N is for Nave (On the Fire at Notre Dame)

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Prologue
Notre Dame de Paris was one of the first buildings I knew by name.

For this, I surely owe credit to Ludwig Bemelmans’s classic Madeline children’s books about an adventurous young girl who lives in an old, vine-covered house in Paris. Between the picture books, the animated TV series, and the computer games, Madeline was my childhood ambassador to the world outside the United States. Bemelmans’s charming illustrations introduced me to the Seine and its many bridges, Notre Dame, and the omnipresent Eiffel Tower. Paris was one of the first cities I could name, right after my home city of Chicago.


“In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”

Madeline used these landmarks to make a place as distant and ancient as Paris feel familiar to me at age five. I didn’t really know anything about Paris. But I sensed the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Arc de Triomphe were what made the city unique, just as Chicago had the Sears Tower and Navy Pier. I implicitly understood the power of architecture and time to transform steel, concrete, masonry, and glass into an icon able to define and represent a place and its people.

“Notre Dame is Paris; it’s all its history,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told the press on the eve of April 15th, 2019. Earlier that afternoon, a fire broke out in the rafters below the cathedral’s spire, the cause of which is believed to be an accident related to ongoing renovation work. The cathedral’s steep gable roof was framed with massive timber beams, which are very dry and extremely flammable. With so much fuel to burn and a delayed response by church personnel to identify the source of the fire alarm, the blaze quickly grew out of control. Flames ripped through and destroyed the entire roof structure, causing the spire to collapse through the vaulted ceiling and into the sanctuary, leaving behind gaping holes and char marks. Stained glass windows crafted centuries ago were shattered. Hand-carved stone blocks in the vaulted ceiling which were hoisted by pulleys and set by several generations of masons came crumbling to the floor. Mighty oak trees planted in the 8th or 9th century—having grown for over 300 years before being logged, cut, transported, and erected into a frame that would stand for over eight centuries—were reduced to ash in a matter of hours.

Fortunately, no lives were lost in the fire. But the destruction was spectacular, in the very worst sense of the word. Terrible clouds of smoke bellowed from the roof, casting darkness over the Île de la Cité. My mom, fearful the entire structure would imminently collapse, texted me that afternoon to express her gratitude we had the opportunity to see it before it was completely destroyed. Notre Dame was the top trending topic in the world that day, as friends, family, and strangers took to social media to share their memories of the cathedral from vacations and study-abroad programs. It was a period of public grieving for a building that belonged to the world as much as it did to Paris.

I had not known the extent to which I treasure Notre Dame until I had to sit through the rest of that afternoon at work in a haze of worry and grief. I came home that evening and immediately sat down and began scrolling through hundreds of tweets, news stories, and videos of the destruction, exposing myself to its horrors as many times as possible so my brain could build a tolerance to the idea of a world without the Notre Dame I’d known since my childhood. I think this is what we really mean when we say we need to “process” something.

I didn’t add any of my vacation photos to the public grieving, largely because I was left speechless. I couldn’t finish processing this loss until I understood the extent of the destruction. Would forensic experts condemn the building to be razed because it was too unsafe? Or would we soon see a new roof better equipped to resist fire? I didn’t want to underreact nor overreact. (So naturally I chose to spend the next year writing an essay about it, because I’m a swarm of contradictions.)

When I had finally seen enough photos for the night, I realized it would be very easy to put aside the initial shock and sadness and conclude, “Oh well. They’ll fix it eventually.” But that seemed unthinkable while my emotions were still so raw. It felt like one of those tragedies where I’d always remember what I was doing when I first heard the news. I wanted to give myself time to feel that grief rather than allowing it to be buried the next morning by the sands of time.

I soon turned inwards, trying to understand why I, along with the rest of the world, reacted so strongly to this particular tragedy. As I learned more about the fire and the history of the building, I came to see the story of Notre Dame as the story of what it means to be human, standing at the forefront of all the history preceding us and asking: “What is my place in all this?” This is my humble attempt to tell that story and look to the future.

Part I: “Our” Lady
Notre Dame de Paris was born on an island shaped like a cradle, or perhaps like a boat. The Île de la Cité is nestled in the Seine and lies at the geographic heart of Paris. Archeologists believe the plot of land on its eastern end where Notre Dame stands was previously the home of four different basilicas and cathedrals before this one. The creation of Notre Dame began with an act of destruction: around 1160, Bishop Maurice de Sully ordered the demolition of a cathedral dedicated to Saint Étienne[1] to clear the way for a much larger church. Stones from this house of worship were reused to form the foundation of what would become Notre Dame de Paris.

The cornerstone of Notre Dame was set in 1163 and major construction was completed by 1220. But its builders would spend the next 125 years topping out the bell towers, erecting the spire, refining architectural details, and incredibly, demolishing and remodeling the earliest-built parts of the cathedral using better technology. Renovation work on Notre Dame began before they even finished building it.

In a 90-year span around the turn of the 13th century, the French built an astonishing eighty cathedrals. Notre Dame de Paris is hardly the tallest, oldest, or most magnificent. It’s not even the most magnificent cathedral named Notre Dame that was severely damaged in a modern fire. But undoubtedly, it is the most famous church in France, and arguably the world, which is why the fire provoked such a huge global reaction. Why does this particular church earn such widespread recognition?

Simply put, I believe Notre Dame is famous because Paris is famous, and it happens to be the only cathedral[2] in the city. The building itself could just as easily be one of the lesser-known Notre Dames in Chartres, Reims, or Amiens and be renowned all the same. Notre Dame’s fame rides the coattails of Paris’s reputation much more than it can be credited to its own architectural merits. I don’t mean to imply the cathedral isn’t remarkable and majestic—it is both those things and more. But France is overflowing with Gothic majesty. It makes much more sense to say Paris is ten times more visited than Reims than it does to say one cathedral is ten times more beautiful than the other. It’s all about location.

Paris’s reputation as an internationally renowned center of art and culture is owed to the extreme concentration of wealth among the French royals and the Catholic Church, both of whom have centered their power and influence there for centuries. These authorities built grand palaces, churches, and abbeys, which led them to commission and patronize artists to fill these spaces with sculptures, portraits, furniture, and other artwork. Thus, Paris became the home of monasteries, universities, and art academies, which attracted yet more scholars, writers, craftspeople, and artists.

Notre Dame hasn’t always enjoyed the status of a universally beloved national icon. By the end of the French Revolution, it had suffered significant damage from riots, been converted into a temple for the atheistic Cult of Reason, and used as a warehouse to store wine. Even after Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished Catholicism as the majority religion of France, Paris was apt to let Notre Dame decay into ruins until it caught the attention of a young writer named Victor Hugo. Hugo was outraged by the mistreatment and public apathy towards Notre Dame, so he set out to make the case for its beauty and importance. The result was a novel he titled Notre Dame de Paris, better known in the U.S. by its English title, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo, like Ludwig Bemelmans, understood the power of compelling fiction to endear a place to its readers. In fact, he objected to the English title because it detracted from his intended focus of the novel: not the deformed bell-ringer Quasimodo, but the cathedral itself. Hugo’s novel was a hit, successfully garnering enough public interest in Notre Dame to convince King Louis Phillipe to order a restoration in 1844.

Only after its reputation was bolstered by Hugo and its image was made presentable by the ensuing renovation did Notre Dame become the iconic tourist attraction we know today. The long-standing institutions of politics and religion shaped Paris into the capitol of France in every possible sense of the word, endowing it with dozens of monuments, churches, and museums. Notre Dame is well-visited because Paris has every reason to be well-visited. The wealthy and well-connected have always been over-represented in deciding which art and artists matter.

Which brings us to the present-day United States and its frequently myopic view of the world.

Outside France, there is surely no other country where Notre Dame (and more broadly, Paris) is more popular than the United States. American culture and tourism surely played a significant role in turning Notre Dame into a destination visited by 12 million people every year. The U.S. has held strong cultural and political ties to France since the American Revolution. French language and history are commonly taught in American schools. French art and culture have long been romanticized in the U.S., being regularly exhibited in its most prominent concert halls and museums. Paris is one of the most common destinations for American trips abroad. It is no surprise many Americans feel a special connection to Paris (and to a similar extent, London) because of its cultural prominence in the United States. Madeline forged that bond for me when I was young, and she had help from other animated ambassadors targeting my generation. Rugrats in Paris. Ratatouille. The Aristocats. Disney’s adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I think growing up with these movies makes the foreign familiar, helping to create in us a sense of global citizenship and shared international heritage that endures our coming of age.

Establishing shot from Rugrats in Paris. Pretty accurate for a cartoon, though if the Eiffel Tower really appeared that tall from Notre Dame, it would be a preposterously oversized wrought iron monstrosity (more than it already is) and possibly the tallest structure in the world.

All these historical and cultural forces connecting Americans with Paris seem to have done so at the expense of other places in the world being treated as equally important. The fire at Notre Dame garnered more attention in the U.S. than the three historically black churches in Louisiana that were destroyed by an arsonist just a week earlier. Seven months prior, Brazil’s National Museum suffered a catastrophic fire that incinerated 200 years of the nation’s historical treasures as well as artifacts from around the globe. A few years before, ISIS used pickaxes, sledgehammers, and explosives to obliterate countless ancient temples and artifacts across southwest Asia. I didn’t feel the need to spend an entire evening “processing” any of those losses of cultural heritage. I admit this reflects a deeply ingrained cultural bias on my part, one perhaps wrapped up in latent racism.

It’s emotionally difficult to claim personal responsibility for an institutional bias, since the forces that created it had compounded, propagated, and reverberated through the American consciousness decades before my generation was born. But I can’t honestly explain my reaction to the destruction at Notre Dame without acknowledging the influences I inherited, for better or worse.

To be clear, I don’t feel the need to express guilt for the way I reacted to Notre Dame. I don’t think Americans who mourned were being unreasonable for singling out this particular icon, with historic and symbolic value unlike few other structures in the world. Maybe that value was fairly earned, or maybe not. But a close relationship with Europe does not excuse the general American tendency to ignore or undervalue non-European culture and peoples. Francophilia isn’t itself “bad” or “racist.” Lack of empathy for other cultures is. Fortunately, empathy is not a zero sum game.

These social ethics become thornier for me when it comes to the question of philanthropy. If there was any significant backlash in the global reaction to the fire, it was regarding the hundreds of millions of euros immediately pledged by European billionaires and corporations to fund the restoration. If they have this kind of money to fix a single church, why can’t they do something about food insecurity, refugee crises, and the lack of access to reliable healthcare systems around the world? Why don’t they allocate their resources in a way that will reduce the most human suffering? I think those are compelling moral arguments, and I have no good retort except to point out ways in which Notre Dame’s financial situation is complicated.

A 1905 secularism law gave ownership of all cathedrals in France to the state. That means the French government owns Notre Dame and allows the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris to use it permanently for free. France’s Ministry of Culture is responsible for Notre Dame’s maintenance, but the Archdiocese handles day-to-day operations and upkeep.[3] If you find that confusing, so do the French: the exact breakdown of responsibility for managing aging cathedrals is unclear, and it had led to tensions between church and state. A few years ago, Time Magazine ran a rather prescient article reporting on the Archdiocese’s struggle to obtain enough money from the government to repair crumbling stones and replace substandard mortar at Notre Dame. Both of these items are critical to the long-term survival of the cathedral, but the cost far exceeded their annual subsidy for maintenance. The Archdiocese finally admitted the money wasn’t coming, and in 2017 launched an ambitious pledge drive with the goal of raising €100 million over the next 5 to 10 years. Restoration after the fire of 2019 may cost ten times that amount.

That money needs to come from somewhere. It’s simply too large a sum to be raised from within the Archdiocese and from pledge drives in a reasonable amount of time. And it’s widely considered infeasible for the French government to spend hundreds of millions of euros on just one of hundreds of old (and lesser-known) state-owned churches in need of maintenance. Nobody wants to put the French people in the dilemma of having to choose which parts of their cultural heritage are more important than others. Nor do they want to be forced into an equally awful dilemma over whether they can afford to save Notre Dame and still fund the rest of the government.

The amount in question is a small fraction of France’s annual budget, but the nation is not currently in a political position to easily increase federal spending, even for an emergency like this one. At the time of the fire, France was in the midst of months-long protests from the yellow vest movement, a group seeking economic justice on behalf of the working class. These protesters are urging the government to provide higher wages, affordable fuel, a better-funded pension system, reduce France’s soaring rates of homelessness, and for President Emmanuel Macron to reinstate taxes on the wealthy—things that actually affect humans’ well-being. If the government were to fund Notre Dame and ignore the yellow-vesters, it would be giving in to one set of budgetary pressures over another and playing right into that awful dilemma.

Before France could get into a debate over public financing for the emergency repairs, the money had already been pledged by billionaires and corporate donors. The French law enacted to govern the restoration process created a “national subscription” to collect funds and accept donations and payments. Some local government bodies contributed funds, but the law doesn’t appropriate any federal money. As long as wealth is distributed so vastly unequally, one of the better outcomes is for the extraordinarily wealthy to swoop in and foot the bill for culturally important projects like this. Admittedly, this creates a perverse incentive for them to withhold their donations until the project goes in their preferred direction. If and when they do eventually pay up, it would be no different than any other time in history: the wealthy yet again exerting disproportionate influence over which art matters.

As for whether their philanthropy is misprioritized, it is easy to raise awareness for causes that are acute, highly visible, and simple to understand, like a fire at a famous building or aiding hurricane victims in your own country. It is more difficult to raise awareness for, say, the complex relationship between logging, farming, and climate change that led to unprecedented forest fires in the Amazon last August. Even less obvious is how to spend resources effectively to protect people from such ongoing, systemic problems. I can see why it may be tempting for CEOs to throw money at Notre Dame and ride the wave of positive PR, rather than do the hard, quiet work of figuring how and where their money can accomplish the most lasting good. Charity, unlike empathy, isn’t quite a zero sum game. But with billions of euros comes the luxury and the chore of not having to pick and choose causes. Participating in cultural charity shouldn’t give billionaires a pass on their responsibility for humanitarian charity, but neither should that participation be condemned in and of itself.

The yellow vest activists were understandably angered by the outpouring of donations to Notre Dame in the face of their weeks of protests. Having Notre Dame’s economic problems take precedence over theirs was perceived as an insult. But they didn’t go so far as to call for the donations to be returned. Support for the idea that France should give up on Notre Dame, demolish it, and save the money for something else is virtually non-existent. The French have an implicit understanding that leaving Notre Dame in ruins is simply not an option. Rich and poor alike felt grief watching the flames burn a national monument that Monday night.

Notre Dame could not have been built and maintained over the centuries without deep imbalances of power and wealth. The economic systems that created and preserved it may be cold, indifferent, and unfair. But what endures is an act of good will for all: a grand work of art that stands at the heart of one of the world’s great cities, existing only to stir the hearts and minds of believers and non-believers alike, its beauty given away for free. A building is always more than just a building. Notre Dame transcending the value of its materials to become a symbol means nobody, not even the French state, can truly own it. And that means we all own it.

After all, notre dame means “our lady.”

