579: Fourth, . . .
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 6 concludes
Fourth, and possibly most bewildering of all, we were made to change classes. When our day’s bout with one subject had ended, we got up and left the room, and went to another, similar, room where we tussled with another, different, subject. What an enormous change this was. In the past, when we had spent nearly the entire school day in one room, we had drifted from one subject to the next, one blending slightly with the next, like the indistinct edges of objects depicted in a watercolor painting, but the act of changing classes said, “There is definition here. Crisp lines separate one subject from another. The boundaries of knowledge are sharp and can be marked precisely,” and here I am at the edge of my theme.
Mark Dorset, my sociologist friend, has said that one of the ways people can be divided into two camps is according to whether they exhibit a tendency to stay put or a tendency to move on. The difference between staying-put behavior and moving-on behavior is, he says, profoundly indicative of essential personality traits. Well. There we were, after six years of staying put for most of the school day, now required to move on every forty-eight minutes. A personality change was being imposed on us. We would be sitting in a classroom, stable and studious, and then a bell would ring, triggering a brief, intensely active period, a burst of frantic energy, when we all changed our positions, rushing into the halls like photons scattered from a naked light bulb, like particles of dust puffed into the air, or like a multicolored bunch of marbles in the confusing midgame in Chinese checkers.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 579, Mark Dorset considers Personality Traits, Distinctive: “Staying Put” versus “Moving On” from this episode.
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