FLASHBACK: It's a night in the mid-'90s; I must be around 11 or 12. As I'm getting dressed and ready for bed, I quite vividly remember happening to turn toward a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself, bare-chested. And an entirely new thought comes to me, a thought whose exact source I'll never really know: "Golly, how scrawny I am!"
Looking back, it was the birth of some new form of self-consciousness, but all I discovered then were what I believed to be two pathetically pipe-like arms. Fortunately, time changes everything-especially bodies and quite a few priorities in life as well.
Once I, and many others, realized our largest talents weren't along the axis of the muscularly challenging-and no, sorry to all the motivational speakers out there, the brain is not a muscle-we became a little more satisfied with our own corporeal lot, if we ever weren't in the first place. Take note, I only said a little more satisfied.
See, there's a phenomenon on the college campus that's giving many of us away. Yet few things in modern undergraduate life are less thoroughly explored than this place of near shrine-like importance for some. A hint: Wilson. Brodie.
Our gymnasiums are among the largest after-hours gathering points we have-and the most egalitarian. Rarely are we more likely to run into an acquaintance, a friend, an enemy or a stranger than at the gym.
And given all the people we know, it's hard to get to know many very well. But at the gym, you needn't talk to your peers. Just watch them. It's an instant confession. Know that mental flash when you suddenly understand something about another person, or come to see him or her entirely anew? The gym is one long, continuous unfolding of that moment.
But before I go any further, let me take out some garbage. Yes, I know all about how exercise increases your chance of living a longer, healthier life and decreases stress. And someday, we may go for those reasons foremost. But not today.
We, who regularly back-load term papers at great loss of sleep, who guzzle coffee by the gallon, who quite frequently do everything we can on the weekend to wreck the bodies we work so hard to tone on the weekdays-we aren't doing splits on the elliptical and sets on the bench whispering "Heart disease, diabetes, goodbye! Hurrah!"
Some people have a vague feeling of embarrassment at even being in the gym, one that's only partially alleviated because they're in such generous company. Who wouldn't feel a little uncomfortable trying to act like the "work" in working out doesn't summarize our attitude to the place, an attitude that only highlights the fiendish devotion we have to whatever complex brings us there?
That's why the people at the weights and machines have to feel a little ridiculous in front of sport-playing peers. At least these people are having "fun," moving organically instead of in regularized, controlled jerks that reduce people to the final piece of a wretched machine!
And in the weight room-well, about that room:
FLASHBACK: Fifth century B.C. We're in ancient Greece, and Socrates is expressing his very tender admiration for Charmides, the "most beautiful boy" in the gymnasium: "then, ah then, my noble friend, I saw inside his cloak and caught fire, and could possess myself no longer." Now, if you go to the weight room of our own gym, you'll be hard-pressed to believe that most of the guys there don't know another "beautiful boy" when they see one.
Whether that beautiful boy happens to be our own person-mirrors lining every wall make it an easy and ubiquitous practice to metrosexually "check yourself out"-or the gigantic freak doing squats doesn't matter.
When Charmides enters the gym, Plato notes that "none of [the boys], not even the smallest, had eyes for anything else." The practice didn't die with ancient Greece. Should you choose not to believe me, go to the weight room in the evening, and watch when a "Charmides" comes in; all heads turn to him like a finicky magnet, moving toward and away with enough rapidity to make it seem like they're ogling at the clock. If we guys came to the gym for larger muscles, what in the hell is going on in here?
To Plato and Socrates, the gymnasium meant, literally, a "school for naked exercise." Oh, how little things change. We're naked all right, in all the ways we'd rather not be.
Philip Sugg is a Trinity junior. His column runs every other Friday.
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