 

Part II: Whose Lady?
In the days following the fire, French President (and non-building expert) Emmanuel Macron promised the cathedral would be rebuilt “more beautifully than before,” setting an impossibly ambitious goal of completing the work before Paris hosts the 2024 Olympics. (Experts estimate it will take at least twice as long.) I imagine most people assumed the building would be restored to appear exactly as it did before the fire. But soon after Macron’s statement, Prime Minister (and non-building expert) Édouard Philippe announced an international design competition for a new roof and spire, kicking off a debate on what the future of the building ought to look like.

To dramatically oversimplify: on one side are the purists, who want to see a restoration as close as practicable to the original design, but with modern building techniques and materials to protect from future fires and corrosion. High-resolution 3D scans of the entire building exist, enabling precise recreations if that’s eventually the direction chosen. Opposite the purists are the architectural provocateurs who proposed ludicrously unconstructable designs to incite debate about what it means to restore a medieval building. Somewhere in-between are the ambitious architects who genuinely believe they deserve the privilege to stamp their name on a bold reimagining of centuries-old cultural heritage. Naturally, the ambitious architects called the purists a bunch of snobs afraid of change and innovation, and the purists called all the new proposals a pile of hubristic lunacy by artists with no understanding of the laws of physics.

No real consensus formed around any of the proposals, but I think the broader conversation about restoration is worth exploring because it asks us to consider what a cathedral actually is.

For example, let’s take one big question that needs to be answered: what should be done to replace the spire? I had assumed the spire lost in the blaze was part of the building’s original construction, but I was totally wrong. The original spire was built around 1250 and dismantled around 1787 after it became unstable in the wind. The spire destroyed in 2019 was designed and built by architect Eugène Viollet-Le-Duc in the 1860s as a replacement. I had no idea this wasn’t the first time Notre Dame needed a new spire. I was initially strongly in favor of a faithful and exact recreation, but gaining more historical context complicated the way I thought about these new proposals.

Viollet-Le-Duc and Jean-Baptiste Lassus were the chief architects for the 19-year-long project (1845-1864) to restore Notre Dame after Victor Hugo rallied public support for its repair. In addition to the new spire, the restoration involved a nearly complete rebuilding of the sacristy, repair of the great organ, and the replacement of many panes of stained glass on the western rose window. Perhaps most visible to tourists, Viollet-Le-Duc is credited with leading the effort to restore nearly every statue on the main façade. Photos and drawings prior to the restoration work show a barren front elevation bereft of gargoyles[4] between the bell towers, without the 28 Kings of Judah over the three entry portals, and missing or damaged sculptures within the portals and near the doorways. Viollet-Le-Duc and his team of sculptors referenced old drawings, archives, and similar sculptures at nearby churches to decide how to replace all this missing stone artwork. The gargoyles looking out over Point Zero today are of his design.


Left: West end before 1841. Right: West end in 2018 (photo by me). Look how much was missing!

Viollet-Le-Duc reinvented Notre Dame to such a degree that some historians consider it a 19th-century building as much as it is a 12th-century building. Generations of architects, masons, sculptors, craftspeople, church officials, and politicians have made their mark on Notre Dame, collectively and cumulatively steering it through centuries of history. The purists who want Notre Dame to be restored exactly as it was have valid concerns about preserving the Gothic nature of the cathedral, but I think they need to be honest about what exactly they are arguing to protect. The notion that Notre Dame de Paris is—or ever was—a singular work of architecture conceived at a singular time that should look a singular way is an absolute fiction. Even as it was being built, the project was led by different master builders over the 200 year construction process, each with their own ideas and technological innovations. Parts of it were demolished and renovated before the building was even completed. There is no unified, canonical, specific vision of Notre Dame to be preserved and respected. In fact, this is exactly the kind of thinking the roof design competition proposals seek to challenge. “Viollet-Le-Duc got to put his mark on this timeless masterpiece. What makes me any less worthy to design a new spire?” these architects ask. “Why does his vision deserve to be recreated without considering any new ideas?” Though I don’t care for their proposals, they’re right to ask this question. Viollet-Le-Duc was just one of many who recognized change is inevitable and happened to be in the position to steer the ship in his preferred direction. His is not necessarily the final word.

Most renderings of the new roof proposals are jarring to me because even to my non-expert eyes, the new material choices, geometric shapes, and architectural styles are so blatantly in contrast with the original Gothic design. But even Viollet-Le-Duc wasn’t immune to this criticism. To historians and Gothic architecture experts, his additions—especially his spiky, ornamented spire—were somewhat overzealous and more decorative than befits a Gothic cathedral. Mitchell Owens, writing for Architectural Digest, calls his designs a “pastichery” of the original style.

I would venture a guess most observers today (including me) lack the knowledge and historical context to appreciate the distinctions to that degree. But so many of the new proposals—even the serious ones—are such radical, polarizing departures from the Gothic style. Nobody seems to be offering a middle ground between a strict reproduction of Viollet-Le-Duc and a complete abandonment of the style that will appear obviously dissonant to the architecturally clueless even centuries from now.

On July 29th, 2019, the French government officially enacted a law declaring the restoration of Notre Dame must “preserve the historic, artistic and architectural interest of the monument.” This was a departure from an earlier version of the bill passed by the French Senate requiring the cathedral to be restored exactly as it was, suggesting the legislature didn’t want to be involved in making creative decisions. It’s uncertain whether this law effectively brings Prime Minister Édouard Phillipe’s design competition to an end.[5] Legally, I don’t think this clause has a clear meaning at all, which leaves the future of the cathedral’s architecture an open question. Nobody is quite sure what will happen when the building is finally cleaned up, stabilized, and ready for new construction.

We find ourselves at a turning point in history where we must make a choice about what our generation will contribute to Notre Dame. What we decide now may have rippling impacts on future restorations as other aging cathedrals crumble and are subjected to the harsh realities of a warming climate. There is no restoration project in the world more visible than this one. Will we allow the new spire to become a vanity project for an architect more concerned about their own legacy than that of Notre Dame? Or will we stick with what works and copy Viollet-Le-Duc? Will we use this opportunity to create something new and inspiring, or tarnish something old? Future generations will judge us for how we answer these questions.

Nineteenth-century writer and preservationist Prosper Mérimée cautioned Viollet-Le-Duc, “A restoration may be more disastrous for a monument than the ravages of centuries.” Whatever path we take, we must be careful not to further add to the disaster with thoughtless alterations.

 

Part III: The Ship of Theseus
There’s this famous thought experiment in philosophy called The Ship of Theseus. It goes like this: suppose the warship sailed by the ancient Greek hero Theseus is brought home from battle and put on display. Over time, the wooden beams and planks begin to rot and are replaced one by one with new wood, until eventually none of the original pieces remain. Is that ship still the Ship of Theseus? If not, at what point did it cease to be the “original” ship?

I’m sure you can see the parallels to building restoration. How many original shingles, spires, sculptures, stones, and stained glass windows can be replaced before we must ask: is this building still Notre Dame? Would it still be Notre Dame if the bell towers burned down and the roof were replaced with sleek, curved glass? Would it still be Notre Dame if the walls were somehow reinforced with steel and the iconic flying buttresses were demolished because they were no longer necessary?

Victor Hugo had particularly strong opinions on whether replacing elements of Notre Dame was actually contributing to its destruction. In the vein of Prosper Mérimée, he described disagreeable renovations to the cathedral as nothing less than “vandalism,” a term itself named for the Vandals who destroyed buildings in their ransacking of Rome. Hugo’s 1831 edition of Notre Dame de Paris begins with an interesting anecdote from his explorations of the cathedral. He once came upon the Greek word for “fate” carved into the stone in one of the bell towers, most likely by a medieval scribe. Hugo was struck by this—he pondered what kind of anguish would inspire a person to spend no short amount of time chiseling this message. When he later returned to the tower, the marking had been scraped and plastered over, erasing the human experience recorded into that wall. Hugo presents this incident as representative of the carelessness and apathy with which architects and clergy members in his day treated medieval churches like Notre Dame. He feared eventually the entire cathedral would be scraped and plastered over until nothing remained. I find it fascinating and extremely telling that Hugo sees the defacement of a wall with graffiti as meaningful and architectural modifications sanctioned by church and state as vandalism. To Hugo, The Ship of Theseus after all the planks have been replaced is a zombie ship, taking the form of the original but retaining none of the humanity carved into it.

A man of many interests, Hugo notoriously spent entire chapters of his lengthy novels going on tangents about society, history, the intricacies of the Paris sewer system, and whatever else suited his fancy. (Seems like my kind of writer, really.) In the middle of Notre Dame de Paris, Hugo pauses from the story to expound on a phrase spoken by his villainous archdeacon Frollo: “The book will kill the edifice.”

Hugo argues that from the beginning of civilization, humans have expressed the dominant ideas of their time and culture through architecture. Without widespread literacy and an efficient medium to promulgate language, the symbolic, durable form of the edifice was a way for “the genius scatted among the masses” to unite their crafts and produce the “prodigious result of the union of all the resources of an epoch.” Hugo seems to have revered the cathedral as the pinnacle of architectural achievement, and by extension, all human artistic endeavors.

Human expression was forever changed with the invention of the printing press, which Hugo calls “the greatest event of history.” “Under the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever,” he writes. “Durability has been exchanged for immortality. One can demolish substance, but how extirpate ubiquity?” The printed word offers human thought a purer, longer-lasting medium able to preserve it over the centuries with the power of duplication and cultural memory. With such a simple and inexpensive alternative, architecture no longer had a reason to remain the singular, collective mode of societal expression. The days where France would begin constructing eighty cathedrals within a few decades came to an end.

I think Hugo wants us to conclude Notre Dame de Paris represents 12th-century France’s single most important message to the present, rendered in a form never again to be replicated. That made it all the more important to Hugo for his country to respectfully and urgently protect those medieval voices, lest they fall silent forever.

Obviously, writing remains the dominant mode of transmitting ideas in the 21st century, advanced by the internet in ways we’ve hardly begun to understand. But cultures continue to express their ideas and values through architecture. In fact, you can tell a lot about societal change in France by examining how Notre Dame has been modified over the centuries. The book may have killed the edifice, but to lose Notre Dame is to lose a library.

Before the French Revolution, the kings of France did as they pleased with Notre Dame. Occasionally a king would decide to demolish the raised area where the clergy sits in front of the altar (known as the choir) and replace it with something completely different. In the late 17th century, Gothic architecture had fallen out of style. King Louis XIV, carrying out the wishes of his father, ordered an extensive remodeling of the choir and commissioned a new high altar to reshape the cathedral in line with the tastes du jour. Neoclassical rectangular pillars, clad in marble, were formed around (or in front of) the original stone columns. Semicircular arches in a similar style connected the new pillars together. If you’ve ever visited the Louvre, right around the corner from the Mona Lisa is this Louis David painting of Napoleon’s 1804 coronation at Notre Dame de Paris:

I remember stopping at this piece to think, “Wait a minute, that’s not Notre Dame! It doesn’t look anything like that!” The transformation was so complete I genuinely questioned the accuracy of the painting. I thought it must have been creative interpretation, or my own misunderstanding of which church this was. But Notre Dame really did look like this for over a century. Other pieces of artwork and engravings of the coronation show this same style of pillars and arches. The power of the monarchy to authorize changes was so absolute that the choir was rendered unrecognizable to eyes both modern and medieval.

This wasn’t the only attempt to cover up Gothic features around the early 18th century. While the choir was undergoing this renovation, the headstones of about a dozen French royals and Parisian archbishops were removed from the floor and replaced by the same drab checkered marble tiles that exist today. Tapestries were hung over the pointed arches lining the aisles, cloaking the original stonework. The cathedral was deemed too dark, so the walls were whitewashed, obscuring the natural color of what stone was left visible. To let in even more light, the last remaining 12th-century stained glass windows behind the choir were demolished and replaced with clear white windows. Today, the only remaining medieval glass is in the rose windows, which are very fortunate to have survived the fire.

Perhaps the most egregious change of this era was architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s partial destruction of the Last Judgement Portal over the central door of the main entrance. This sculpture illustrates the scene of Christ sitting on the throne on Judgement Day[6], saints rising from their graves, and some unfortunate sinners being chained by a demon. It’s remarkably detailed, rich in theology and symbolism, and anyone off the street is free to walk up and examine it as closely as I did in this photo.

The original portal and doorway below committed the crime of being mildly inconvenient for church processions in the 18th century. A pillar featuring a statue of Jesus divided the doorway into two panels, making it awkward to file in in large numbers. The doors also weren’t quite tall enough for the tent canopy carried over the Sacraments of Holy Communion to be brought into the church. The Archdiocese’s response to this problem could easily have been to change the way the clergy processed in at the beginning of Mass. Instead, they employed Soufflot to remove the pillar and carve out parts of the intricate 12th-century sculptures above the doorway to make the door opening taller. I almost didn’t believe this one either. But go back to Part II and look at the photo of Notre Dame from before 1841: sure enough, the central door is taller with an arch on top. Thankfully, Viollet-le-Duc recreated what was lost during his restoration work.

To destroy hundreds of years of history to make room for a processional tent is beyond unthinkable today. This is how little 17-18th century Catholics regarded Gothic artwork. The Church saw itself as the guardian of Christ’s eternal kingdom and the heart of French society. They believed their power and traditions were handed to them by God’s own self, making their ways beyond reproach or compromise. Notre Dame to them wasn’t a timeless monument, but a fleeting sandcastle, easily shapeable to serve their liturgical whims. They cut and plastered with no regard for preserving the humanity written into its history.

I keep wondering how much more emotionally affecting the Louis David painting of Napoleon’s coronation would be if it depicted Notre Dame exactly as we know it today. Wouldn’t that be such a great example of architecture bearing witness to history? We owe it to our descendants to consider these interruptions to the continuity of centuries-old public art when we decide to change them to fit contemporary trends.

Contempt for the cathedral continued after the French monarchy was deposed, Catholicism was outlawed, and new institutions came to dictate the look of Notre Dame. Remember those 28 Kings of Israel over the portals? The revolutionaries famously mistook them as a symbol of the French monarchy and had them beheaded—or at least that’s how the story is commonly told. I’ve always (perhaps naïvely) pictured a small gang of young anarchists scaling the walls with ropes and hammers to commit this destructive act in the dead of night. But this incredibly thorough French history blog cites sources claiming the Paris Commune actually solicited and paid contractors to erect 50-foot-high scaffolding in front of the cathedral and dismantle the statues over the course of several weeks. The idea of slow and deliberate vandalism is so bizarre from our modern perspective that it is literally a Monty Python joke. But that was reality in the French Revolution: anti-religious, anti-monarchical sentiment had taken such a hold among those in power that vandalism and iconoclasm was a government-paid job.

Since the restorations by Viollet-le-Duc in the mid-19th century, Notre Dame has retained more or less the same appearance. In fact, it looks more medieval than it did during the days of the monarchy: in one of the last major aesthetic alterations, the sterile white glass was replaced with colorful stained glass in the early 20th century. This restraint speaks volumes about how successfully Victor Hugo made the case that Gothic architecture is beautiful and worth preserving. Widespread destruction across Europe during the World Wars also left an indelible mark in the public consciousness about the vulnerability of their societies and monuments. The newly-formed United Nations created UNESCO, an organization tasked with identifying and protecting cultural treasures like cathedrals. Historical preservation was elevated into the world of codified laws and certified experts. In recent decades, the values we chose to write into Notre Dame came through our decisions not to change it.

