Where Art Thou?

Where Art Thou?

Tapping my foot against the desk with mounting agitation, I take another gulp of coffee. Frantically, I flip through the highlighted pages, then glance at the clock.
4 a.m.
That sinking feeling hits my stomach — it's too late.
With only this art history book to study, I’m completely unprepared. It’s like one of those nightmares where you show up for the final exam only to realize you forgot to go to class all semester. Except — it’s not a dream. I really did skip most of my classes.
So, alone on a starless fall night, I race through the pages at a full sprint. Centuries pass in seconds as artists rise and vanish — styles flare, then fade.
Echoes from a half-forgotten night ripple back: racing shadows, leaves rotting away.
This time, I don’t run in fear from mortality — I run with fervor toward a dreamed of artistic immortality.

When I leave the exam defeated, I already know I failed. But oddly, I feel unburdened to search for the essence of my art. I start with mathematics. The pure, eternal beauty of geometry feels like a rock upon which to build. I head to the college library and begin searching the stacks. On my way to the mathematics section, I pass by Godel, Escher, Bach.

As if revisiting an old friend, I pause to reminisce. I turn to page 276 randomly. There, Douglas Hofstader recounts the long-standing discomfort with Euclid's fifth postulate—that parallel lines remain parallel at infinity. The trouble is, there's no way to prove it. Then, in the 19th century, two Russian mathematicians independently challenged the postulate. One envisions elliptic geometry, where parallel lines curve inward and meet. The other imagines hyperbolic geometry, where they curve outward, diverging forever.

Both are internally consistent. Both valid.

Shock waves ripple through the mathematics community of the time. For centuries, Euclid’s system had seemed unshakable; the only description of physical reality. But then there are three ways of doing it.

I am shaken to the core also, for my own reasons. If there are multiple geometries, does that imply multiple realities, and if geometry can change, then it isn't immutable. It cannot be eternal.

The ground I was searching for collapses beneath me, and I’m enveloped by water once more. I feel adrift—unmoored—until a chance encounter sets me off racing in a new dark direction.

I’m visiting one of the guys from the track team—Chris—when I notice a book on his desk: The Norton Anthology of British Literature. On the cover, a painting grips me like a fever dream. A screaming pope, mouth gaping wide, colors distorted blue-black. I pick it up to discover the artist's identity: Francis Bacon.

In my gut, I know.

I want to scream like that because everyone who suffers screams.

So, I abandon my quest for the grounding order of mathematics and embrace the chaotic tempest of figurative expressionism. I enroll in a painting class, gain access to the college studio, and start working late into the night. With rags, oils, and my bare hands, I smear and twist paint into distorted images. Bacon's influence is clear, but where he expressed the horrors of war, violence, anger, and terror, I try to express the horrors of my childhood: fragmentation, anger, and fear.

I am not prepared for what emerges.

Emotions like aquatic monsters swim up from the watery depths of my subconscious—raw, broken, terrifying. I see barely identifiable fractured faces, torn and tattered, disconnected eyes that cannot unsee, and frozen mouths twisted in silent screams.

I panic. I stop going to the studio and dropped the class. Blown by winter winds like snow, I drift.

On a bitterly cold day, between lectures, I duck into Bryant Library to warm my hands and escape my past. I wander the stacks aimlessly, feeling lost and hopeless.

Ready to give up and head back to the dorm, something catches my eye; an unassuming volume left on a nearby table: Polyhedron Models for the Classroom by Magnus J. Wenninger.
I inhale and hold my breath. On the cover are six impossibly beautiful shapes.
So perfect. So symmetric. So harmonious.
I smile. A sense of centering ripples through me.
I flip through the pages, tracing the delicate geometry of dodecahedra, rhombicuboctahedra — these aren’t just shapes; they’re revelations. I need to make them. I need to hold them in my hands to know they’re real.

I check the book out and run home.

That very morning, I began a ritual that would last for decades. I trace the nets of polygons, cut them out, fold them carefully, and glue the edges. My desk is a mess of paper and glue. But when I finish the first model—a perfect truncated icosidodecahedron—I stare at it in wonderment and awe.

In a world of death and decay, it seems impossible that something so perfect, so pure, could exist.
Yet I have found it — a kind of eternity like a still point at the center of my being from which I can build.