I'm pretty sure elliptical machines steal souls. Maybe it was the dark, swirling appendages of the great machine, creating a black vortex from which no light escaped. Or maybe it was the vacant yet stern faces of the people on the machines, either reading Cosmo or calculating the dreaded calories that they were ridding themselves of and the shots of Bacardi they would be able to take that night, thanks to their valiant efforts.
Regardless, when I walked into Quenchers to buy a drink after a run around the golf course, I saw the stampeding hordes on the machines without a single empty gap in their ranks. This was last Wednesday, which was a glorious day for April and an unbelievable day for February.
But all these people chose to get their exercise inside away from the Carolina Blue sky. To me they are exercising for the wrong reasons. They aren't getting a runner's high or enjoying nature; they are hardening their bodies to conform to social norms, and they're trying to do it with as little pain and work as possible.
They all just seemed so mechanical and dead, simple extensions of the machines they ride. It is unbelievable to me that this repetitive, unmoving motion could be preferable to being outside doing anything.
And they are doing it in the most public place possible, saying, "Look at me! I exercise! I'm HOT!"
It's like the library socialites infesting Bostock and Lilly, limiting quiet studying to a few hidden corners of the libraries. They are the type of people who do a thing not just to do it but to be seen doing it.
At that moment, standing in Wilson with my Riptide Rush Gatorade, watching the herd on the elliptical machines, I realized how horribly superficial Duke is.
And I'm not really talking about the social scene, though that would be an easy target.
I'm talking about the i-banking, doctor-becoming, succeeding-at-all-cost mentality that is so prevalent here. It seems like we are all selling our souls to become wealthy. I want to meet an art history/biology double major who is going to curate a museum or open a studio-the kind of person who would have gone on a walk through the gardens last Wednesday instead of running inside on some machine. Calories be damned.
I think we are immune to the beauty that doesn't come with sacrifice. The girl on the cover of Cosmo is obviously beautiful, but we love her more as a goal to reach than as something honestly beautiful. Too many of us can't walk around the Duke Gardens reveling in what we already have.
We are left pining for what we can't achieve in Wilson, immune to that easy, pure form of beauty outside.
It must infuriate our professors, watching us read Shakespeare and study the mechanics of the world, not to understand but to get an A. That's why there's a sign posted around campus from Teach for America, which declares that "Morgan, Goldman and Bains all agree" you should work for Teach for America as a tool to get a soul-devouring job. We can't do anything without an obvious reward.
We love the carrot, fear the stick and ignore the flowers on the roads we travel.
There's this facebook group full of Pratt kids mocking Trinity kids. It declares "have fun traveling the world. while I'm out making the cheddar!" I mean, traveling the world sounds like fun. Getting a job doesn't. You shouldn't need other people to see you drinking $14 martinis in a fashionable Manhattan club to know you are a success.
Listen: We are all mice in a maze, and the goal is to find the cheese at the end of it. You, being the smart mouse, manage to make it straight to that cheese.
Me?
I go to every dead end, taking an amazingly long time making sure there wasn't some extra little present at the end of the other tunnels.
I arrive with a button, a dropped pipet tip and a grape. You've eaten half the cheese and are full.
I begin my meal.
I'd echo Bernstein from Citizen Kane when he said, "Well, its no trick to make a lot of money. if what you want to do is make a lot of money." The trick is to find something to do with yourself so that, at the end of the maze and the end of your days, you have some stories to tell your grandkids.
Jordan Everson is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Friday.
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