This makes the question of what to do with Notre Dame’s roof and spire all the more meaningful. It would be consistent with the last century of practice to create a faithful facsimile of what was destroyed. But it would be inconsistent with the entire nine-hundred-year history of Notre Dame to refrain from casting our modern design ideas in with those from different eras.

In the same Architectural Digest piece I mentioned earlier, Mitchell Owens seeks a compromise, calling for the restoration committees to continue the legacy of modest reinvention and replace what was lost “with 21st-century Gothic statements in the same way that Viollet-le-Duc created his own Gothic vocabulary in the mid-19th century.” I’ve come to believe this is the most fitting and honest way to go about renovating Notre Dame, a church built on foundations literally made from the church that stood there before it. I am optimistic this is a direction laypeople and architects will broadly agree “preserves the historic, artistic and architectural interest” of the cathedral. We should learn from the mistakes of the past and not radically alter a historic monument just because we can. But we shouldn’t let our fear of change and idolization of the past prevent us from taking this opportunity to participate in the ongoing artistic dialogue that is inextricably part of Notre Dame.

There’s a Japanese art called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired and gold or silver-powdered lacquer is spread over the cracks, highlighting the fractures rather than concealing them. Behind kintsugi is a philosophy acknowledging damage and brokenness as an important and even beautiful part of the object’s history. France’s tumultuous history is written into Notre Dame through cycles of vandalism, renovation, and repairs. In a perfect world, Notre Dame would be as pristine and untouched as it was the day it was completed in 1325. But in a world with vanity, mistakes, and willful destruction, it is our choice whether to see the repairs and renovations as features of Notre Dame rather than blemishes, features which more fully acknowledge the humanity in how the building came to be. Looking at the cathedral as a perfect monolith does a disservice to its history.

The Ship of Theseus is such a classic thought experiment because it is simple, and yet manages to propose so many interesting, unanswerable, and totally fundamental questions about the relationship between identity, material, and time.

Is Notre Dame a collection of specific stones, glass, and lead?
Yes. But not entirely.
Or is Notre Dame a symbol, an aggregation of the stories and memories we share about those materials?
Also yes. But still not entirely.
But isn’t Notre Dame also the story of how some of those materials fell away and were replaced by others?
Still yes. But not entirely. A building is always more than just a building.

The wonderful mystery about interpreting art is that there are so many right answers. Part of Notre Dame was lost when it burned. And in a different sense, something will also be lost when new pieces replace the lost ones. But I choose to believe its brokenness enriches its story and bestows upon it more beauty, even if it is not the kind visible to the eye.

 

Part IV: Symphony in Stone
The Ship of Theseus isn’t the only way in which Notre Dame is like a ship.

Notre Dame’s floor plan takes the shape of a cross, as is typical for European Gothic cathedrals (and neo-Gothic churches around the world). The “arms” of the cross are called the transepts, and the place where the two “boards” of the cross meet is known as the crossing (or, to a certain audience, “The Literal Heart of Jesus”). The spire is built over the crossing. The congregation sits in the main aisle in the center of the building, called the nave, and the clergy sits up front in the choir.

If you stand in the nave of Notre Dame and look up, you’ll see the bays of the vaulted ceiling forming a long hall covered by a roof arched and ribbed like the hull of a ship:

So why is it called the “nave?” Because it comes from the Latin word navis, meaning “ship.” It’s where we get the words “navy” and “navigation.”

The Christian church has adopted ship imagery and symbolism from its earliest years, thanks in part to the abundance of stories involving water and nautical life in the Bible. Humanity is delivered from extinction in The Great Flood on Noah’s ark. The same Hebrew word for ark (tebah) is used to describe the floating cradle Moses’ mother placed him in as a baby to send him down the Nile to escape persecution. Jesus calms a dangerous storm while he and his disciples are out sailing on the Sea of Galilee to demonstrate his total ability to protect his faithful followers. Perhaps it is with this history in mind the Church itself came to be described as a ship, one under the protective captaining of a Triune God, steering its passengers toward Heaven.

Historians and etymologists are unsure if the nave got its name as a nod to these larger theological and scriptural themes, or simply because it happens to resemble a boat. I doubt church builders intended any symbolic meaning when they chose the forms of their roofs. A cross-shaped floor plan may be intentional, but the arched roof was born of structural necessity. An arch experiences only compressive stresses, which suits the brittle stone materials available to medieval builders. Stone, like unreinforced concrete, is weak in tension and therefore has limited ability to span horizontally as a beam before it cracks. Arched roofs were the only practical way medieval builders could have made spaces this large.

Proposal by Won C Kim. Inspired by Noah’s Ark, this design would see the original spire restored and a greenhouse installed in place of the previous roof.

I had the privilege of visiting Notre Dame de Paris in May of 2018, a little less than a year before the fire would force it to close indefinitely. At the time, it was the oldest building I’d ever visited, and I felt that as soon as I set foot inside.

(Tangentially and curiously related: the oldest building I’d ever visited before Notre Dame was a different French Gothic church named for Saint Joan of Arc. It was originally built in France around 1420. Centuries later it attracted the whims of a wealthy railroad tycoon who had the building dismantled, moved across the Atlantic Ocean, and reassembled in Long Island, New York in 1927.[7] If that isn’t enough of a real-life Ship of Theseus scenario, in 1965 it was dismantled again and reassembled on Marquette University’s campus in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I visited it in 2009. So now I’m asking myself…how old was that building really when I set foot inside?)

I could try to describe the architecture I saw when I stepped inside Notre Dame. I could try to capture the way the light streaming in from the high clerestory windows reflected across the nave’s ceiling in beautiful blues and greens. I could try to conjure words for its column capitals and the stained glass and the ornamentation of its dozens of side chapels. But I don’t have the architectural knowledge to have really appreciated what I was looking at. What really spoke to me was the fact that it was very, very old.

In Chicago, we’d call anything that survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 “old,” which amounts to only seven buildings. So I found it absolutely mind-boggling to enter a grand, functioning, well-lit building that had stood there for 850 years. I couldn’t help but to look at it as a feat of engineering. I looked at the stone columns and thought about how the equation we use to predict the load columns will carry before they buckle wouldn’t be developed for another 400 years after Notre Dame was completed. I marveled at how the builders devised the clear, logical load path of the cathedral’s structural system and innovated the use of flying buttresses 350 years before Newton would codify the laws of motion and vector analysis that are the backbone of how engineers think about structures today. The builders had no statistical understanding of the strength of their stone blocks, if they did any testing at all. Notre Dame was not “designed” in the way modern engineers use the term, with rational analysis, calculations, and factors of safety. Instead it was designed by rules of thumb, the knowledge of generations of trial and error, and experienced master builders intuiting the geometric path forces take through the structure. And that was enough. I was standing in an intricate, cavernous space that survived nearly nine centuries of wind, earthquakes, political unrest, destructive vandals, German bombs, and poor maintenance, and it was built on educated guesses.[8] The architecture was pretty, but that fact blew me away.

While all this was weighing on my mind, I realized people were filing in and taking seats for an evening Mass that was about to begin. In my jet-lagged state of affairs, it hadn’t occurred to me today was Sunday and Notre Dame de Paris was an active Catholic parish which would be celebrating Mass that evening. The central nave was roped off, which herded us tourists into the side aisles and transepts, out of the way of the service. There were easily twice as many tourists than actual members of the congregation. I felt somewhat uncomfortable lining up to watch these people go to church, as if they were some kind of zoo animals behind glass. I would be mortified if scores of foreigners were to gather and watch me engage in personal acts of devotion and song. But that is hard to imagine; the church building I attended in college used to be a CVS Pharmacy, so pretty much any church is something of a tourist attraction for me.

It is unmistakable how Mass at Notre Dame de Paris begins: with a prelude on the great organ. The prelude started with soft, airy tones and soothing melodies. It barely registered as I continued to walk around and look at all the artwork. Eventually the organist built up the intensity, literally pulling out all the stops to create these absolutely howling, thunderous, dissonant chords. I genuinely feared stones might collapse in response. The music now had my full attention. I turned towards the crossing at the center of the church to wait for whatever was about to happen next. The organist ventured back into consonance and played the cues for the beginning of the entrance hymn, at which point the congregation began to sing as one:

Laudate Dominum! Laudate Dominum!
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!

Of course I stole a missalette from the front of the church. It had music printed on it!

I’d heard enough liturgical music sung in Latin to have known this translates to something like Praise to You, God! All people! Alleluia! But I think the hymn loses much of its charm translated into English. Latin may be a “dead language,” yet there I was in France and this hymn was the most I’d understood the French since arriving there. Latin is something of a liturgical lingua franca for Christians around the world. There is something rather Ship-of-Theseus-like in how the Church persists in its traditions and texts passed down from the faithful centuries ago, even if the language is no longer native or convenient among the current set of participants. For me, Latin keeps church music “extraordinary,” or “holy,” or otherwise unlike anything else in my secular life. (Except, I suppose, researching etymologies.)

The melody these words were set to was captivating. It sounded ancient and mysterious. It has unexpected harmonic shifts and colors (that F# adding a touch of brightness on only the fifth note!) and yet was so repetitive and simple, I memorized it after hearing it only twice. I remember standing in the cathedral lamenting how rarely I had the opportunity to sing ancient-sounding chants like this back when I was a person who regularly attended Mass and felt so invested in the beauty of liturgical music.

Eighteen months after my visit, I typed these Latin words into Google so I could fact check my translation. What I eventually found—buried in a YouTube comment section of all places—were two facts I found astonishing:

  1. This hymn was written not centuries ago, but in 1980 for the Taizé Community. Def Leppard is older than this hymn.
  2. Except actually, the basic shape of Laudate Dominum’s harmony and melody dates back to the 16th century and is considered one of the oldest chord progressions in the entire European tradition.

It turns out this hymn is based on a theme known as the Folia, which was basically the classical music world’s version of modern songwriters constantly borrowing from Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Scores of famous composers (pun intended) have incorporated the Folia into their work—J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Vivaldi among them. In 1980, an organist named Jacques Berthier joined their ranks (pun also intended) when he set a verse from Psalm 117 to the melody of the Folia for this Taizé chant. The Taizé Community is a non-denominational monastery in east-central France. They are known around the world for their worship style of short, repetitive hymns that are intended to be memorized easily and allow the participants to focus on prayerful contemplation. Although this background was unbeknownst to me as I stood listening in Notre Dame, this is exactly the effect it had on me.

Laudate Dominum!
I’m standing in a centuries-old space singing centuries-old words.
Laudate Dominum!
French Catholics hundreds of years before me may have bounced these exact words off these exact walls.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Repetitive and unchanging as it is, isn’t it remarkable that you can walk into a Catholic church on any continent and understand what’s happening because the structure of the Mass is universal?
Laudate Dominum!
Like the buildings that outlast us, language too can be a bridge to centuries and cultures past.
Laudate Dominum!
How lucky are the few hundred people who live close enough that they can come to church here every Sunday?
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Would I still go to church if I could come to a place as magnificent as this?
Laudate Dominum!
Did my relationship with God depend too much on my ability to appreciate church aesthetics rather than spiritual substance?
Laudate Dominum!
And yet, wasn’t this whole incredible building erected painstakingly, brick by brick, to inspire believers?
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
Imagine the act of indomitable faith it must have taken to work on this building.
Laudate Dominum!
The masons who started the building all died before they had the chance to see it finished.
Laudate Dominum!
So did their children. And perhaps their grandchildren. This building was their legacy. We may not know their names, but we will remember their work.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
This edifice predates the printing press and the Reformation which brought Scripture to the masses. It is likely most of the laborers who built this church neither read the Bible nor spoke Latin.
Laudate Dominum!
And yet these craftspeople dedicated their lives to setting stone on stone with the hope that one day, long after they return to dust, people will see it towering over Paris and look up to the heavens. The mere existence of this building is an ongoing act of worship.
Laudate Dominum!
They built this cathedral for God. But they also built it to inspire me. I am so profoundly lucky to be alive right now.
Omnes gentes! Alleluia!
We are all so lucky to be alive right now.

I fell out of this state of contemplation to wipe tears from my eyes from three Laudates ago.

I wouldn’t call this a spiritual experience, nor a prayerful one. But the ever-changing ship of Notre Dame undeniably transported me from its nave to somewhere else. I was singing a 40-year-old hymn with a 500-year history of being remixed in a 2500-year-old language that unites the 2000-year-old Christian world while standing in an 850-year-old nave crafted, reshaped, and preserved by generations of artisans. I was standing feet away from where kings and emperors were coronated and wed, from where the tides of revolution began to sweep Europe towards democracy, and from the pews where centuries of faithful worshippers sang their hopes and fears to the heavens.

I saw myself standing at the front of a line running through all this, back to the day in 1163 when the cornerstone of this building was set. And rather than feeling small and insignificant in the face of it, I felt this was where I belonged. Notre Dame de Paris was one of the first buildings I knew by name—and now my tiny, singular moment there was part of its history. It was an experience of interconnectedness across time and culture which cannot be done justice with words. It was watching my hometown sail past as my flight turned around for a landing at O’Hare. It was standing in the United Center joining 20,000 Blackhawks fans yelling and cheering over the Star Spangled Banner.[9] It was a feeling bigger than the French people, class divides, Catholicism, or even Christianity, yet small enough to penetrate the cracks between my doubts, struggles, and apathy and reach me in a way no other nave in the world ever did or ever could.

It was the building even more than the Taizé music that spoke to me. Victor Hugo called Notre Dame “a vast symphony in stone.” That Sunday, I heard the stones cry out in song. Sometimes I can still hear them echoing.

 

Epilogue
Notre Dame de Paris was born on an island shaped like a cradle, or perhaps like a boat—the two most fitting symbols to represent its entire history of birth, destruction, and rebirth. To the infant Moses, the two were one and the same; all that mattered was whether his vessel could carry him across the waters. Whatever the future holds for Notre Dame, I want it to keep carrying people across the waters. I want people to feel their place in history when they step inside. And I want those with the privilege of steering Notre Dame through time to make choices enabling those things to happen, not hinder them.

Building materials are only one answer to what makes the Ship of Theseus the Ship of Theseus. Ultimately, what matters to me is the continuity of the building—the narrative attached to the materials that at any given moment comprise Notre Dame. It is appropriate the noun “building” is the same word we use for the process of creating one, even after it is supposedly finished. The original architecture plays an important role in maintaining that continuity, but I don’t think the meaning of the building begins and ends with it. The true value of a cathedral is measured in stories told, photos shared, memories made, lives enriched. Notre Dame becomes more precious every year it ages and gifts millions more people with experiences like mine.

The last morning my family was in Paris, I got up earlier than my parents to spend my last few hours in the city venturing out alone. I chose to spend that time climbing the stairs to the bell towers at Notre Dame. Unbeknownst to me, I would return with some of the very last tourist photos ever taken of the roof before it was destroyed. As I stood between the belfries looking at the doomed spire, I remember thinking to myself with such certainty, “I’ll be back here one day to see the rest of the cathedral. If I only had more time.”

Even on an unforgettable two-week trip abroad, it is so difficult to fully appreciate in the moment a sight or an experience for the gift it is. Every day, there is some risk I will wake up to the news that Notre Dame suffered a catastrophic collapse and was completely destroyed. The tragedy of the fire at Notre Dame is the crushing reminder that even great cathedrals, like us, are beautiful, ephemeral containers of multitudes never to be taken for granted.

