child. For the sake of our advancement - and for the sake of our humanity - we must keep the Love alive.
Fortunately, places like Cornell provide a dream world where the love is more contagious than gonorrhea. But if you want it then you have to put yourself in contact with those that have it. The most important undergraduate decision we'll make really has nothing to do with classes or clubs - it's all in the friends we choose to surround ourselves with.
Today, life is no longer just about survival, but about spiritual fulfillment. We don't just eat whatever we happen upon to stay alive, but go to Superwegmans to get exactly what we're craving.
In the aisles of our course listing we're not just looking for a way to pay the bills, but a way to find something that gives our lives real meaning. Cornell has mad Love for the taking. Find some, spread it around and give it to your loved ones.
Nathan Wilson is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The North Façade appears every Monday.
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