So, Halloween is great. In every way and for all ages. It is an equal-opportunity funployer. Trick-or-treating on the Lawn, as I hope you all know from personal experience, is one of the best of the University's modern traditions. Of course, it says something odd about us that we can do an event for four years and have it sink so far into our civic soul that it becomes traditional and thus, ipso facto, incontestable. That's a whole different subject, though, and I think I've already written that column.
So instead, let me talk about Halloween for another moment. Trick-or-treating on the Lawn is delightful because all these hordes of ill-tempered children (many of whom are so young that the roaring chaos horrifies them into incredulous screams) and tromping packs of parents come thundering down both sides of the Lawn, demanding candy and gifts from everyone they see and threatening violence to those who can't satisfy their insatiable desires.
You get to see an extraordinary variety of child costumes, too. Many of them dress as you'd expect them to, largely, in variations on a theme of pirates, witches, Harry Potter and various kinds of animal life. There was an odd concentration of Cleopatra costumes, I'm told, which you wouldn't necessarily expect -- given the climate of moral indignation surrounding the midterm elections, you might reasonably be surprised to see parents dressing their children as an unusually famous hooker.
But that was pretty run-of-the-mill -- there was a kid dressed as Castro. Honestly.
Thus, the Lawn was, as it often is, a spectacle Tuesday, a spectacle which swelled even broader with the addition of pug dogs and heavily pregnant women and glow necklaces and Play-Doh, which I really enjoyed, although I don't know how much the children were delighted by it, given that they were expecting to get a haul of candy orders of magnitude larger than anything I could have hoped to net in my prospecting days. Not to mention that the work-reward ratio is absurdly low. Back in my day, we actually had to walk from house to house, struggling through heavy shrubbery and the standards of odd old people to obtain our precious bits of chocolate glory. So maybe it was in fact a good idea to have at least one non-sugar product on the Lawn.
All of this aside, though, Halloween is great for many reasons more. The Celtic festival of Samhain, from which it originally derived, marked the conclusion of summer and the turn into the austerity and sacrifice of the dead months of the winter. This alternation from light to dark, from activity to retirement, was intimately associated with a sense of threshold-ness -- the day was one of the days when the dead and the living were thought to be in closer communion than in the everyday.
I haven't seen the restless spirits of long-dead professors or University mascots stomping around Grounds, so I figure we're safe on that score. Still, the idea of Halloween as the day that marks the distance and the deep connection between our ideas of different times and kinds of life is a pretty interesting thing when you hold it up as a lens for the frolics on our Lawn. The confrontation between three generations is nowhere as acute, as parents and their little ones briefly possess a space which, at all other times, belongs consummately to our in-between demographic. We don't talk about this, of course, because it's not particularly cool or tough to do so, but that doesn't change the fact that those who go to watch the madness on the Lawn universally feel a little otherworldliness about the scene.
Nor does the tension of our unspoken idea of Halloween fail to change our behavior. We wear costumes, sure, because it's normal and offers a chance for people to show off their wit or their bodies, depending on which attribute they feel more comfortable with. But also, by stripping ourselves of the Polos or loose jeans which define our workday self, we, too, can pass for a moment through the briefly-thin veil that divides our lunatic Grounds from the seductive space on the other side of the fire, the place you always want to leap into when the pin-prick pressures of the normal cycle grow just too much to bear.
Which is why, my friends, I love Halloween: Because it lets us stop being ourselves for just a day. And that's something we all need. Enjoy November -- weather should get wild.
Connor's column runs bi-weekly on Thursdays. He can be reached at sullivan@cavalierdaily.com.
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