Other Eyes: St. Olaf from a different perspective
This assignment came from Elise's insistence that we ought to learn the names of the other organisms in St. Olaf's ecological community. She loved Paul Gruchow's essay, "Naming What We Love," which ends like this:
Can you, I asked these students, imagine a satisfactory love relationship with someone whose name you do not know? I can't. It is perhaps the quintessentially human characteristic that we cannot know or love what we cannot name. Names are passwords to our hearts, and it is there, in the end, that we will find the room for the whole world."
I liked Gruchow's essay too, but I was skeptical of the benefits of learning names (I'm less skeptical now). So I suggested that we invite students to get to know one organism intimately enough to both name it and speak for it. The collection of essays would constitute our community, or at least an approximation of it.
The results, we thought, were amazing. The different perspectives opened up a whole new world around us. If, as William Kittredge says, we live in stories, we now had many more stories to live in and live with.
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