Last weekend, we visited the prep school our kids attend, and that we both attended back in the ‘90s. It likes its traditions, this place. I like mine too—as a result, both my kids are day students on substantial financial aid, as I was. Still, I am ambivalent about the whole thing.
I was thinking of J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, as I walked Exeter’s paths and marbled stairways. His book irritated me when I read it, with its overwrought tropes of poor-kid-at-Cotillion/confused-about-which-fork-to-use. Not that such scenes don’t happen for working class folks who are invited into elite institutions; they do, but mainly Vance irritates me because he continues to play the bumpkin, as if he’s still just a stranger in that world, and not an “elite” himself, doing a cynical performance. I can tell similar stories of class bewilderment, having grown up in a beat-down old mill town in Massachusetts almost entirely peopled by various flavors of ethnic Catholic. (For an excellent literary dip into something beautifully done that resembles my own elevation-via-education story, see Dirtbag, Massachusetts.)
I admit to leaning a bit overheavy myself on vignettes that crystallize but also reduce this experience— how I deliberately drove off of any hint of a Boston accent (which was probably light to begin with), or my overstated, maybe apocryphal, reports of embarrassment in conversation with classmates who knew about things that mystified me: “What is ‘Saab’?” and “Is there one specific New Yorker who is The New Yorker?” The flaw in these stories is obvious—any poor kid let into an elite prep school or Ivy League college is bright enough to pick these things up via context clues almost immediately. Bright enough, even, to watch and mimic which fork people are using for which dish. The class markers I remember most vividly are private, weirder, more specific, the way true stories usually are. Like my bewilderment at the opening assembly where everyone else seemed already to know the words to this weird, droning song “O God Our Help in Ages Past” (in fact, they probably didn’t all, but a lot of the ones who didn’t could at least read music, which I could not, deepening my sense of isolation). Or this:
I had a campus job, and I also made some additional money by babysitting for faculty members’ kids. In one faculty apartment, there was framed art on the walls, but it was presented in a way that was totally foreign to me. Each piece was surrounded by a wide border of white space. In some cases, the art was tiny, maybe three by three inches, and the white space much larger. I don’t think I’d ever encountered matted art before, and I was captivated by the way the white space funneled my attention, or, like a moat, held any distractions at bay. I didn’t register it as fancy, just as revelatory. On my walls at home, there was plenty of art work and family photos, but it always ran all the way to the frame.
Our house was crowded and chaotic. My mothers’ decorative style was maximalist, saturated, and embellishment ran clear up to the ceiling. Five kids in two small bedrooms meant bunkbeds also to the ceiling. Usually, from my bottom bunk, I couldn’t even see the ceiling, just the underside of a mattress. But some nights, I would sleep on the couch and look up at the vast white space and start to feel panic. I would start to feel like the ceiling was moving, crawling with something, and that it was also making a noise, a hum or buzz of blankness. I felt a kind of visceral horror vacui, unaccustomed as I was to blank space, quiet, emptiness.
I think this may be what struck me most as the difference between the Wasps I encountered at Exeter, and me: prep school as white space, in more than one sense of the word. The aesthetic and intellectual advantage of breathing room, of being able to hear yourself think, of a room of one’s own.
In my hometown, I had been inside several churches: two Catholic (one for the Irish, one for the French Canadians), one Baptist where an evangelical friend from a tithing family brought me a few times, and one Congregationalist. My own Catholic Church was high ceilinged but felt close, the stained glass windows obliterating the outside world, everything richly patterned, embellished, stamped metal, no white surfaces, emaciated bleeding Jesus on a cross suspended above the altar, angled toward the pews like he was hang-gliding. There was a lot going on. In the Congregationalist Church, the windows were high and clear. There was no art at all. It felt expansive. It was an enormous box of air. It was not cozy, but it felt easy to draw breath in. They don’t gild the lily, these Wasps, but they do breathe easy.
I got curious about the term horror vacui after it popped into my head, remembering the ceiling buzzing and crawling. I was reading about it as an aesthetic movement and discovered it had class implications too:
There is a relationship between horror vacui and its inverse phenomenon, value perception. Commercial designers favor visual clarity in window displays and advertising in order to appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers, on the premise that understatement and restraint appeals to more affluent and educated audiences.
On the Wikipedia page for horror vacui, I spotted in the margin an example from the 1500s—an engraving by Jean Duvet that looked deeply familiar to me. I went to the basement and found the odd, tall old book that I stole in the 90s, called “Duvet’s L’Apocalypse Figuree.” I didn’t mean to steal it, initially, I don’t think. Still, I decline to explain its exact provenance. I know that, when I encountered it, and looked through the images in its pages, I thought, “No one appreciates this here. Probably no one has looked at this in decades. It means more to me than it ever could to these people.” I took it, acting profoundly out of character, maybe with the intention of returning it at some point, but I can’t say for sure. I was attending Exeter at that time, and maybe feeling a spiritually homesick aesthetic craving for maximalism, overwrought ornamentation, and obliteration of empty spaces. I have kept the book and will keep it, relieved to discover, upon googling, that it’s not extremely valuable.
It’s hard to say what parts of me are attributable to an elite prep school education. But I think that’s where I was given the idea that a person could choose where to lay their attention, and should expect, or at least strive for, the space and time to do so. To not always be simply reactive. To not always be scanning for threat. To not always have your time accountable to someone else’s needs or wants or demands. I now feel myself to be a chimera of the kind of family and community I grew up in, and the world I entered in prep school. I still prefer a certain aesthetic press and jumble. When I started to get into Buddhism, I gravitated away from the sparse spaciousness of Zen, and toward the cacophanous, overbrimming, busy iconography of the Tibetan tradition.
Poor people, the working class, the kids on scholarship, however you want to say it—they’re busy. The hours and days are full to the very edges. The apartments, the rooms are too. I had a room to myself, and a bed to myself, for a single, six month long sliver of my life. Still, the memory of it makes me close my eyes and pull my cheeks in sucking on the spareness, the sweetness of it.
Bard College, where my son is a student, calls itself in marketing materials, “A Place To Think.” They are, I am sure, implying the same kind of above-it-all advantage you write about here. This contrasts with my old school, Loyola of Chicago, where a lot of the thinking had to be done on El rides to part-time jobs after (very early) classes. And so I find myself in the embarrassing position of envying my own kid just a little bit. I wonder if your daily transit from mill town to prep school created any distance between you and your siblings.
Horror vacuum makes me feel claustrophobic. Where’s Waldo??