Centrepiece Online | Summer 2011

Bruce K. Johnson with his fall 1993 group at Stonehenge. John Kinkade ’95 is in the front row, second from left. The two reunited as co-London directors in 2011.

Learning to Be Amazed

It’s expected now that everyone at Centre will study abroad. When you come across someone who hasn’t, you wonder why not? What happened? What were you thinking? It’s part of the culture to study abroad, but still students don’t understand just what they’re getting into.

When I was a student in London, my first journal entry for Bruce K. Johnson’s class was about my surprise at not feeling different. Everyone had told me that going abroad was amazing—it would change my life. But I got to London, and my life was entirely unchanged. I was still so uncertain about so much, still taking such tentative steps, still—and this perhaps surprised me most of all—still growing tired at the end of the day.

As a faculty director in London this spring, I saw that in our students, too. The little things annoy us at first as we miss the comforts of home, and though it’s exciting to be doing something new, it’s hard to know what to think of it. Our students were glad to be there this spring, but it took a couple of weeks before they really began to understand why they were there. You’ve got to learn to be amazed.

When Samuel Johnson left London in 1775 to walk around Scotland, he decided that “the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

Travel breaks up our ingrained ways of thinking and disrupts the mental models of the world that we carry around. That’s not always pleasurable, and it’s invariably exhausting.

I’m writing this in London, on the last day as I prepare to go home. The students have almost all left. Some are back at home; most are on the continent, re-enacting the 18th-century tradition of the grand tour. I love my job at Centre—love it intensely, with frequent wonder, still, that it happened to a goober like me—but I don’t want to go home. There’s too much world undiscovered. There’s too much imagination that’s improperly regulated. There’s too much to see. There’s too much to do.

It’s Centre, isn’t it? One great lesson of the liberal arts is how little, really, you can know given the vast scope of knowledge. But that vastness should encourage humility, not despair; confidence in what you can accomplish rather than regret about all that you can’t.

—John Kinkade ’95, London ’93

Assistant Professor of English