I find comfort in this uncertainty by reminding myself the very form of its structure is a symbol of both deliverance from danger and constant reinvention—a ship with oars in the form of flying buttresses, literally balancing the vessel and keeping it upright. Notre Dame is a living, breathing reminder that what is struck down can be raised anew, transfigured and transformed. This message of hope and renewal is preached by its walls and its bishops, played on its great organ, sung by its people, and carried in the hearts of those who come to seek passage on this great ship. May we all have the opportunity to witness its next voyage.

 

Further Reading:

Notre Dame History

Repair Efforts and Structural Risks to Notre Dame

Destruction of Cultural Heritage

Design Competition

Reporting on the Fire

Miscellaneous

Weird Tangents That Never Made It Into The Piece

Footnotes:

[1] That’s St. Stephen for Anglophones.

[2]I always figured “cathedral” and “Catholic” would have related etymologies in some way, but “cathedral” actually comes from the Latin word cathedra, meaning “seat.” Specifically, a cathedral is the church where the bishop of a particular diocese holds his seat and presides over Mass. It’s a church hierarchy term, not an architectural category. A cathedral doesn’t necessarily have to be huge, made of stone, and feature bell towers and flying buttresses. Nor is such a majestic building necessarily a cathedral.

[3] The Vatican, though it holds vast wealth, has no financial stake in the building and has remained mostly uninvolved in the repairs.

[4] My favorite fact that didn’t make it into this piece is the etymology of gargoyle, which comes from the old French word gargouille, meaning “throat,” and is related to the Greek gargarizein, meaning to gargle. It’s not a scary Gothic word to describe a monster, but a word to describe its function: to send water off from a roof through the mouth of a grotesque creature.

[5] It’s also unclear to me whether the design competition ever formally existed in the first place. I couldn’t find any reporting on its rules, deadlines, or criteria.

[6] This happens to be a very common scene for central portal tympanums around France and the world. The one at Amiens is practically identical.

[7] I’m not sure if this was legal, but the practice of exporting French buildings outside the country was banned shortly thereafter.

[8] Of course, their guesses were extremely conservative, leading to an exceptionally heavy, overdesigned building.

[9] Organs are yet another way sports arenas are quite like cathedrals.

(Re)crossing The Break

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About three weeks ago, I began my first serious effort at learning the clarinet, and it gave me an entirely new appreciation for what it means to be a student of music. And by that, I mean the clarinet kicked my butt and reminded me what it means to completely suck. But I wasn’t discouraged: I found a way to look at my failures and actually be quite inspired. It was a whole experience.

Some context: saxophone is my primary instrument. Most sax players who come up through their elementary school band program start on clarinet in 5th grade and transition to alto saxophone by 7th grade. I’m a third-generation saxophone player, so my dad already had an alto at home when I started band. With some parental meddling, I was able to skip clarinet altogether and get a head start on the sax. I was told it’s easier for students to start on clarinet and move to saxophone later. But having never picked up a clarinet myself, I always accepted this conventional wisdom without questioning why nobody ever does this in reverse. That is, not until now, SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, when I needed to record the simple melody of Silent Night on clarinet for this year’s Christmas arrangement.

You see, saxophone is the easiest wind instrument in the whole concert band to learn. You basically just blow into it, and if you wiggle your fingers the right way, it plays the right notes. Unlike the flute or clarinet, the keys are quite big, so it doesn’t matter if you have small or large fingers. The upper register of the sax is played identically to the lower register, except you add the octave key with your left thumb. That’s pretty much it. I mean, actually developing a good tone requires years of practice, but it takes relatively little effort for a beginner to successfully navigate around the full range of the instrument.

Meanwhile, a brand new clarinetist could spend weeks or months practicing their instrument and still have trouble playing smoothly above a middle A. The clarinet has a nasty design quirk fittingly named “the break” (I assume because it breaks your spirit to continue playing the clarinet). On one side of the break, Middle A is played with all but one of the holes in the clarinet wide open, so the air escapes at the top of the instrument. On the other side of the break is the B above, where you need to use nine fingers to close virtually every hole and force air out of the bell all the way the bottom. It’s very awkward to go from all open to all closed. It’s easy to misplace your fingers. And your air instantaneously must travel much farther, so you need to support your playing with a lot of it or you might not make any sound at all. Worse yet, you could accidentally hit a really high harmonic and produce a horrible squealing, honking noise. Crossing the break is a big deal. It needs a lot of attention and practice. I estimate it’s the number one reason why a beginning clarinet player and an angry goose sound virtually indistinguishable. I was totally unprepared to struggle this much.

When I first started clarinet last month, I did so having completely forgotten how hard it is to learn an instrument you can actually play written music on. I spend a lot of time on piano and I know some guitar and ukulele chords, but actually playing written parts on those instruments would be a painstaking note-by-note process because I’ve never really practiced that skill. It took barely ten minutes of attempting to play written clarinet music for me to finally understand why music teachers start their sax players on clarinet: if they all started on saxophone, none of them would want to leave it behind for something so much more difficult.

I realized I wouldn’t be able to learn Silent Night from a fingering chart the way I learned Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here on my acoustic guitar by looking at a few chord diagrams. I needed to learn how all the notes on the clarinet fit together and how one register transitions to another in order to make any meaningful progress. In other words, this wasn’t a “fake it till you make it” situation. I actually needed to sit down and learn the clarinet properly. So I did exactly what worked the last time: I found a copy of the clarinet edition of the 5th grade band book I used back in 2002 and opened it up to page 1.

That’s how I found myself in the absurd position of hitting pause on working out 4-part voicings for my jazz reharmonization of Silent Night so I could practice Hot Cross Buns. My 5th grade band book does a good job of introducing new notes one at a time so you can build your range without getting overwhelmed by memorizing dozens of note fingerings. Obviously, knowing which holes and keys to press on the clarinet is a big piece of the puzzle. But I also found myself asking really basic questions I haven’t had to think about in years. At what angle am I supposed to hold this thing? How strong should my reeds be? How much of the mouthpiece should actually go into my mouth? What do I adjust if I’m out of tune? Is my thumb supposed to hurt if I play for a long time?

I had discovered new depths of having no idea what I was doing. Everything felt so new and foreign. Each time I brought the clarinet out of its case, I flipped and spun around the disassembled pieces trying to remember how to even put the dreaded black tube together. I Googled whether it was weird to play a clarinet with a neck strap to help hold it up because that’s what I’d become so acclimated to on the much heavier saxophone. When I sounded bad playing my grandpa’s clarinet, I went and borrowed my dad’s clarinet to find out if it was me or the instrument. (It was me. But in my defense, my dad’s clarinet has better intonation.) I’d strayed far beyond my musical zone of comfort for the first time in years. It was profoundly strange to learn something at the age of 27 I hadn’t struggled with since I was 10. I was reduced to becoming excited when I finally accomplished something as simple as sightreading London Bridge Is Falling Down with no mistakes. If you had told me a month ago I’d be in this situation, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d have thought I was “better” than London Bridge. Of course, nobody is “better” than London Bridge. You have to start somewhere, and you have to be unafraid of repeated and repeated failure. This was genuinely one of the more humbling things I’ve done as an adult, and it happened in the comfort of my own home.

Probably the biggest difference from my experience learning saxophone was that THANKFULLY, I’ve already learned how to read music. I can’t imagine how much harder learning clarinet would be if I had to learn to read treble clef all over again. Except…I kind of can imagine it, because at some point in my life, I did exactly that. I learned how to play saxophone and how to read sheet music at the same time. And I did it as a 10-year-old child without the benefit of a fully developed brain, and the eye-hand coordination, patience, and discipline which comes with reaching adulthood. (Not to mention nearly two decades of experience on other instruments.)

As I was nearing three total hours of screwing up crossing the break in Silent Night, I was weirdly in awe of my 10-year old self for persevering through those first and worst several months of being a musician. Actually, I was weirdly in awe of every single friend I know who started learning an instrument through their school’s band or orchestra. Learning an instrument is NOT easy or natural. Your mistakes are obvious, unpleasant, and often loud and embarrassing. Troubleshooting your mistakes can be unintuitive if not mystifying for new, inexperienced players. And it can take months or longer to reach a level where you’re making music and producing a tone you really enjoy. There’s a reason (okay, several reasons) why so few kids who start an instrument in 5th grade continue with it all the way through to their senior year, but I think a big one is that many of them don’t see all the practice as rewarding enough. As I was squeaking away in my house, I reminded myself that so many of my friends made it all the way through high school band and orchestra as better musicians and stronger people. If they could do it as children, I could learn Silent Night in C major as an adult. It was so peculiar but so lovely to take inspiration by imagining my friends as 10-year-olds struggling right along with me.

It’s only now–nearly 10 years after high school–that I’ve become broadly and deeply thankful so many of my friends and I were able to have such a profoundly formative lesson in patience, memory, coordination, self-confidence, teamwork, and aesthetic appreciation through our public schools’ music programs. If you wanted to learn a wind instrument in 2002, you had few choices but to join your school’s band and sit in a room with a music teacher for an hour each week. I was even lucky enough to have a dad with an extra saxophone in the closet who helped instruct me. But the school’s band program provided structure, regiment, and community to the learning process, which made it sustainable over many years. If it weren’t for music education in public schools, I probably would never have learned any instruments at all, even the ones sitting in my parents’ closet. My life would be immeasurably worse off. I didn’t even know I had an interest in music until I was gifted the opportunity to start playing it.

That said, there has never in human history been a better time to learn an instrument on your own as an adult. If you can get your hands on one, you have the benefit of a rich, diverse, and accessible internet full of musicians and music educators who freely and enthusiastically share their knowledge and expertise. Endless forums and blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to teaching pretty much anything about music you could ever want to know are out there waiting. All you have to do is search for it. If you’ve ever wanted to pick up an instrument, or if you haven’t played yours in a couple years, give it a try! Sure, the goose honks can be discouraging. But there’s something deeply satisfying in hearing yourself improve and making a sound that’s good and pleasing–so satisfying that even the honks and squeaks are worth it. There is so much joy to be found in making the air sing just because you can.

As a wise friend of mine once said, “Some of our talents we’re supposed to use to make the world better, and some of them we’re supposed to use to make the world a bit more beautiful.” I’ve always liked how she implied creating beauty is an obligation. And I’ve always enjoyed how my drive to fulfill that obligation has never felt like work to me. Not even practicing crossing the break.

10 Years of 10 Words – Test/Exam

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This is Part 8 of the 10 Years of 10 Words series. You can find Part 7 (Chicago) here.

When I was an undergrad at Valpo, I had all these very specific, idiosyncratic rules for how I would talk about college. Rule number one: I never used the word “college.” I always called it “school,” because that’s what it was: a continuation of the formal education I’d been pursuing all my life to that point. I didn’t like the cultural baggage associated with the word “college.” It reminded me of all the drunken, raucous stereotypes of higher education from all those 80’s movies I haven’t actually seen. That wasn’t at all what my own experience was like, and I didn’t want others to get that impression of me. “School” better reflected why I felt I was there: primarily to learn.

For many of the same reasons, I didn’t like calling my residence hall a “dorm.” Dormitory comes from the Latin word for “sleep,” suggesting it isn’t much of a living space. When I was younger, I always had the impression that a “dorm” was a dumpy little closet barely large enough to fit a bed. I actually felt like I had plenty of space in the building I lived in (at least as an upperclassman). So I just called it “my room” to prime people to imagine a space more like a bedroom. I also refused to call Founders Table the cafeteria, but for what it’s worth, I think everybody called the main dining hall on campus “Founders.” I felt cafeteria gave an unfair impression of mass-produced, low-quality food. Founders was better than that, although dedicated readers of this blog will recall my feelings about Founders food are…complicated.

I adhered strictly to these rules while I was a student at Valpo, but after I graduated, I pretty much immediately threw them all out the window. My college experience was now in the past tense, and I realized to effectively describe my time there to other people, I’d need to use the set of words they were familiar with, cultural baggage and all. I love Valpo with all my heart, and I firmly believe it is a uniquely wonderful school that attracts a uniquely wonderful type of person. But very few of the day-to-day interactions that happen there require my special vocabulary to be understood.

The way we use words is evolving all the time: new slang becomes popular, old slang falls out of style, and we adapt old words to mean new things. It’s kind of a rite of passage in everyone’s first year of college to adopt the new vocabulary of higher education. (I still don’t like the word freshman; it’s gendered and sounds a little too much like you’re selling meat.) Your teachers are no longer Mr. or Mrs., but Professor and Doctor. You no longer have “periods,” but Tuesday/Thursdays and Eight-AMs and labs. Then there’s dining dollars, gen-eds, TAs, RAs, flex cash, and something called a registrar, which it turns out you’ll be dealing with for the next decade as you graduate and start seeking professional licensure from state boards who understandably want to know whether your degree exists. (But I digress.)

College really is a whole new world, but most students seem to adjust long before the end of their first year. I transitioned into all this new vocabulary with the same awkward stumbles as everyone else–like spending the first few months feeling weird about using the term “professor” because made me feel like I was in a movie. But it apparently took me two years to stop using the word “test” and start calling them “exams.”

Here’s a cumulative plot for “Exam” and “Test” in the 10 Words. (Check out Part 3 for more on how that works.)

I can’t imagine I’d ever be able to explain the difference between an exam and a test to someone whose native language isn’t English. In my mind, an exam is more formal than a test. Or at the very least, an exam carries more weight when it comes to determining your final grade. But your perspective may vary depending on how your teachers used the terms throughout your primary education. In those first two high school years of 10 Words, I clearly stuck to calling them “tests.” The only “exams” we took in high school were the all-important end-of-semester Final Exams. High school really made finals out to be a big deal. There was a special schedule where the day would be split into 3 periods and you’d have something like two hours to take your exam. The longest Scantrons I’ve ever filled out in my life came in those hours. I think the school purposefully used different terminology for Final Exams than they did for plain old tests to set them apart and intimidate us into taking them seriously. Even the most singularly consequential exam you take in high school – the ACT or the SAT – isn’t called an exam, but a “standardized test.”

In college, the stakes are raised. No more intimidation tactics are required; you’re here because you’re paying to be here, not because the state mandates it. Gone were the days of taking three “tests” throughout the semester; newly arrived was the era of the “Midterm Exam,” or simply “midterms.” (NB: There is only one mention of the word “midterm” in the 10 Words, so apparently that’s not what I called them.)

You can tell from this graph that I started using the word “exam” in the 10 Words immediately after beginning my first semester at Valpo. The vertical red line milestones on the graph are placed on move-in day each year. You can see how the graph flattens out just before the beginning of the next school year during my exam-free summers (GRE excluded).

Reading through the 10 Words, it actually looks like I was arbitrarily switching between “test” and “exam” for the first two years of college. But the graph makes it apparent that I essentially quit using “test” cold turkey at the beginning of my junior year. You can see “exam” continues to be mentioned steadily beyond what I call “College Graduation” up until May 2015, when I finished grad school, whereas “test” plateaus out. This is one of those changes I had no idea was happening until I stumbled upon it while digging through the 10 Words. I can’t point to a particular moment where something clicked and I consciously made this change in speech and thinking. But I think I know what happened: I hit a wall called Being a Junior In College.

