There’s no other way to say this: going back to school has a smell.
(Reader, I will now spend six hundred words looking for another way to say it.)
It’s not just the aroma of fresh ink on hurriedly printed syllabi, of stale air in three-months-empty classrooms, or of mass-produced pizza at welcome picnics. Nor is it the half-comforting, half-anxiety-inducing presence of several dozen bodies sitting and breathing in the same direction for one to three hours. And let’s leave dorm rooms out of this completely.
No, returning to school has a smell because smell is the best metaphor I can think of for an amorphous thisness that can be neither ignored nor described. Smells jar our senses, astringent or delightful or perplexing, until they fade into the background, unnoticeable. Smells jog our memories in bizarre ways, evoking not events but moods, auras, vibes. Smells escape taxonomy: two oranges might smell slightly different from each other, but is there any way to describe how (at least that doesn’t require sommelier training)? Smells don’t just pierce the air like light or ride the air like sound—smells are the air.
And that’s what going back to school feels like. Yesterday, on the second day of classes at my seminary and the first at the university next door, I was walking across town so an HR rep could spend thirty seconds confirming that my passport really was a passport. I’ve started a school year almost two dozen times now, but I was still feeling that familiar pit of newness in my stomach: new classes, new jobs, new professors, new classmates. (And I’ve heard from professors that I shouldn’t expect this to go away any time soon).
And as I walked across Princeton I had the distinct feeling that the whole town was feeling the same shapeless nervousness that I was, from the parents dropping their freshman off to the bookstore employees navigating their busiest days of the year. Certainly I was projecting, but even the clouds, low and dense, seemed to share this apprehension, as did the cobblestones, bearing the footprints of generations of nervous students and first-time teachers. It had rained earlier in the day, but now it was just damp. You could smell the hesitant air looking for its next class in all the wrong buildings.
For about a week after I had Covid in May, I couldn’t smell anything. I was so afraid it would be permanent that my spouse had to lie to me and say it definitely wouldn’t be. Thankfully, it came back fairly quickly, but I still catch myself double-checking—smelling well-known things like coffee and wine (okay, mostly beverages) with unusual intensity to make sure they’re the same. The thing is, there’s no way to know for sure. Smell is too diffuse, too hard to capture in words or ideas, to compare across time and space. In a way, it only exists in the present.
Since I’ve got my seminary hat back on, maybe this is the place to talk about a theology of smell: the “fragrance” of offerings to God, the “stench” of judgment and injustice, the deathly aroma of the myrrh presented to Jesus by the magi. But let’s save that for the exegesis papers.
Instead, I’m going to try to do what I don’t do enough: not think but breathe. Breathe in the damp, cloud-shaded air with its embedded centuries of academic anxiety. Breathe in the newness, unpleasant as it is to my order-loving enneagram-five brain. Breathe in the ink and the trees and the songs and the masks and the pavement and the sweat and the bread toasting way too early in the morning.
And breathe that same air out again, and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
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(Writer, your six hundred words did not disappoint!)
Thank you, Michal!
Very interesting article Josh!