My favorite bench in Ithaca NY
"to those who shall sit here..."
This is my favorite bench. It’s right by the big clock tower on Cornell’s campus.
It caught me by surprise, because I don’t usually read the inscriptions on benches. They usually have some dedication to someone who donated money or something.
But not this guy
TO THOSE WHO SHALL SIT HERE REJOICING
TO THOSE WHO SHALL SIT HERE MOURNINGSYMPATHY AND GREETING
SO HAVE WE DONE IN OUR TIME
Now let me tell you, this bench was already in my top 10 before I even read this.
I had a phase where I was walking up here every day. It’s nice to have a daily habit of leaving your house when you work from home. But I think what really kept me coming back was the view.
Look at this:
This was a 10 min walk from my apartment. You can see the entire town, and the lake (off screen, to the right). I often came here to contemplate, particularly early morning, to have a quiet moment to myself.
I found myself drawn to this spot in moments of triumph; after untangling a particularly nasty bug that took weeks of engineering effort, or after having shipped a major feature etc.
But I found myself coming here in forlorn moments as well. When I had doubts about what I was working on, about my future, about my relationships to friends and family.
I don’t know, there’s just something calming, or grounding, about an overlook like this. Maybe it has something to do with the “overview effect”, seeing your entire city, your entire world, as one small patch in a wider universe.
Our world feels so big & important when we’re in it. I think most of us rationally know that our problems are not that important in the grand scheme of things, but it doesn’t feel that way most of the time.
I think standing up here gives me that feeling; that my world is a small part of something big and grand. This seems self-evidently true when I’m here.
My daily walks continued for a few months and I started playing a game: could I spot something new every time? I thought I had seen all there was to see from up there, but I kept finding new things, like:
I could spot Lowe’s & Walmart, all the way across town
The Island gym
The farmer’s market
Whenever I was out around town and looked up and saw the clock tower, I made a mental note: if I could see the tower from there, maybe I could find this spot back at the bench.
The coolest thing I saw was the solar terminator:
This is the line you see in all those maps that separates night & day and sweeps across the Earth. Literally watching the wave of night recede away across the planet.
Finally, on a particularly introspective day, I turned my gaze in the other direction, and I read the bench for the first time, and it give me chills.
TO THOSE WHO SHALL SIT HERE REJOICING
TO THOSE WHO SHALL SIT HERE MOURNINGSYMPATHY AND GREETING
SO HAVE WE DONE IN OUR TIME
It felt like this bench was saying:
we have no idea what you’re going through, or what your world looks like
you may be sitting here overflowing with joy & optimism
you may be sitting here in a pit of despair
know this: we’ve felt all of these things too, and we made it through
— 1892
It’s that last line that keeps ringing in my ear. It feels intensely comforting to me. I think because there’s a tendency to think that whatever we’re feeling now is new and unique, and this makes us feel alone. But the bench is saying: we know this is a good spot to contemplate, to sit with despair or to feel your joy. Even though your situation is completely different, we felt those exact same feelings, about our future, and about our past.
We’ve been here before. Physically here, and emotionally here.
I started thinking about the generations of people who sat on this bench, alone, on an early morning. Perhaps on their last day in town before they left. Kindred spirits.
I started thinking about my heroes who went to Cornell. This bench would have been here when Carl Sagan was here. I imagined him sitting at this bench, looking at the stars, maybe contemplating how to convince NASA to make the Voyager probe use its remaining energy to turn around and take a picture of Earth.
I thought about Richard Feynman. This bench is older than him too. I imagined him sitting at this bench too, alone, thinking about how we dumb things down too much for the layperson, and how we can do better.
I thought about how every single year there are hundreds of people who sit here alone. I thought about the people that haven’t yet made their way up here, but who will.
The inscription on this bench is dated to 132 years ago. I have no idea what this spot is going to look like in 132 years from now. But I hope we’ll leave something behind to remind those who come after, that no matter how amazing or terrible things might be then, either way: this is a damn good spot to think about it.