ABSTRACT
The elevator in Raubinger Hall is very slow. Everyone is always waiting, waiting. Will it come? Why does it take so long between each floor? More than anything else in my work these days, this elevator dominates almost every experience. If it’s not just slow, but out of service, I will have to trudge up and down two flights of stairs lugging a cartload of manipulatives to each class. If it’s merely taking its time again, I’ll spend several minutes complaining with the rest, sharing impatience and anger. I find myself repeating advice that I heard back when I was an undergraduate music major; then, too, there was a frustratingly slow elevator. Alvin Lucier, a professor and composer, would wait with us and suggest that we celebrate our technology: accept this treasure that the elevator gives us, of time. Time to relax, to think, to not have to be doing anything else but waiting and then riding the elevator. The elevator experience was a musical composition, a pattern of pauses and movements in time and space. A delicious opportunity to experience. So now I find myself talking to students I have not yet met, other faculty racing late to class on the third floor: take this treasure, I say; enjoy this moment in time. We’re all crazed with speed and things we have to do, but here we have something that we can take as ours, a time away from all else and all the demands of others that encroach on our peace, a time that is only for us. By taking the elevator in this way, it is no longer an eternal wait; it is a moment that we cherish.