I don’t know or remember exactly what I expected my civil engineering classes would be like when I first arrived on campus in Fall 2010. And I wouldn’t really find out until the following spring, because the first semester of Valpo’s program places civil, mechanical, electrical, and computer engineers into the same general classes. So my only glimpse of what was ahead came from the upperclassmen and women I met in student organizations like Engineers Without Borders. These older students often seemed, to put it mildly, stressed out. Especially the juniors and seniors. They complained about all the late hours they’d spend in the engineering building working on lab reports and design projects. And they would carry around these huge reference manuals and tell horror stories about exams written by professors who taught subjects so advanced, I wouldn’t have any reason to meet them until I took two years of prerequisites. How in the world could I ever be expected to understand all this? Was I about to tank my life-long academic success? College administrators didn’t need to engage in any scare tactics for me to be pretty alarmed.

Having been sufficiently warned by the brave souls ahead of me, I braced myself for the shoe to drop. First semester kept me busy–I was working and studying harder than I ever had in high school–but it was completely manageable. I wasn’t studying late into the night. I had plenty of free time. I didn’t feel overwhelmed or fall behind. So when we moved into Semester 2 and started our first 100 level civil engineering classes, I was sure a wave was about to crash down. But I kept plugging along, and before I knew it, sophomore year came and went. Things did become more challenging. I started working later and longer, including on weekends. But by and large, the workload wasn’t nearly as scary as the older students led me to believe. I made it through not very differently than I did in high school– mostly by giving myself plenty of time to figure things out on my own. I didn’t find myself going to my classmates very often for homework help or to study for midterms (or whatever they’re called).

Junior year was different. There were no humanities courses or science prerequisites left to take. In that fall semester, my schedule consisted of five upper-level civil engineering classes with the same 20 people in the same hallway of the same building. There were group lab reports and group design projects and incessant homework with the dreaded reference manuals. My classmates and I basically made a second home for ourselves between the red-painted walls of the general computer lab. I started installing Spotify on my favorite lab computers. All this to say it became impossible to work independently that semester for two reasons. First and most obviously, we were in such close quarters for hours and hours each day. But second and more importantly, we were all dealing with five upper level civil engineering courses! It was a huge amount of information to process. Nobody was going to understand everything immediately, and even the top students in class were asking each other for help. Forcing us to work together was a valuable and intentional part of the program.

So I started calling them exams because my classmates were already calling them exams. But that’s the easy answer. I don’t think this shift wasn’t simply a matter of picking up a word through osmosis. I think in some way, it represents a change in how I perceived myself and my work. I had crossed some sort of threshold where I was being challenged in a way I hadn’t been before, so much so that I needed new language to describe it. “Exam” was the most serious word at a time when I had to take school more seriously than ever. And I think this shift was an implicit acknowledgement that I couldn’t get through that semester alone–that in fact, most accomplishments are collaborative in some way.

I spent a great deal of time thinking about how I could use words to shape others’ perception of my college experience. But it never occurred to me that all the while, words from other people were shaping mine.

10 Years of 10 Words – Chicago

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“I was in love with the place
In my mind, in my mind”
Sufjan Stevens, “Chicago”

This is Part 7 of the 10 Words in 10 Years series. You can read Part 6 (The Long View) here.

Like most people, the way I identify where I’m from depends how far I am from home. The farther away, the less specific I need to be. When I’m in and around Chicago, I name the particular western suburb where I grew up, and sometimes add the neighborhood in the city where I currently live. When I was a Valpo student, I lived in what is practically a Chicago suburb, albeit in Indiana. Most of the student body is from Indiana and its neighboring states, with a significant fraction from the area where I grew up. So I’d first say I’m from the Chicago suburbs, and if that was met with recognition, I’d tell them which town I’m from or which high school I went to. In my travels to Tanzania and Europe, we would simply tell locals we were from the United States, often elaborating and mentioning Chicago but dropping any mention of the suburbs. (Invariably, the reaction we would get was “Ah, yes! The Chicago Bulls!” I found this totally fascinating because it’s been 20 years since the Michael Jordan dynasty days and I can’t imagine why that would have made such a lasting impact in Paris.)

With the exception of my year at grad school, I’ve lived an hour away from Chicago all my life. But from the beginning of the cumulative graph for the word “Chicago” (see Part 3 for more on how that works), it’s clear my relationship with the city started off slow and distant. Even into college, “Chicago” for me was synonymous with “going downtown,” which meant making a day of seeing a show or visiting a museum or otherwise being a tourist. It wasn’t something I did often: there are only nine mentions of Chicago in the 10 Words prior to my Valpo graduation in May 2014, and two of those mentions are about watching the film adaptation of the musical by the same name. For what it’s worth, I definitely made trips from Valpo to the city which aren’t counted in these references, so I must have described them with more specific words. I think choosing not to use the word “Chicago” to describe those visits suggests I wasn’t thinking much about the broader idea of Chicago in those earlier days.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how I started to feel closer to Chicago in a piece called A is for Anthem. It’s a wide-ranging story involving an airplane window, church music, and hockey pregame shows, but ultimately it’s about how rallying around professional sports teams can foster civic pride and even influence your sense of self. In that essay, I mention the Chicago part of my identity began to form in earnest only after moving away to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2014 to start grad school at Lehigh. If you look back at the graph, the sharp uptick in 10 Words mentions begins only a couple of weeks before I moved. It continues through graduation and the first few months after returning home and working downtown. I’m so delighted to find this notion I wrote about two years ago turned out to be reflected by data I’ve been collecting this whole time.

Among the American students in my grad school program, I was the second farthest from home. When people at Lehigh asked where I was from, it was usually good enough to say I’m from the Chicago suburbs. Most students there are from Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, and probably couldn’t point to Chicago on a map, let alone care which suburb I’m from. (In fairness, I doubt I could point to Pittsburgh on a map before I spent a year in Pennsylvania.) This distance and displacement from the Midwest to the East Coast highlighted differences between schools, speech patterns, physical geography, and pizza (among other things). In an almost defiant response to this mild culture shock, my self-image tightened its grip around Chicago and the Midwest. I really can’t overstate how strong this Midwestern part of my identity became: I immediately developed a crush on the only other Midwesterner I met at Lehigh. Some relevant background information: my parents met by chance in a foreign country and were surprised to learn they lived only 15 miles from each other back in Illinois. Being from the same city or even the same region only seems to count as something you have in common when you’re far from home, but it can be an important or even necessary connection to make. The significance of place is written into my origin story.

That said, this identity shift wasn’t immediate and automatic. Somehow, I made it halfway through grad school with effectively zero knowledge of Chicago’s streets. Most of my visits to the city involved being driven to a particular stadium or museum or making a beeline straight from the Metra terminal at Union Station to the familiar crowded sights of Michigan Avenue and Millennium Park. I didn’t really have a sense for which direction the Chicago River ran. Nor could I have told you that it’s a trick question: there are actually three branches which run in different directions. I didn’t know which streets ran north/south or east/west or how the blocks were numbered. Up to that point, I was navigating by landmarks and intuition. There is some truth to the local joke that a Chicagoan’s internal compass reads North, South, LAKE, and West. But if I ever hoped to live and work in the city, I knew I’d have to do better than that.

There was a day in January 2015–during my long winter break–where I took a very intentional step to further my understanding of the city. I had made plans to go downtown and meet up with…a certain Midwesterner I met at Lehigh who happened to be in town that day. She had a long drive ahead, so I just wanted to briefly show her some sights and grab dinner. I was afraid I’d embarrass myself as her supposed tour guide if I got us lost. So I spent most of the afternoon hand-drawing a map of downtown Chicago. I started by taking a piece of engineering graph paper, putting it over my laptop screen, and tracing the route of the three river branches and the lakeshore. I used a straightedge to draw the street grid and then I filled in each street name and populated the map with landmarks I knew. I spent the train ride drilling myself on the order of the streets in The Loop (the center of downtown) from east to west and north to south, muttering “FranklinWellsLaSalleClarkDearbornStateWabashMichigan.”


It was a very long winter break.

Even in the moment, this felt a little silly and dorky. But we didn’t get lost! To this day, I consider those few hours of intentional, concentrated effort as a turning point in my relationship with the city: I’ve felt like I understood where I was going every time I’ve been downtown since. A place doesn’t feel like home to me if I can easily get lost there. In my detail-obsessed engineer brain, to love Chicago is to know her. My love is expressed through remembering intersections and train routes, learning about local history and politics, and collecting interesting facts about the design of every iconic building in The Loop.

But I feel conflicted about this cerebral kind of love. For as practical and useful as it was, did drawing that map really have anything to do with incorporating Chicago into my identity? They’re just street names. Knowing Madison and State is the 0 N/S and 0 E/W intersection on Chicago’s grid system doesn’t make you a Chicagoan. It just means you’ve read a map. I also know where DUMBO is, but nobody would ever mistake me for a New Yorker. Loving Chicago with my mind  leaves me wondering whether these connections to streets and skyscrapers and sports teams are superficial and replaceable. Is there really anything special about Chicago in particular, or could I move to a different city and quickly find things about it to be proud of?

In fact, the more I learn about Chicago, the more I realize I have absolutely no right to claim that I’m from Chicago. I am so obviously the product of an affluent, white suburb when I’m in Chicago the same way I am so obviously an American when I am in Paris. In both cases, I feel naïve explaining to people where I’m from as if they didn’t already know from my skin, clothes, and body language. I doubt I could convince someone who grew up here that I’m “from” here too.

I claim only the glamorous parts of Chicago in my identity. I don’t claim the broken machine politics and high tax rates that drive people to leave the state. I don’t claim the under-enrolled and closing public schools. Or the hungry homeless people I pretend to ignore every morning. Or the deep segregation and racial inequities. I don’t claim the news reports every Monday tallying the weekend’s gunshot victims. What I claim isn’t actually Chicago at all, but rather a cutesy snow globe version of the skyline, bubbled off from the strife of the real world. I may live here, but without a sense of community and responsibility, I feel removed from its suffering, observing it like a suburbanite or  a tourist. It seems disingenuous to attach myself to Chicago unless I can genuinely say I’ve met its ugly brokenness and still find it beautiful.

I know civic pride can run much deeper than an appreciation for local food, architecture, and sports. But even if it doesn’t, it can still create that almost worshipful feeling of unity I tried to capture in A is for Anthem. The wonderful thing about an idea as big as Chicago is it doesn’t have a single meaning and isn’t defined by a single experience. You can be proud of a city for its baseball team, or museums, or parks, or history, or holiday traditions, or sense of community, or all of the above, or something else entirely. Chicago is an experience all of us – even the tourists — give the same name in an attempt to connect to each other. For me to erect a high border wall around this experience and argue I belong on the outside defeats that purpose.

I know I only have feelings for Chicago because my parents – against great odds — both happened to be from its northwest suburbs. If they had been from Cleveland or Boise or Indianapolis, I’d imagine I’d have similar feelings for one of those places instead. And I’m pretty confident I could move to those places, and given enough time, find reasons to be proud of them, too. Is there anything particularly special about Chicago that legitimizes my irrational belief in its superiority? I doubt l’ll ever have the answer to that question.

But what I do know is this: I’ve been fascinated by the Chicago skyline since I first saw it from the 94th floor of the John Hancock observatory when I was around six or seven years old. Critics say it’s among the best skylines in the world. And it made enough of an impression on me that I went on to pursue a life-long career in designing buildings. So maybe it isn’t disingenuous or minimizing to claim that skyline as long as I realize that Chicago is much more than its skyscrapers. After all, maybe the entire reason I became an engineer is so I can play a role in shaping the place that shaped me.

10 Years of 10 Words – The Long View

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One day this past January, my friend Lydia pitched me a great idea for visualizing the 10 Words. She suggested I represent words as dots, and sort them into different colors for categories like friends, work, and so on. Then I could display this array of dots however I wished without having to reveal more information about my daily journals than I felt comfortable. I suspect Lydia was picturing something more in the realm of an abstract art piece than a scatter plot. But Lydia is also well aware my approach to art can be almost comically analytical. She ended her pitch assuring me it “could mostly be computer generated and not crafty.”1

That was my starting point for what turned out to be a months-long rabbit hole of graphs, word counting, and sorting rules which finally come to an end here. In this post, I’m going to take a long, broad view of the last 10 years to answer as generally as I can, “What kind of stuff do you write about in the 10 Words?”

First, some numbers.

There are 3,653 days in my 10 Words data (365 days x 10 years, plus two February 29ths, plus the first day of the eleventh year, 9/11/18). Theoretically, there should be 36,530 total words. For a whole host of boring syntax reasons,2 my best count of how many words I actually typed into my spreadsheet was 36,873. (It’s a difference of less than 1%, which is close enough for me.)

I want to start with the most zoomed-out view of the 10 Words and zoom our way in, ending with the graph directly inspired by Lydia’s suggestion. Her original idea involved sorting the words into categories, and I think that’s a good place to begin understanding the big picture view of the 10 Words. Here is how the entire set of 36,530 words breaks down into 12 different categories, both in pie chart and tabular format.

Defining these categories and sorting the words was by far the most time-consuming part of this process because it had to be done manually. Fortunately, I knew an easy way to automate the task of counting up the number of mentions for all the unique words. There’s a website called Wordle that generates word clouds from user-entered text. In a word cloud, the size of each word is proportional to the number of times it appears in the text–more mentions means a larger font size. When you submit your text, Wordle creates a table with each word and the number of times it appears and lets you copy and paste the data into Excel. After pre-processing my original spreadsheet,2 I basically copy-and-pasted 10 years worth of journal entries into Wordle and it spat out the results.

Several weeks of scrolling, sorting, and color-coded highlighting ensued. Eventually, I settled on ten “real” categories and two “fake” categories.

Here are a few examples of the kinds of words represented in each “real” category:

Names: Lydia (of course), Zach (who you may know from The Fault In Our Cake), Mom, etc.
(Structural) Engineering: concrete, steel, foundations, joist, beam, etc.
Pop Culture: podcast(s), Beatles, The Dear Hunter (or TDH), Hamilton, Cubs, Community, etc.
Hobbies: music, piano, writing, jazz, journaling, etc.
Food: pancakes, breakfast, lasagna, cake, etc.
Academics: studying, lab, exam, essay, research, etc.
Emotions: Happy, anger, love, nostalgia, frustration, apathetic, etc.
Spirituality: God, church, prayer, Mass, Bible, etc.
Places: Chicago, Valpo, museum, France, Target, airport, etc.
Chores: driving, shopping, laundry, packing, ironing, cleaning, waiting
(See the appendix at the end of this post for more details on what made it into each category.)

As for the “fake” categories: “Ones” are words with only a single mention. “Other” is everything that didn’t fit into any of the categories I defined.3 To give you some idea what didn’t get sorted, here are some of the top-mentioned “Other” words:

Other: haircut, stories, reading, late, early, work, family, rain…

It immediately became clear when I started developing the categories that life strongly resists being sorted into neat little boxes. Many, many different words straddled the line between two categories. I put the 89 mentions of “journaling” into Hobbies, but there was a period of several years where journaling was one of the primary ways I expressed my spirituality. All Valpo students are required to take a theology course to graduate, but I felt “theology” belonged better in Spirituality than in Academics. Sufjan Stevens is the name of a person, but I decided the Names category is for people I actually know, and Pop Culture is for names I know because they are famous (like Sufjan). One of the most consequential decisions was trying to separate my structural engineering career path from the parts of my engineering education I didn’t end up focusing on after college–topics like transportation engineering, fluid mechanics, and hydrology. Those fields ended up in Academics, whereas the Engineering category focuses on structural engineering in particular.

