Bosko didn’t do his job (pt 2)
Autumn is a ritual for university students that is echoed across television, literature, and vast stretches of time. When the leaves turn to the color of dusk, something in the air awakens. The kettle whistles on the stove. Tea bags are steeped with milk and honey. Loaves of sourdough and lattice pies bake golden inside the oven. On a rural farm, the harvest is coming in. Apples turn from crisp to mushy, fallen from their branches in rotten heaps. Rory Gilmore has pulled out her cable-knit sweaters; she’s starting her first day at Chilton; she’s falling in love for the first time. Richard Papen has left his stagnant hometown for Hampden College in Vermont, chasing aesthetics and an elusive Greek teacher to the end of the world. Though the students here do not have the bacchanals of Donna Tartt’s elite Classics students or the symposia of the ancient Greeks, we have rituals all the same.
By autumn, the sense of alienness has fallen away. Acquaintances have been distinguished from real friends. Newfound families are formed. Our own echoes of cultural rituals resonate through Victoria’s quaint campus grounds. Somewhere in Burwash or Annesley, a group of first years are huddled in a dorm room in their pajamas at 2 am. They trade stories, share laughs, and pass gossip from ear to ear (they’ll learn tact later). Annesley girls have dressed in black, circled the Vic quad with candles in their hands, and signed their names inside a book beside all the girls who came before. Somewhere down the street, second years have just moved into their new apartment, freshly furnished with the $50 Facebook Marketplace couch they hauled down Yonge Street for three hours. They make a mess of the kitchen trying to cook dinner, which they wash down with a few glasses of (legal) wine. Some time into the night, two friends hold hands and twirl each other around. Some time, over the music, I love yous are said.
We may not have Luke’s Diner, but autumn is for café study dates anyway. Something about this season brings out a love for learning—yes, the school year has only just started, and yes, people have finally found classmates who simply love what they study. Autumn is for wide-eyed, starstruck conversations about newly-acquired knowledge over steaming cups of cider and pumpkin spice. It’s for house parties that start with “So what do you study?” and end with three hours spent knees-sore on the carpet floor talking about the books you’ve read and your favourite translation of the Iliad.
Shakespeare in the Trinity College courtyard is a ritual too—a continuation of the Greek oral tradition, a coalescence of our favourite stories passed down, an experience that is communal, shared, and yet changes with every glance. And this is it. Autumn is not a ritual of constancy, but of change. Autumn is a beautiful but fleeting moment suspended in scented candle-lit time. Every year, the same rituals are performed over again, even if the Smirnoff changes to wine and the crowded residence dorm to a city high-rise. Espresso is brewed. Memories are made. Rituals of autumn echo into the fast-approaching new year.