When the wise man builds a house

Two summers ago, I read everything I possibly could about Hartley Hall. The Living-Learning Center was to be my new home, and I was excited. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I was setting a precedent for the next time I’d have to build a new home, which would be two years later.

In my “pre-frosh” Hartley information hunt, I chanced upon WikiCU and its Hartley Hall entry, and lo, there was the Layla to my Majnun. There were photos and floor plans and factoids, and I could even see what the bathroom looked like. But then it turned out that some fellow named Jack Kerouac had lived in Hartley at some point, and he didn’t like it. Talk about a wet blanket.

I had no idea who Kerouac was (perhaps an embarrassing confession), but I was nonetheless miffed to read that a celebrity had given up on Hartley and sought asylum in Wallach, called Livingston Hall at the time, “where there were no cockroaches.” Did Housing dump me in the LLC’s worse half?

Eventually, like Kerouac, I too left Hartley, but not for the same reason. In my two years at Hartley, I had only one rather unremarkable encounter with a pathetically perfunctory roach. I was Kyoto-bound, and needless to say, a preponderance of bugs wasn’t really a major impetus for my Hartley departure.

As soon as I got my housing assignment this summer from my program here in Kyoto, I turned into an overeager high school senior all over again, but this time armed with Google Maps’ Street View. I was an expert on my neighborhood by the time my mom asked me for my address. But when she looked at my first-floor apartment assignment, ensconced in the shadows of a parking lot, a kindergarten, a shrine, and a cemetery, she echoed the famous Hartley-hating alum: “You’re going to have a lot of cockroaches,” she predicted.

Unfortunately, moms are always right.

But who cares? There’s something positively celestial about my stygian, little, roach-infested apartment here in Kyoto, something so alive, so vital. And two years after cumbersomely building a home at Columbia only to abandon it and start all over again, I’m actually not starting all over again. I feel somehow better equipped to build myself a new home here, even with my strange roommates of a different species.

“Ah, when the wise man builds a house,” goes a passage from a text I read during my first year at Columbia, “he causes no expense to the people, no trouble to the spirits. He uses benevolence and righteousness for his ridgepole and beam, ritual and law for his pillar and base stone, truth and virtue for a gate and door, mercy and love for a wall and hedge.”

It didn’t mean much to me at the time, but I was drawn back to that passage from “Record of a Pond Pavilion” over the summer. I saw myself—or, rather, who I wanted to be—in Yoshishige no Yasutane. His approach to building a new home seems so happy, so enlightened. He demands that I ask the most fundamental of questions: Why am I doing what I am doing here in Kyoto? On what foundation am I building my home?

At college, sometimes I feel as though I am a thrall at the altar of my own self. My college home is just a temple for the inviolable trinity of Grades, Work, and Extracurriculars. I get lost in meditation, wondering if my servility to that trinity, my obsequious desire to meet their endless demands, will propitiate the graduate school gods and goddesses to whom they ultimately report. Truth and virtue as the gate and door of my Columbian home? Try truancy or Machiavellian virtù.

But in Kyoto, perhaps I should do as the Kyoto-ites do, or at least as one Kyoto-ite sought to do a millennium ago. The problem is, how? Can a house built with “benevolence” and “righteousness”—those most Confucian of virtues—find a home in an academic community? How am I supposed to build a wall out of “mercy” when it’s my job to tear to intellectual shreds an academic paper I find stupid? And what exactly does a “merciful wall” or a “loving hedge” mean in the first place?

I’m hoping I’ll figure this all out somehow. Studying abroad is a second chance, an opportunity to start college once again, and to build on a blank foundational slate, this time with the knowledge gained from the last time around.

So I’ll explore Kyoto, each day building a little more of my new home as I search for the spirit of Yoshishige no Yasutane. And when I’m done for the day, I’ll come home, turn on Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me,” do my homework, and watch out for the roaches, as if I were in Hartley all over again.

Jack Kerouac left Hartley to get away from the roaches. I left to find them.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College junior majoring in East Asian languages and cultures. He is a former Spectator editorial page editor, a former senior editor of Columbia East Asia Review and served as secretary of the the Bahá'í Club of Columbia University. He is studying abroad at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Tuesdays.