Even more numerous than those judgement calls were words with multiple definitions or connotations. I had to decide whether to separate the times I referred to “Christmas” as a religious holiday from the times I referred to it as a cultural event or a type of music. I had to decide whether it was worth it to separate the times I used “stress” as an emotional or mental state from the times I used it as an engineering mechanics term. Often, it wasn’t even clear from context which sense of a word I meant. Closely examining every use of every word to get an extremely precise sorting would take months, and the results would still be highly subjective. Most of these ambiguous words ended up under “Other.”

So when you look at the pie chart and see 65% of the words didn’t fit into categories, take that not with a grain, but with a whole shaker of salt. Of the 9,473 unique words, I was able to sort only 837 into distinct categories–about 9 percent. Having selected those 837 words by hand, I can tell you I definitely undercounted. I certainly missed some words that should have been sorted, particularly in the single-digit mentions. I know there are typo versions of sorted words that ended up as “Ones” rather than counting towards a category. And there may well be other distinguishable categories I didn’t think to consider that could divide this pie chart into even more slices.

By now, I’m sure you’re starting to see the sorting process was a MESS. So why even bother showing the results?

For one, I think the pie chart is still interesting and informative despite being only a rough approximation. Word counts and categories are the two main tools I have to make sense of the actual content and meaning in the 10 Words as a whole. With the understanding that these categories and counts are a subjective, first-pass attempt, I believe the proportions we see in the pie chart to be relatively accurate.  Even with a much more rigorous analysis–if I made no typos, no sorting mistakes, and created new categories to capture more nuance–I don’t think the proportions would change much, at least not relative to each other. I spent most of my time sorting the top-mentioned words (which would affect the counts the most) and I feel pretty confident about where I have them now.

With all that in mind, I have some general observations about the way the categories broke down.

It seems right to me that Names and Engineering are clearly the largest categories, as they inarguably represent the two biggest and most important aspects of my life. I found it reassuring that the four largest categories were (in descending order) Names, Engineering, and more or less a tie between Pop Culture and Hobbies. This reflects the way I believe I should prioritize these things, if not by the way I allocate my time, then at least in my mind and heart. You’ll notice in the table that the average word in Names was mentioned nearly 1.5 times more frequently than the average word in Engineering (22.21 vs. 15.47). This is driven in large part by the extremely high number of mentions in the top 4 or 5 names. For perspective, it only takes the mentions from the top 17 names to beat the entire Engineering category of 131 words.

The Hobbies and Pop Culture slices are of nearly identical size, but the average Hobby is mentioned about twice as often as the average Pop Culture word (22.36 vs. 10.75). I think this difference illustrates my tendency to finish consuming one piece of culture and move on to another. I don’t dwell on most pieces of art or media, revisiting it over and over and racking up more mentions. Contrast that to a hobby, which by definition is an activity you choose to engage in repeatedly. Hobbies are practically made to be top performers in the 10 Words–and as you’ll see later, they are. Similarly, the average mentions for a Chore is through the roof at 52.3 thanks to their repetitive nature and limited number.

Other categories like Places and Food are significantly smaller than Names and Engineering, but they’re still well-defined and large enough to be counted. I’ve come to appreciate the value of good food as I’ve grown older, particularly as I’ve been responsible for more of my own meals (this should sound familiar if you’ve read Part 2 about my life-long love of pancakes). While there does appear to be a small uptick in my recent “adulting” years in food-related mentions, I was surprised by how often and consistently I’ve written about food across the whole decade. It may be simple, but a good meal or even a good dessert can really affect your day. After all, we literally are what we eat.

Above all else, I was surprised that after all my counting efforts, the words I was able to sort into categories account for only 35% of the total. I’ve discussed process-wise why I believe the categories are undercounted, but what does this result actually mean? Collectively, the words in Names, Engineering, Hobbies, and Pop Culture represent how I spend the vast majority of my waking hours, and yet they only account for about 25% of the 10 Words. Why?

I’m not sure there’s a clear, uncomplicated answer to that question. Of course, the 10 Words were never intended to proportionally reflect how I allocate my time each day. I usually make a conscious effort to represent a broad range of the day’s events rather than describe in detail one or two unique things. This writing practice reflects my original goal of trying to preserve one unique memory from every day. But you would expect adhering to the general principle of “breadth over depth” would result in a larger number of common, sortable words. It seems like a cop-out to simply conclude the multitude of events and experiences that make up a life story are so vast and interrelated that it’s only natural to find describing most days requires unique or relatively rare words. But it also seems like the truth.

I think understanding why so few words belong to categories is a matter of perspective. The way I’ve framed the data so far may give the impression that most of the 10 Words are unsortable noise with only a few mentions. But picture is more nuanced than that, and to paint it we’re going to need more graphs!

Until this point in the series, I’ve made a few references to specific word counts–like how there are 97 mentions of the word “pancakes.” But how does 97 mentions compare to other words? To answer that question, I ranked all the unique words by number of mentions (largest to smallest) and plotted them:

(Note how the data here is so heavily skewed towards a huge number of words with a small number of mentions that I needed to plot the X-axis on a log scale. Log scales are useful for displaying data that increases or decreases so quickly that it can be hard to see or understand if plotted on a traditional linear scale. If you don’t believe me, check out what this graph looks like on a linear scale–it’s basically illegible.)

This graph should make it very clear how the 97 mentions of pancakes “stack up”– it’s one of the most frequently used words in the entire set. Only 12 words break 100 mentions. Only 73 words–out of nearly 10,000–exceed 50 mentions. The disparity between the top several dozen words and the rest of the set cannot be understated. But I want to keep unpacking this disproportionate distribution of mentions.

To be clear, there is a difference between considering unique words (as we are in this ranked mentions plot) and counting each mention of unique words separately (as we did in the pie chart). More than half of the unique words are “Ones,” but they account for only 14% of the 36,530 total mentions. Because the highest-ranking unique words have five, ten, or even twenty times more mentions than the average word (which has about 3.9), a relatively small number of words make up a large share of the total.

The cumulative effect each unique word has on the total number of mentions can be visualized in this graph:

On the X-axis is a modified way of looking at the word count ranking. Rather than showing the actual rank numbers up to 9,743, I’m basically showing as a percentage how far we are through the ranking as we work our way down, starting with the top-mentioned word at X=0. On the Y-axis, I’m showing as a percentage how many of the total mentions are cumulatively accounted for as we work our way through the ranked words. Every word makes it tick up a little bit more–at first very quickly because we start with the words with hundreds of mentions, then very slowly as we get to the words with only one or two.

With this graph, we can see that the top 20% of the unique words are responsible for 70% of the total mentions. It only takes the top 698 words–a little more than 7%–to reach 50% of the 36,530 mentions. In one respect, a relatively small number of words are, in fact, responsible for most of the mentions. But this also means 93% of the words are responsible for the other half.

I think this information provides a more complete context for understanding why the 837 words I sorted into categories were only good for 35% of the total mentions. The top 837 words of all time only get you to 53%. I think it was unreasonable to expect any set or category of words with strict boundaries to count as a majority. The Other block isn’t so huge merely because it’s full of words with only a few mentions. A significant portion of its size comes from the several hundreds words with a few dozen mentions adding up very quickly. So unfortunately, I think my cop-out answer is looking pretty good. The scope of the 10 Words is so utterly vast and encompasses so many different experiences. Perhaps the way I go about writing them biases the word counts towards particular details that don’t repeat as often as the big themes in my life.

Interestingly, the distribution of this data–where about 70% of the effects (mentions) are due to only 20% of the causes (unique words) is a commonly recurring phenomenon in many fields of study called the Pareto Principle. Technically, the Pareto principle expects the proportion to be more like 80/20, but I consider it to be only an approximation to describe a particular kind of exponential relationship. I have a theory as to why my data ended up on the low side of the 80/20 rule in the footnotes, and it involves using The Little Prince as a control group.4

Now, as promised, the graph directly inspired by Lydia’s suggestion! Each point represents a different word. On the horizontal axis is the date a word first appears in the 10 Words, and on the vertical axis is the total number of times that word has been used.

This graph includes all the words with at least 25 mentions from most of the larger categories. Click to open the full size version if you want–there’s a lot here.

It’s no coincidence that of the seven categories, the words in Culture are the most spread throughout the decade. Like I said about Culture’s higher average word count, I think this illustrates my tendency to finish consuming one thing and move on to the next at a regular frequency. For example, I’ll spend a solid month repeatedly listening to a new favorite album. But then it’ll fall into my usual rotation, at which point it stops being notable enough to make the 10 Words. That makes it hard for bands to end up with a lot mentions: of the four musical artists with more than 15, I’m a big enough fan to have seen three of them live. (The fourth one is The Beatles.)

The most recent word to earn 25 mentions and make it on this graph first appeared in December 2016, which was nearly two years ago. That may be an indication I haven’t had many new and recurring experiences in the last two years. There is some truth to that–much of my life as a working adult is pretty quiet and routine. I would have at least expected something new from the Engineering category to appear recently, but it seems like any topics I’ve learned about recently proved not to be frequently recurring in my work. Who’s to say what the next rising word will be?

It can take a long time for a word to obtain 25 mentions, which may be why so many words are clustered near the beginning. Nine out of 11 words in Hobbies, all 14 Food words, and 6 out of 7 Emotions first appear before the end of high school. In contrast, nearly all new words from college onwards are Culture or Engineering related. These simple patterns lead to some interesting questions: Had I already known most of the breadth of my life experiences by the time I was 18? (Are different kinds of life experiences even quantifiable?) Are a person’s core interests, tastes, and personality traits more-or-less decided by the end of adolescence? Is it unusual or difficult for adults to pick up new interests or hobbies? What would this graph look like for literally any other person?

I’m not going to try to answer those questions here. But I do broadly take this distribution to mean that at 16 I was–at my core–more or less who I’ve grown up to be today. Ten years ago, I still liked writing, creating music, overthinking, chocolate cake, quirky single-camera sitcoms, and working on projects. The reason why most of the top-mentioned words occur so early is because I had more time to develop those interests and rack up mentions.

One limitation of this particular graph: it doesn’t capture the way word usage changes over time, unlike the cumulative graphs in my earlier posts. I don’t write words or play music the same way I did at 16 (thankfully). I don’t talk to many of the same people, listen to the same music, enjoy the same podcasts, or work on the same creative projects. But broadly speaking, those are all still important aspects of my life. Things are largely the same, but with different substance.

There are plenty of other observations to make here. We can talk about how 5 of the 7 Spirituality words appear in my first year of Valpo. We can speculate what happened to cause a new emotion to appear in the Fall of 2014, five years after the other top emotions were first mentioned. (Spoilers: that word is “anxiety.”) I seem to have picked up one “hobby” (Engineers Without Borders) right at the beginning of college and another one (journaling) right at the end, which I think make for wonderful bookends representing my transition in and out of the Valpo community.

But what I ended up thinking about the most was the Engineering category. I found it particularly striking that I didn’t mention any Engineering words before college even once, with the one exception of “CAD.” (Computer Aided Drafting is the generic term for software used to create architectural and engineering drawings. I took a drafting class as a junior in high school.) It must be exceptionally common for high school students to choose a major they intend to turn into a career without having a clue what exactly their studies will entail, let alone whether they’ll actually enjoy them. This huge leap of faith so many of my friends and I have successfully taken is something I’ve never been able to let go. In a future post, I plan to take a closer look at the Engineering category on its own. I think the story it tells about my education has much in common with the stories of many others, even those outside a technical field.

To be continued!



_________________
Category Rules

I prefer not to publish the lists of words I included in all the categories, but I will discuss the criteria I used to define which words were were included or not.

Names: First names, last names, and nicknames of people I know and have interacted with. Also includes familial titles like Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, etc.

Engineering: I specifically restricted this category to terms related to structural engineering, the subject of my graduate degree and chosen career path. Primarily, the category consists of words like foundation, concrete, beam, loads, and the names of software I use at work. I also wanted this category to account for my experience actually practicing engineering in a design office, so I included words like submittals, coordination, RFIs, and issuance. I wanted to keep my focus on the actual substance of my work, so I excluded the names of specific projects which affected the count by a couple hundred mentions.

Pop Culture: This category was extremely broad and I needed to make a list of subcategories to describe the boundaries. In general, any piece of media intended to be consumed passively consume (as opposed to actively participating in it, like video games, board games, or sports) counted as Pop Culture.

Included: Books, TV Shows, Podcasts, Movies, Fictional Characters, Names of Famous People, Bands, Albums, Musicals, Songs (that I haven’t tried to arrange), Names of Sports Teams, Names of Schools I Did Not Attend

Excluded: Names of Cities (see Places), Names of Companies, Names of Social Media Websites, Names of Sports

Hobbies: Activities I engaged in repeatedly, even if infrequently. There was some potential for overlap with Pop Culture–I decided that the aforementioned video games, board games, and sports belonged here.

Food: Names of edible or potable items and terms related to their preparation and consumption. Includes the names of restaurants and words like breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Academics: Names of classes, concepts from classes unrelated to structural engineering, names of academic buildings, plus terms related to general classwork like presentation, exam, studying, etc.

Spirituality: Terms related to the study and practice of organized religion.

Places: Mostly includes proper nouns, such as names of cities, states, countries, schools I attended, buildings, and stores. Also includes generic places like “airport,” and names of rooms like “basement” and “hallway.”

Chores: To be honest, I kind of invented this category last-minute to fit seven very high-ranking words (laundry, driving, ironing, shopping, packing, cleaning, waiting). But they all involve repetitive, laborious tasks I wouldn’t choose to do if I didn’t have to. (I suppose I get some enjoyment out of cleaning and driving, though that’s usually because they’re a vehicle for making time for music and podcasts.)

Emotions: Words that describe a particular feeling or mental state, such as “laughter” or “boredom” or “sleepy.” Also includes the classics like “joy” and “sadness” (and Bing Bong).
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Footnotes
1 Special thanks to Lydia, whose suggestion inspired much of this piece and whose lasting interest in self-reflection and the 10 Words inspired much of this series. Lydia is also the artist responsible for the painting in the header image for this blog. It’s called The Examination and it features five different types of graphs, each representing the contemplation of a different part of one’s identity. It seemed pretty on-brand for The Real Tangent (it was a gift to me, so that’s no coincidence) and with her permission I’m glad to feature it here.

2 The syntax and formatting I use in my Excel file is a disaster. There are dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, slashes, and all sorts of characters which are not letters. All these symbols make it very difficult for Wordle to understand where one word ends and the next begins. I had to spend some time cleaning up the text in my spreadsheet to prevent Wordle from combining or separating words incorrectly. Specifically, I found all those dashes, apostrophes, and other characters and replaced them with spaces. This allowed Wordle to recognize, for example, “Lydia” and “Lydia’s” as the same word rather than two unique words. It is of little value for me to know how many possessive nouns I used–I’m much more interested in how many times I used the noun in any form. My pre-processing definitely improved the accuracy of the word count. Before I made any of those character deletions, I came up with 33,772 total words rather than the expected 36,530. Removing these characters did create some problems, namely by stranding letters that came after apostrophes. I now have 43 mentions of the word “s,” which is not actually a word at all. There are also a few instances throughout the thousands of days where I drew symbols that I couldn’t type into Excel, so I used a few extra words to describe them in the spreadsheet. I did not attempt to hunt them down for this study.

