Kent Reflections XII: A Squirrel at the University of Chicago

XII. Kent Laboratory, October 5^th, 2016:

I watched a squirrel this afternoon. It was wandering around on the quad of the University of Chicago. It didn’t care much for the life of the mind, nor for the politics of the administrators; it was not worried about campuswide consolidation and liquidation of assets and funds, as though this institution were a business, nor did it care for the gentrification of the South Side. It was just a squirrel.

There is something nice in being just a squirrel. One can ignore the world around you and just focus on that satisfying little nut. Chew chew chew. Gnaw gnaw gnaw. Nut nut nut. He was afraid of a police officer, so he climbed up in a tree and gnawed his nut there. The police officer, of course, didn’t notice the little squirrel. Squirrels, after all, never face racial profiling. They are just squirrels.

I admire this little squirrel, but not for its solipsism. I admire its naturalness. How it stays natural on the quad of the University of Chicago is a little bit of amazement to me. After all, here we are in the central South Side of one of the largest cities in the country, full of concrete jungles and wastelands, full of the blasted carcasses of lost families and the hollowed-out souls of minds trapped by capitalism… and here, in this little once-upon-a-woods, the remnants of pre-Chicagoite forestland, the dream of the past lakeside, a little squirrel continues on being a squirrel, as though none of that matters. He’s quite persistent.

The trees, too, they show a persistence that amazes me. Some of them in South Kenwood and Hyde Park fly high above the rooftops of apartment buildings and condominiums, with a devil-may-care attitude saying, “We are tall, we are strong, and we can destroy you if we must.” Come a little rain, come a little thunder, and maybe they will. “At the very least,” they testify, “we will outlast you. We will outlast your manly wisdom, your supercessing teleologies, your capitalistic masterpieces, your cavernous parking garages, your systemic oppressions.”

That seems very fine to me. They are defiant, those trees. And it makes sense: there is a root of defiance in Hyde Park, albiet smothered at time by the smell of freshmen. It wafts over from Medici’s and Valois, with a hint of deephistory bound up in it. It fertilizes those roots, and the fruit is somewhere here.

I admire that defiance. Yet I am neither tree nor squirrel. I do not, in that sense, live in the future already. The always-already now is at my door, not the not-yet end of Paul’s eschatology. The natural realm sees what is in light of what has been and what will be, but I see what is in the dark of what is. Defiance, then, for me, must be more than perseverence or continuation, it must be… defiance. And that defiance must be abnormal, else it will not be taken into account.

Defiance, for a squirrel or a tree, is to be. But defiance, for a man, is to act.