The same thing we do every night, Pinky.
TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
Now, don’t laugh. I’m taking over the world and have already indoctrinated quite a few students into my English’s major cult. How do I know that are we— little girls who like to spend too much time in libraries; French berets and coffee cups; long-haired, passionate, pretentious Proust quoting snobs—stronger, more mighty and powerful, than those nuclear atomic-bomb building scientists?
Simple. I was one of them.
Afternoons, mornings, early evenings, I filled test tubes which chemicals that have funny names. Like potassium permanganate. I sliced rat brains into teeny tiny slivers; the brains were so white, shaped like almonds, in my blue-gloved hands. Those slivers stuck onto the glass slides, were fixed and Nissl stained, and then magnified under a microscope, larger than they ever had been; larger than life. It was summer and the days were long. My supervisor (who had nonchalantly informed me, that she liked to come to work around 6am and stay until, oh, just about midnight) abhorred lunch breaks. Life? Ha. Life was for ninnies.
Wet, snowy winters in Organic Chemistry lab. The sky dark. The smell of sulfur permeating every surface and trapping itself into my pores (“I breatheded it,” I insisted to my lab partner. “I breatheded it.” “There’s no such word,” she said, rolling her eyes. “That’s what happened,” I insisted. “I can’t breathe.”) We would sit, as a group, in the library, copying mechanisms, imagining chemicals colliding, forming, re-forming. Memorizing reactions like Grignard and Alkene Metathesis. Things happened. Compounds exploded. Apparatus caught fire. It was all very boring. In this universe, I played an insignificant role. I, the chemical-mixer, memorized, iterated, re-iterated, attempted to apply abstract concepts to my life. In this lecture hall, professors with little passion for teaching (and a sickly dedication to labwork, 5am-9pm) bred a generation of cold scientists. Lab coats un-inspired me. Heavy textbooks—filled with years and years and years of tedious research for one brilliant discovery—burdened me.
My initial interest in science undoubtedly sprung from wanting to change the world. Yes, progress is built upon scientific discovery. A nation without scientific inquiry and the tedious, committed research (which so irked me) would be sorry and retarded one. We rely on science to better our lives; to cure, engineer, create. Scientists improve the world. But by their nature, they are a secluded bunch, locked away in their laboratories and libraries. (I will not argue the anomaly.) How can you take over the world if you no longer live in it?
By taking over the world, I do not advocate a fascist regime, nor anything remotely political in this context. Rather, I instigate the exchange of ideas, art and philosophies, which creates a shareable and accessible world. A student of the arts is constantly encouraged to develop his or her own opinion and ideas. A classroom is not a lecture hall, but a shared space, a forum. Compounds do not explode. Ideas do. Things do not happen. We happen.
This is the value of a liberal arts education: its all yours.