3 I made up the difference between the actual and theoretical word counts by calculating the mentions in Other by subtracting the totals from all other categories from 36,530.

4 One interesting aspect about doing a word count analysis of the 10 Words is that the text defies the conventions of normal English syntax and grammar. Unlike typical prose writing, the 10 Words uses virtually zero articles, prepositions, pronouns, and other common parts of speech that facilitate the expression complete sentences. This creates an layer of complication in comparing the word count of the 10 Words to that of a more traditional text, where the most frequently mentioned words would typically be the, to, a, is, that, and so on. By default, these words are counted by Wordle but excluded from the word cloud in order to yield more meaningful results. I did not need to do any such filtering with the 10 Words, which actually makes it much easier to glean any insights from a word count compared to, say, a novel. Nevertheless, if you were to do a word count analysis of a novel and rank the unique words by mentions, you’d still need a semi-log scale to look the distribution, which would look very similar to my plot. I did this for the Katherine Woods translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince as an experiment. The most common words were mentioned 2-3 times more than that in the 10 Words, which is due to almost entirely to pronouns, prepositions, etc. Interestingly, The Little Prince text ends up aligning much more closely with the 80/20 rule of the Pareto Principle, and I think this is due to the inclusion of so many pronouns, articles, and prepositions. Here’s how the ranked mentions and cumulative mentions compare to the 10 Words:

10 Years of 10 Words – Illness

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This is Part 5 of the 10 Years of 10 Words Series. You can find Part 4 (Beauty) here.

A few weeks ago, I was home sick with what I’ve come to call my Annual Fall Cold. For about as long as I can remember, it seems like I catch a cold every September or October. When it happened yet again last year, I realized I’ve inadvertently been keeping a decent record of when I’ve been sick through the 10 Words. So in my boredom, I opened my spreadsheet and did a quick CTRL+F search for the words “cold” and “sick” to try to find evidence to support my belief that I fall ill at the beginning of every autumn. My hunch turned out to be correct, though I was surprised by how many times I got sick outside the early fall months. This year, my Annual Fall Cold came in the middle of this series of 10 Words studies, so I figured I’d do a more thorough investigation.

Below is a bar graph of how many times the word “cold” or “sick” was used in the 10 Words in each month. There are a few exceptions: I didn’t count the times I seemed to be describing the illness of another person,  nor did I count the times I used the word “cold” to describe (or complain) about the temperature outside.

Often, illnesses would last more than one day and “sick” or “cold” appear multiple times in a two or three day period to describe the same viral infection. I counted these instances separately, figuring it would serve as a way to measure which months contained the most severe or longest-lasting symptoms. (The subjective metric for severity being “bad enough to make the 10 Words.”) Much more often than not, the words “sick” or “cold” appear in isolation–that is, without repetition in the following days. This suggests that for most of my so-called illnesses, I felt bad, but mostly recovered by the following day.

Clearly, September is the worst month, thanks (or no thanks) to multi-day illnesses in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015.  “Cold” or “sick” show up every September from 2008-2016.

Summer months notably see the lowest incidence of illness. I’m guessing this has something to do with school being out and spending less time indoors with large numbers of people. WebMD says “In the U.S., most colds occur during the fall and winter. Beginning in late August or early September, the rate of colds increases slowly for a few weeks and remains high until March or April, when it declines.” This seems to be consistent with my recorded experience.

Even after dealing with seasonal allergies for most of my life, it can be hard to tell whether a constantly runny nose on any given day is the beginning of a cold or the result of spectacularly high pollen, grass, and other allergen counts. Most likely, some of these isolated days can be blamed on allergies, particularly in the spring and fall, which could be another reason why those months have higher counts.

I’ve always felt like I get sick more frequently than the people around me, but this study has led me to question whether that’s really the case. WebMD also states adults “average about 2 to 4 colds per year, although the range varies widely.” For the 9 calendar years (2009-2017) where I have complete data, I average 4.4 illnesses per year (including the one-day events that may just be allergies), with the counts ranging between 1 and 7. By that measure, I’m completely normal (besides being a person who unwittingly kept a medical diary for ten years).

Perhaps one reason why I believed I got sick more often than average is the way my brain tends to put more weight on my own experience of suffering through a cold than it does on merely hearing about the suffering of another person. The actual, physical experience of an illness can be all-consuming. I focus on my inability to breathe through my nose properly. I find it difficult to fall asleep because I’m forced to break habit and breath through my mouth while simultaneously clearing the mucus draining into my throat. I have to plan my day around having constant access to tissues in case my nose starts dripping onto my clothes or belongings. I feel inescapably dirty and full of my own germs the entire day. All this for a common cold! The slow accumulation of minutes and hours spent in pain or discomfort over the day amounts to so much more than hearing someone tell you, “ah, I was sick last weekend,” or reading a piece of data about how often people get sick per year.

And yet, despite having had 65 days–more than two whole months!–like this in the past ten years, I don’t even remember most of them. After all, most of them were just colds. I recovered back to full health without lasting effects.

At my most cynical, I think about suffering as a cumulative total–adding up each little slight, illness, stubbed toe, missed opportunity, indignity, and disappointment over every day, earning more points the worse it feels. Looking back at two months’ worth of colds and illnesses reminds me that suffering isn’t a function you integrate or a sum you total. Some suffering leaves behind lasting, devastating echoes. But a lot of suffering simply comes and goes, never to be remembered or thought about again, and that’s the kind we shouldn’t give more power over us than it deserves. To borrow another phrase from John Green, “Your now is not your forever.”

May we all have the perspective to hear that ancient reassurance: this too shall pass.

10 Years of 10 Words – Beauty

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This is Part 4 of the 10 Years of 10 Words Series. You can find Part 3 (Pancakes) here.

This is a cumulative graph that ticks up each time the words “beauty” and “beautiful” appear in the 10 Words. (For an explanation on how to interpret this type of graph, see the beginning of the previous post.)

Obviously, the eye-catching part of this graph is that big surge in the middle. Prior to that point, I used “beauty” and “beautiful” only six times. (You can count the six plateaus before the surge). Four of these were titles of artistic works, like Beauty and the Beast and A Beautiful Mind. For the last one, in April 2013, I described my first listen to a Dear Hunter album as “beautiful, confusing.” (Isn’t most great art?) These words were buried pretty deep in my vocabulary, but they were there.

I owe the first dot (October 9th, 2013) of that surge to a professor1 at Valpo who taught a class on innovation and creativity in engineering that culminated in a trip to Disney World over Fall Break. On our first night, we went to Epcot and headed straight to its version of France. I had been to Epcot many times as a kid and even two summers prior as an adult. But I had never spent any time at its France Pavilion (except for trying to get as close as possible to its version of the Eiffel Tower–because of course I was obsessed with the Eiffel Tower at the age of six–only to find it’s hidden backstage). I don’t even think I was aware that the France Pavilion had an actual attraction. So when I learned we were going to see a 18 minute short film about France, I shrugged and thought it might be nice to experience as an adult something I certainly would have deemed boring as a kid.

Our professor gathered us in the courtyard outside the entrance to Impressions de France and proceeded to set a high bar for what we were about to experience: “This is going to be the most impressive film about France you’ve ever seen in your life.” That wasn’t the pitch I was expecting for a 30-year-old film tucked away in the back corner of a Disney park. It wasn’t even in 3D. But this trip was about provoking inspiration, wonder, and creativity. I trusted he knew what he was doing.

We filed into the small theater and took our seats, and I noticed the screen curves around the front of the room, somewhat surrounding the audience in a panoramic view. The film begins by fading in to the cliffs at Normandy, but the shot at first only occupies the center of the screen. Then the outer thirds fade in from darkness, and suddenly your entire field of vision is filled with sea, sky, and rock, totally immersing you in the scene. And for the next 18 minutes, you’re in France.

The cliffs are only on screen for a few brief moments before we crossfade to a tranquil marsh. Lush trees and greenery line the banks and form a canopy above us, casting shadows across the water. We glide down a stream with a cool mist rolling in and soft light reflecting off the surface. This place is nearly the stuff of fantasy, and it’s set to the eerie Aquarium from Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. We’re barely sixty seconds in and I’m awe that a place like this actually exists on Earth.

But before I have time to process this place, the scene changes and the film continues to take us through the very best scenery and music France has to offer: sweeping aerial views of the Palace of Versailles, the French Alps, the Louvre, medieval castles and ancient shores, all set to Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Satie, and Ravel. It relentlessly hits you with perfectly timed orchestra swells and scene after scene after scene of some of the most breathtaking cinematography I’ve ever seen. I simply could not wrap my mind around the fact that one small country could contain this much beauty.2 I was particularly struck by how many dwellings I saw in remote mountains and barren cliffsides, as if it were human nature to be drawn to the incredible vistas and forget about the practical challenges of actually residing there. Our professor said he looked down the row during the movie and saw all of us with our eyes wide and mouths hanging open. I’m sure I was on the verge of tears.

I used half of my ten words that day on those 18 minutes: “France the EARTH is beautiful!”

There could be no other word for it than “beautiful.” October 9th, 2013 seems to be the day I finally dug up that word from the depths of my vocabulary. October 9th was the day I realized there is a name for when an aesthetic experience makes my hair stand on end or my heart feel heavy or otherwise provokes awe. I suspect this change in thinking was also helped by my discovery of a Gungor song called You Are The Beauty a few weeks later, which proclaims the things we experience with our senses as “all things made for good with love divine.” Either way, gaining the knowledge and power of that word permanently changed the way I think about art, nature, and, well…everything.

The entire surge in the middle of the graph occurred in my senior year at Valpo. It was like when you first learn a new word, and then you happen to hear someone use it in conversation the next day, except it went on for months. I started seeing beauty everywhere. I saw it in the soft flicker of candlelight off the Chapel walls on Sunday nights and in the brilliance of its stained glass on Monday mornings. I felt it in the crunch of undisturbed snow beneath my feet on walks across campus in the still morning. I heard it in my favorite practice room piano in the basement of the VUCA as I poured the conflicts I was feeling into the keys and heard all creation echoing back from a wooden box. I held it in my arms when hugs were exchanged, or better yet, necessary.

That surge ends two weeks after graduation, but you’ll notice the slope of the line after the surge is, on average, steeper than it was beforehand.3 I may not enjoy the view from a beautiful mountaintop like Last Semester Valpo anymore, but what this graph teaches me is that I never quite descended back down either.

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1This same professor also happens to be somewhat responsible for the first time “Valpo” was mentioned in the 10 Words, way back on August 5th, 2009. The very first time I visited campus, he gave my mom and I a personal tour of the engineering building. He was kind and accommodating, and I was so impressed that a faculty member would take an hour out of his day to tell one prospective student about the College of Engineering. That kind of generosity and personal attention was honestly one of the biggest reasons I knew Valpo was the one. He taught electrical engineering and I studied civil, so the only class I ever had with him was this Disney program. And yet the difference he made in my life may be immeasurable. If you are an educator, never, ever doubt your ability to make a profound impact on a student–it can happen even in the simplest and smallest of acts of kindness.

2Today, as I write this, the last piece of art I experienced that takes the form of a panoramic view wrapping around the audience was in Actual France: Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musée de L’Orangerie. The presentation is fascinating: an elliptical room custom-built to display the artwork, just like the theater at Epcot. Bonus: the paintings are of a French swamp, of all things! I love when life rhymes like that.

3Two months after graduation, on August 1st, 2014, I started writing Thank God For Thin Walls after imagining what it must have been like to have been Debussy’s neighbor while he was writing Clair de Lune. (Which is the main reason why the young woman’s name in that story is Claire.) Most of what I have to say about the ongoing conflicts in my search for beauty from that time can be found in that story.

10 Years of 10 Words – Pancakes

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This is Part 3 of the 10 Words in 10 Years series. You can read Part 2 (FAQ) here.


(You can click on the graph to open the full-size version.)

This is one of my all-time favorite graphs, mostly because I think titling a graph “Pancakes” is hilarious, but also because it illustrates some big picture ideas about life and how I use the 10 Words.

But before we get into that, I need to explain how to interpret this type of graph to make sure we’re on the same page. On the horizontal axis is the date, starting on the first day of 10 Words (9/11/08). On the vertical axis, we have the number of times a particular word has been mentioned in the 10 Words up to a given day. This number always starts at zero, and it always increases or stays flat because it’s a running (cumulative) total. It can’t decrease because there can only be more total uses of a word as time goes on. So in this graph, for example, the word “pancakes” had been used about 20 times between 9/11/08 and the end of 2013.

The most important thing about these types of graphs is the slope. Flat lines mean I wasn’t using that word at all. Steep slopes indicate I was writing that word pretty frequently in that period of time. I like looking at the 10 Words with this tool because you can see on any given day where I was in my relationship with a particular thing, person, idea, and so on. The cumulative effect of every single day is visualized and accounted for.

One more thing before we dive in: it will be useful to identify a few important milestones so we can better see how trends fit into the broader context of my last decade. I graduated from high school in May 2010 and from Valpo in May 2014. I then spent a year at Lehigh for grad school. After graduating in May 2015, I immediately started my job. The last big life change was moving to Chicago in May of 2017. I’ve drawn vertical lines marking the first two graduations. I may add more or other lines in future graphs if I believe they’re relevant, but otherwise I don’t want to create more visual clutter. (I already expect complaints about how horizontal gridlines are bad, but I actually think they’re useful in this case!)

Okay then! Let’s talk about my life-long love affair with pancakes.

For as long as I can remember, my mom would make pancakes on Sunday morning. I still have memories of being a little kid, probably no older than 5 or 6, wandering into my parents’ room at 7:00 AM, blanket in hand, and snuggling between them in bed until they were willing to make me breakfast. Eventually, my sister and I grew older and came to understand the value of sleeping in, at which point the roles reversed. We would be the ones woken up by my mother telling us to come downstairs and get them while they were still warm. This continued well into our college years and beyond. Sometimes it would be French Toast, and occasionally it wouldn’t happen at all, but by and large, Sunday mornings were pancake mornings.

So at least through the end of my high school years, I can pretty safely say I was eating pancakes on average about once a week. Looking at the slope of the graph, you might assume that my rate of pancake consumption remained the same through high school and college up to late 2013, at which point I suddenly began eating pancakes WAY more. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth! This is an important quirk of the 10 Words: the absence or infrequency of a word doesn’t necessarily correlate with the absence or infrequency of the thing it represents. And the explanation for this discrepancy often has to do with the basic law of supply and demand.

Even though I was probably eating pancakes once per week in high school, the word “pancakes” appears only six times in those first two years of 10 Words. When I started at Valpo in the fall of 2010, my breakfast started coming from the campus dining hall where I could get pancakes literally every morning if I so desired. And very often, I did so desire. I ramped up to eating pancakes at least a few times a week, but they were still mentioned in the 10 Words only a few times a year. But that makes sense: if eating pancakes is a relatively common event that consumes only a small amount of my time, I won’t spend one of my precious ten words on them. I’ll save it for something more unique and/or time consuming. I also drink water and brush my teeth every day, but I never mention that in the 10 Words.

