Listen
I’ve been forced to wake up early recently. Having to live in the skylight room of Soule is both a blessing and a curse: it’s spacious but suffocatingly hot, you get privacy but only at the cost of the 67-step staircase, you see the stars at night and the sun in the morning. This morning, I saw the sun. At around 6:30 AM. The lap of luxury, senior spring, begets its curse: a mandatory, celestial alarm clock. However, being awoken that early on the morning of your quadruple sleep in has its benefits. You hear things. Cars zipping by on Front Street, the E&R truck backing in, laughs between maintenance workers on the quad, birds, and the fan beside you, oscillating calmly. The first things you notice after a deep sleep are the things you hear, before groggy eyes and body roll out of bed. A map of sounds.
Sound, I guess, has been pretty central to my Exeter experience. I remember vigorously purging my middle-school iTunes library (Daniel Powter, Sara Bareilles, P!nk) and over the course of two days, attempted to make myself culturally current. I went to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a stock Green Day poster of a fictitious concert, before promptly returning home and attempting to verse myself in all things American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown. To my horror, upon my arrival to school, I discovered Green Day had stopped being good / culturally relevant in the late nineties. So throughout prep year, I drifted, through a wasteland of Mraz and Mumford, listening without really listening, hearing the sound of my own voice change, in more ways than I could have ever anticipated, for better or for worse.
Soule’s two spiral staircases, lined with brick, dotted with yellow light, serve as an aural cave, carrying sound floor-to-floor, room-to-room (again, for better or for worse). I remember emerging from a particularly dull winter my prep year to hear the barbershop quartet practicing outside of the room of David Moon ’12, two floors away. I sat on the steps in front of my room and marveled at the reverberations, vivid, clear, that cascaded and bounced off the glass ceilings at the top of the stairs. I remember that afternoon as the first day of spring.
After that point, I heard more. The soundtrack of people around me. Giacomo Melegari ’11, playing piano, creating mixes, and blasting techno a floor below me, shaking furniture, lamps and bed like clockwork five minutes after lights-out each night. The unforgettable tenor of Jackson Crook ’13 practicing each new Exeteras solo as he walked up and down the stairs. The cheers and caterwauls following a Fifa match in the room of Nicho Gonzalez ’12. The cacophony of screams as 40 Soule boys, dressed in flags, run down the stairs, burst out the back doors, and onto the midnight quad.
I eventually found my sound. Through radio shows, EPs, EAR shows and late-night conversations. Through performing with Exeteras, locking in harmonies, or improvising new ones with the jazz trio. Through hearing those around me perform, staircase and stadium concerts alike. There is never enough advice you could give to a prep, and there is only so much advice a prep will listen to. But if you can take away one thing: listen. Get up early, stay up late, go where you shouldn’t and stay when you shouldn’t. Leave your dorm room door, your iTunes, your mind and your ears open.
And if you ever get lost, lie in your bed and stare into the night (skylight or otherwise) when it’s quiet. Connect the constellations, the points on your map of sounds, and eventually, you will hear yourself.