As I’m sitting here writing my final paper on Sylvia Plath’s Daddy issues and working through an occasional physics problem, I cannot help but let my eyes wander over Mugar’s stacks. Straight ahead, I see thick bindings with “FREUD” inscribed across them, how appropriate. While I considered casting Freud in a more serious role in my paper, my gaze shifted left. There I found books fusing psychoanalysis and multivariate calculus. The first thing that comes to mind involves taking the integral of a schizophrenic. And that’s just the first thing.
Mugar seems to have an academic breeding problem, but then again so do I.
One of the next things was a flashback to studying multivariate on the second floor. You know those tables on the second floor tucked between the stacks? Well they aren’t there anymore, which is the main reason that I’m up here but that is beside the point. Inhabiting those stacks are books filled with art, architecture, and music: a fitting backdrop for calculus problems. More appropriate than I cared to realize at the time. Artists, either intentionally or unintentionally impose the laws of math, physics, and chemistry to produce their pretty pictures. Painters mix chemicals for the perfect hue; apply torque to their brushes to achieve the perfect stroke and musicians coordinate sound waves to create the perfect harmony. Science and art are inexplicably wound together—how many derivatives did the designers of Mugar do? Alright they have been pretty simple considering its box-like design, but nonetheless it has not collapsed yet. Books themselves are the perfect manifestation of academic fusion. They are composed of organic matter, chemicals, and ideas. If minds never mingled we would not even have books, let alone anything to put in them. So keep your Kindle, Amazon, I’ll take my decaying books home to merge with me any day.