So why the sudden increase in slope at the beginning of September 2013? Because that’s when I started my senior year at Valpo and started living off-campus. For the first time, I was living in an apartment with a proper kitchen, and–crucially–no meal plan. My access to ready-cooked pancakes on a regular basis had been cut off for the first time in my life. If I wanted pancakes, I would have to cook them myself. I wasn’t willing to dedicate time to this noble cause in the mornings, since I had 8 am classes. But somehow it became a sort of tradition among my Valpo family to turn pancakes into a common midnight snack on weekends. We literally had a pancake theme song that sounds like a circus march. I logged 12 pancakes in the 10 Words during that school year, and only one of them was on a Sunday.

And notice how immediately after I left Valpo, that slope decreases back to about what it was before senior year. At Lehigh, though I still had my own kitchen, I was missing two crucial ingredients that aren’t printed on the back of an Aunt Jemima’s box. The first, obviously, was spare time to cook big breakfasts, which was especially scarce in grad school. My Lehigh days were the first time since starting the 10 Words when I actually attended church on Sunday mornings rather than at night or on Saturdays, which meant it cut into prime pancake time. And the second was companions (etymological nod intended!) who were interested in eating breakfast food at weird hours of the day. So it just didn’t happen and the few mentions of pancakes in my Lehigh year were all at times when I was at home over breaks.

Finally, in May 2017, I moved into my own apartment again–this time without roommates–which again left me solely responsible for all my meals. I get up for work even earlier than I did for class, so there isn’t much cooking done during the week. But unlike in grad school, my weekends aren’t structured around finding quiet spaces to get homework done. I often have ample time to cook pancakes, so I often do. There’s no social pressure to be up at a particular time so I can eat with other people, nor am I obliged to make extra food for other roommates. So I’m willing and able to dedicate an outsize portion of my morning to cooking, eating, and cleanup, and I find that time is well spent. So the graph skyrockets as soon as I started regularly cooking pancakes for myself.

And that’s the key insight from this graph: Mom’s usual Sunday morning pancakes suddenly became appreciated enough to be 10 Words Worthy only after I had gone without them. While I may have enjoyed pancakes my entire life, it was only when I had to invest my own time into making them that I came to truly value pancakes. A pancake on your plate is worth two that aren’t even batter yet. And the same applies to many if not most things in life, like building relationships or learning to play an instrument. You get out what you put in.

Invest in breakfast food and each other, friends.

10 Years of 10 Words – FAQ

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This is Part 2 of the 10 Years of 10 Words series. You can find Part 1 here.

Before we dive into what the 10 Words actually say, I think it’s important to understand what exactly the 10 Words are, how and why they got started, a little bit about the process behind them, and what they mean to me. I offer my explanation in the format of a Q&A, since a lot of this story fits into questions I’ve answered before.

How long have you been doing this?
What made you start doing this?
Is there any significance in choosing to start on September 11th?
What do you write them on?
When do you write them?
Where do you keep them?
Do you always finish them on the same day?
How do you decide what makes it and what doesn’t?
Have you ever skipped a day?
What are the rules for what’s considered a word?
Do you ever break the rules?
How much of the 10 Words can you link back to a concrete memory years later?
Why do you keep doing this?
What do the 10 Words motivate you to keep doing?
When are you finally going to stop?

How long have you been doing this?
I began writing 10 words to summarize each day on September 11th, 2008.

What made you start doing this?
It was the third week of my junior year of high school, and I was thinking about the passage of time. Like the beginning of any school year, the first few days felt uniquely memorable as classes got started and we met new teachers and classmates, and readjusted to the school routine. But every year, by the time we got into the second week, all the days started to blend together. They were no longer unique, but mundane.

I thought back to my kindergarten classroom, where our teacher kept a long strip of paper high on the wall. Each day she’d add a number in bold, permanent marker to keep a count of the days of school (and presumably to teach us to count to larger numbers, since we were all five). Over the course of the year, the numbers stretched from the corner of the room all the way across the wall. On the 100th day, there would be a school-wide celebration with snacks and a parade of kids down the halls, each carrying their own display with 100 pieces like a jigsaw puzzle or a jar of pennies. The 100th day was different because we made it different. Now that I was becoming an young adult, why couldn’t I be a little more mindful about what makes every day different?

So at the beginning of the school year, I decided I was going to bring back counting the days of school. I wanted to have something I could do each day that would distinguish them, even if in a small way. At the same time, I was also thinking about actually writing down memories to preserve them–like in a diary or journal–which I had never done before. I thought having a unique memory from each day would keep the weeks and months from blending together into a haze of mundanity like it always does. But I wanted a balance between creating too large a writing commitment to be able to uphold on a daily basis and writing something too short to remain meaningful in the long-term. Eventually I settled on a nice, round (and arbitrary) 10 words and just started doing it.

Is there any significance in choosing to start on September 11th?
Not consciously, no. I had been thinking about starting something like this in the week or so leading up to it and just needed a push to get started. If anything, I think that push came in the form of Free Will. And by Free Will, I of course mean the song by Rush.

You have to understand: I was 16 and obsessed with classic rock radio. My Junior English class was spending first period in the computer lab working on some short essays. For some reason I was writing about choice, decisions, and consequences, and the lyric “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice” from Free Will was on my mind. I became determined to directly use that line–unquoted–in my paper just to see if I could do it. And this apparently made my day so much that even at 7:40 am I knew I would have something worth writing 10 words about. (Simpler times.)

So for Thursday, September 11th, 2008, the very first 10 words were this:

[text: Niel Peart likes English, My concerts are all free! Yay!”]

(Neil Peart is the drummer and lyricist for Rush, and yes, I spelled his name wrong. Also, the top says Day 11 of School.)

I think the remark about concerts refers to successfully requesting off from my job at the grocery store the nights we had band concerts. And I burned a word at the end with “Yay!” because I had nothing else to say after nine words–arguably the exclamation point after “free!” already conveyed a sense of relief and excitement. I didn’t know what I was doing yet.

So like I said, it was mostly the Rush lyrics that were the catalyst. I suppose it’s possible that the somber, reflective mood, the refrains of “never forget,” and coverage of memorial services in the media on 9/11/08 subconsciously influenced me to take the step of actually writing something down in an effort to preserve my own memories. But as best I can remember, I had little to no exposure to that kind of media coverage that day. I’ve always felt strange “celebrating” the admittedly self-centered anniversary of the 10 Words on the same day my country recalls the horrific tragedy and exalts the countless acts of altruism that occurred on that day in 2001. I remind myself that many people celebrate birthdays and wedding anniversaries on that date, as they rightly should. But I can’t resolve whether I can claim coincidence on this and I can’t completely absolve myself of conflict. I pause. I reflect. And I keep writing.

What do you write them on?
Long before I began the 10 Words, my aunt began a tradition of gifting me a puzzle-a-day calendar for Christmas every year. Those sheets have blank space to write on the back and already have the date on the front, so they were perfect. I suppose at some point I could have switched to something where I could fit more than one day per page, like a calendar notebook. But I like that the tradition continues, and I like that you can stack all the sheets nearly 18 inches high. And most importantly, I’m a creature of habit, so page-a-day calendars it remains.

When do you write them?
Writing the 10 Words is one of the last things I do before I turn out the lights to go to sleep. I want to make sure I’m considering the entirety of my experience of that day.

Where do you write them?
I binder clip the calendar sheets into sets of 100 days and put them in a drawer in my desk dedicated to the 10 Words, journals, and other personal memorabilia.

Do you always finish them on the same day?
I did early on, but for years it’s been the norm to write about 6 or 7 words and finish when I return the next night. I usually need a little more perspective on the events of the day to decide what makes it and what doesn’t.

How do you decide what makes it and what doesn’t?
Basically, I ask myself “What did I do today?” and write down the first things that come to mind. I have two main goals: 1) capture what set this day apart from any other, and 2) accurately reflect what I spent the most time doing. The order there is important: I start with novelty before thinking about quantity of time. I find this is a good method to end up with 10 words that describe the most important components of my life.

Have you ever skipped a day?
There have been a handful of times where traveling, spending the night away from home, or other unusual circumstances have caused the routine to slip my mind. I’ve always gone back and done it soon after, so I don’t have any missing days for all 10 years. There are, however, a few days where I forgot I stopped at only 8 or 9 words and had no idea what else to write by the time I noticed weeks or months later. Rather than add something to it like “food,” I just let them be incomplete and gave myself a pass.

What are the rules for what’s considered a word?
Okay, nobody has actually ever asked me this. But I did run into situations in the first few months where I needed to decide how I would treat syntax, formatting, and symbols going forward so I could remain consistent. So I started adding to this list on the fly whenever I made one of those decisions:

I haven’t updated this list in at least five or six years, and now that I’m re-reading this, the rules as they exist in my head today are a little more complete. So here are (I think!) all the rules as I practice them currently:

  1. There must be exactly ten words. No more or less.
  2. Acronyms, symbols, numerals, and timestamps count as one word each.
    • Specifically, the plus symbol (+) counts as one word because it just means “and.”
    • “Symbols” is intentionally open ended. I rarely use this rule, but I’ve drawn the infinity symbol, Greek letters, and a dotted-eighth-sixteenth note, for example.
    • The trick with acronyms is they can be used to cram multiple words in, but it’s on me to remember what they mean or they lose their meaning. Sometimes you don’t remember what “TEWWG” means eight years later so you have to use Google to find out you meant Their Eyes Were Watching God.
  3. Contractions (words with apostrophes) don’t count as multiple words.
  4. $ and ₵ symbols attached to a word (or a number) don’t count as separate words. Used alone, they count as one word each.
  5. Bold, italics, underlining, strikethroughs, and punctuation and quotation marks do not affect the word count.
  6. Drawing arrows from one word to another does not affect the word count.
  7. Hyphenated words are counted separately, unless the hyphenation exists to make a pun, in which case it all counts as one word.
    • I seem to have applied this rule inconsistently when it’s a single letter or number hyphenated with a word, like in 2012 when I thought emails was spelled “e-mails.”

Sometimes the way I’ll arrange the words on the sheet with arrows conveys a causal or temporal relationship that would be missing from a simple list of words. The rules are intended to maintain consistency, discourage cheating, prevent the task from being too difficult, and promote creativity.

Do you ever break the rules?
I’ve inconsistently applied the hyphen rules and accidentally ended up with too few or too many words. I wouldn’t say I intentionally break them outright, but I do occasionally bend them.

For example, sometimes I’ll run into a combination of letters and numbers I want to use but isn’t covered in the rules, and I’ll just let myself use it. Example: ASCE 7-10 is a building code document about minimum design loads used by structural engineers. There have been times where I spent a significant part of my day thinking about it and wanted to mention it. Technically, since numerals and acronyms count as one word each, and hyphenated words are counted separately, ASCE 7-10 should be three words. But that’s obnoxious and burdensome–nobody actually thinks of the title as three words. So I’ll write it as “ASCE7” or “ASCE710” and just consider it to be one word.

How much of the 10 Words can you link back to a concrete memory years later?
Way, way less than half. Probably not even 15 percent.

I set out trying to preserve at least one unique memory from every day, but the great irony is that I ended up learning not every memory is worth saving. I have over 3,653 days of 10 Words. There are words about vacations and weddings, graduations and birthdays, band concerts, movies, late-night shenanigans, and deep frustrations and disappointments. But there are many, many more words about completely ordinary day-to-day obligations that were important at the time but whose specifics I’ll never remember again.

And that’s fine.

A few months after starting the 10 Words, I was researching architect and innovator Buckminster Fuller for my Architecture/CAD class. Fuller was best-known for popularizing the geodesic dome. But get this: he also kept a detailed record of his activities every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. He left behind an absolutely massive collection: tens of thousands of personal papers, receipts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and sketches that were compiled into what he called the Dymaxion Chronofile. His life may be the most thoroughly documented in human history.

I looked at this–perhaps the most extreme example of memory preservation ever attempted–and naturally I compared it to what I was doing. A small part of me was disappointed I could never live up to something of that scale. But a larger part of me recognized I didn’t want to spend that amount of time and effort trying to preserve the past. Within the first year, I realized my 10 Word microjournals weren’t going to be very effective if my goal was to remember the highlights of every single day. If I really were dedicated to that goal, I could have changed course and started writing much lengthier and descriptive accounts. But I didn’t.

When I saw a photo of floor-to-ceiling shelves of Fuller’s documents, I was reminded that I didn’t want to create more journal content than I could conceivably ever find the time to look back through. I felt reaffirmed that setting a word limit was a good idea. And I realized it would be easy to take action while the project was still relatively young to make it more practical to read after the sheets of paper started to number in the hundreds or thousands.

Just 11 days after reading about Fuller, I started transferring my handwritten 10 Words into Excel. I named the spreadsheet “Chrono.xlsx” as a tribute to him. It was more than a practical reading format and a digital backup. It was a way to look at the data I was creating as a whole. After my memories fade and I’m left with thousands of vague words, even the words I don’t remember still tell stories. Their usage will trend in and out over time, and looking at them in the aggregate could actually offer more insight than each of them individually. Just because a particular use of a word isn’t memorable doesn’t mean it isn’t still important.

I’ve long since given up on trying to remember everything. Life in the aggregate looks a lot like how you’d choose to remember it anyways– the most important and unusual stuff naturally rises to the top and everything else is buried until for one reason or another you’re handed a shovel. I’d like to think writing the 10 Words ensures I get even a few more shovels.

Why do you keep doing this?
Lots of reasons, but primarily because I like doing it! I like that I have one long line I can trace all the way back through the beginning of my career, through grad school, through college, and through the last two years of high school. I like that I can sometimes use this to remind me when doctors appointments happened, when illnesses began, and when friendships first started.

At first, I wanted to see how long I could keep the streak going. That is still a motivator, albeit kind of a silly one. But having done it for so long, it’s become kind of like breathing. Now that it’s become such an established constant in my life, I think a better question is, “What do the 10 Words motivate you do keep doing?”

Okay, what do the 10 Words motivate you to keep doing?
The 10 Words give me a reason to stop and be aware. It gives me a reason to think about what’s important and how those things change. It gives me a reason to keep trying to know myself. And it provides me a sense structure and organization, giving me guidance and the means to reflect on how who I was became who I am, and how who I am is becoming who I’m going to be.

When are you finally going to stop?
I have no plans to stop for the foreseeable future.

10 Years of 10 Words – Introduction

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As of today, I’ve been writing 10 words to summarize each day for 10 years.

I’ve never written publicly in any detail about this, the longest running project of my life. I’ve shared a handful of days with a small number of friends, but essentially nobody but me has any idea what’s in it, let alone what it means and what stories it tells about the last ten years. Today, that changes.

Over the last decade, I’ve spent an hour every few months typing the 10 Words into a spreadsheet, building a searchable database of what I thought was most important about each and every day. But only recently did I start to dive in, analyze it, and find story arcs and trends that make up the one big narrative called My Life. If there was ever a way to write about the 10 Words while maintaining control over my own privacy, I’ve always known the spreadsheet was the answer.

So over the next several weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of blog posts that explain and reflect on what I found most interesting and revelatory about the data. One question I’m often asked is “What have you learned by doing this?” I hope what I’ve been working on will make for a satisfying answer and a totally unique kind of autobiography.

So stay tuned!