carrots, education, and kelly

Clara and I are sitting here eating carrot disks. You make them by slicing up a very large carrot into very thin disks, making a very pleasing near-translucent wheel.

Looking at the patterns in the wheel, I'm transported to my year of living with Kelly Sellers. He and Shawn Floyd and I were roommates for a college senior year, and provided enough comedy and scholarly material for an entire lifetime.

Kelly was one of those dream roommates: infallibly open-minded and open-hearted, with manners to match, quite liberal and quite conservative and quite moderate in all the right places. Like his other two roommates, he was enthusiastic about college — and not just the parties and friends but the college part of college, which includes going to classes and studying and expanding the mind. Early evenings were often spent with the three of us sitting around our slightly un-collegey living-room, surrounded by mahogany antiques and oil paintings, perhaps with a pipe, absorbed in reading our separate textbooks and nontextbooks in pleasant silence.

Invariably, one of us would break the silence with something from whatever we were reading, and, for seconds or minutes, there might be a brief discussion. Philosopher, biologist, and composer thus educated each other as part of educating ourselves: it was as valuable as anything tuition paid for.

One afternoon, Kelly ate a carrot, and, over the course of roughly 40 minutes, narrated his eating of it, calling attention to the ingenious architecture of the carrot and the various functions of each carrot part as each was uncovered by a nibble.

He'd been learning, in his giant biology textbooks, all about the processes that go on in a plant: the way one part nourishes another, how one part protects the other part as it grows, why the outer part tastes rich and sweet and the inner tastes stalky and bitter, and how this all helps the plant survive into planthood where it can function in the larger world. He was plugging this information in to his daily life, seeing if it really worked, cementing it into his brain where it helped him pass a test — but he was not doing only that.

He was also preparing himself to be the Chief Chemist at a technology corporation, which is what he does now. He was making himself a better chemist, and, in my opinion of education, a better man. Many people live their lives, and that's jolly well great; but some look at the lives they're living, and attempt to understand what's going on, what makes it all tick.

Among other things, that's what college is for. It teaches you how to eat a carrot, and how to treasure the examined life for as long as it lasts.