I spent an hour today piling watermelon rinds, banana peels and leftover lettuce on top of a compost pile, then covering this with leaves, then shoveling dried horse manure on top of everything. This was one-tenth of my penalty for missing six lab classes last semester. Shouldn't they make me study the material I missed, or put me on probation, or ask my tutor if my performance was satisfactory, or find out why I missed so many classes? A week ago, I walked around Uppers for two hours picking up assorted detritus, broken bottles, candy wrappers, and the like, and staring at the sky and the dry brown hills. Then I swept organic matter away from the stairs, onto the ground by the tough trees and persistent little bushes. I didn't think about much of anything while doing this. I examined, which is my primary mode of cognition; I examined growing things, land, and the effects of two generations of unthoughtful students on their surroundings.

I can't put this into a context. I can find no connection between my six missed lab classes and my ten-hour introduction to Buildings and Grounds. Somehow, I don't mind this. I don't take it as absurd. It is, to be sure, Puritan and inexplanable, but it makes a kind of sense in the back roads of my logic.

Four weeks ago I shovelled snow. It snows here with frequency but not much quantity. Matt Aranoff, the young alumnus who runs Buildings and Grounds, gave me an ice breaker, two snow shovels and a bucket of salt. The ice-breaker worked best if plunged perpendicular to the plane of the ice. The shovels proved ineffective for most of the work. After scattering the ice, I returned to the office and worked for another forty minutes shovelling the parking lot outside B&G, which Matt counted as an hour toward my ten. When it snowed again that night, the areas I had salted remained clear of ice. Salting the ground, usually, has the connotation of cleansing it from evil and preventing anything from growing. It is an image which shows up occasionally in old tales of the supernatural.

I usually feel revulsion at the expression of the concept that exercise somehow improves the workings of the mind, clears the soul. I would say simply that physical action provides satisfying relaxation on a cognitive level. The mind does no thinking; I don't think it regenerates while it rests. There is, of course, a satisfaction that you are doing something, accomplishing necessary work, improving, rearranging, purifying, whatever. This appears largely to be imaginary, although not false. This work is frequently unnecessary, and creates only minor aesthetic pleasure or benefit to the community once it's done. It thus seems unrigorous to claim that it is even community service. I would not call it punishment either. It seems almost a form of meditation. There is, of course, also no connection between meditation and missed classes . . .