“It seems both 

especially easy 

and especially 

hard to have 

open hearts in 

college. We want 

to be known for 

who we are, but 

we also wonder: 

Who are we?”

Wednesday, January 9, 2019// The Statement
6B

“I’m just an animal looking for a home and / share the 
same space for a minute or two.”
I think the most tender, supreme pleasures of friend-
ship and community come when we acknowledge the 
shared things (God, the Talking Heads) that make us feel 
our own expansiveness. Still, it is — and I say this self-con-
sciously — far easier for me to understand Jeffrey May’s 
exhilaration than it is for me to imagine Mori or Thomp-
son’s.
When I listened to The String Cheese Incident’s cover 
of “This Must Be the Place” on Spotify, I thought 
it was just all right. May even admits that he 
didn’t initially think much of the rendition. But 
as the music began to build upon its own energy, 
something changed for him.
“As the last verse commenced, I started to feel 
as though I was possessed by an outside power, 
and my whole body swelled with an alien energy. 
With this possession came a feeling of empower-
ment and a sense of peace and calm — everything 
was finally alright,” May writes. He hesitated to 
tell anyone about this experience: “I thought that 
they would have no understanding of what I had 
seen and experienced: a chance encounter with 
what I could only desperately call the divine, the 
transcendent. Had I found God?”
I’ll spoil the thesis here: May decides that it 
wasn’t God. Instead, he thinks it was collective 
effervescence, a theory proposed by sociolo-
gist Emile Durkheim. Collective effervescence 
is Durkheim’s way of explaining the heightened 
emotions that result from participation in a group 
activity. He argues that being in a group of people 
who are all on the same page — thinking the same 
thing, doing the same thing, hearing or singing 
the same song — can result in a sense of group 
identification so electrifying that it feels other-
worldly.
The word effervescence first came into use in 
the late seventeenth century. It comes from the 
Latin word effervescere, which means “to boil 
over” (ex- meaning “out” plus fervere, which 
means “to boil”). It wasn’t until the 1800s that the 
word took on its current meaning: vivacity, live-
liness. I like to imagine emotions bubbling and 
boiling over and making a mess. If only we could 
always let our interior life express itself this 
plainly: a temperamental liquid, prone to spilling. 
 
This might all seem only tangentially related 
to Good News, but as someone who isn’t reli-
gious, the idea of collective effervescence helps 
me understand why participation in this group 
is so important to its members. College neces-
sarily involves finding out which communities 
or friends speak to our multitudes, our peculiari-
ties and incongruities. We discover which groups 
draw out our most interesting selves — which 
ones make us feel effervescent — and which 
groups we find tedious and limiting. In Good 
News, members are allowed to be Christians, college stu-
dents and singers, all at once. It’s the recognition of the 
overlap between these identities that makes the group so 
special to its members.
***
I began this article with the intention of surveying 
niche clubs and organizations on campus. University tour 
guides tout the huge selection of student organizations — 
more than 2,000 — and I wanted to write about the most 
unique of the bunch. I thought I knew what the core of the 
story was going to be: that there are many, many clubs on 
campus, all of them addressing some specific intersection 
of identity and interest, all of them strange and silly and 
quirky and important. I interviewed the president of Craft 
Beer Club, the co-founder of Game of Thrones Club, the 

president of Cubing Club and the founder of CurlTalk. I 
couldn’t seem to go beyond the surface of the questions I 
was asking, though.
It wasn’t until I spoke to Mori and Thompson that I 
realized what these clubs have in common is not simply 
their specificity — it is the fact of their communality. Sing-
ing, praying, drinking beer, watching Game of Thrones, 
solving a Rubik’s Cube, celebrating natural hair: These 
things can all be done alone. There must be something 
special, then, about doing them in a group.
Fall of my freshman year, I joined Leim, the Univer-
sity’s only Irish dance group. I did Irish dance for about 
eight years growing up, and I wanted to keep dancing in 
college. As a kid, we mostly did solo dancing. Ceilis (group 
dances) were reserved for special competitions and our 
annual Christmas shows. But in Leim, we exclusively did 
Ceilis, and it reinvented Irish dance for me. I was in Leim 
for just one year, but it was exactly what I needed at the 
time: a tangible tie to my childhood, a group with whom I 
could feel identified beyond explanation.
In Leim, we didn’t talk while we were dancing. We 
were silent, hearing the music, feeling it, remembering the 
steps, moving our bodies together to make something big-
ger than ourselves. We held hands in a circle. We moved 
in and out and formed a line. Sometimes, before we got 
tired and cranky and forgot what we were supposed to be 
doing, the separation between our bodies and the music 
seemed to shrink to nothing. The sound was inside us; we 
needed it in order to dance and it needed us in order to 
play.
I may be biased, but Irish music seems to open itself up 
particularly well to this sense of interconnectedness. How 
delicately layered are its intricacies, how clean the sliding 
notes — the kind of sound that longs for movement. For 
me, there has always been a pure joy in the way the song 
fits the dance, in the body memory it inhabits. It engen-
ders certainty. It speaks us into conviction. Surely this 
can’t be so different from singing Christian a cappella.
***
James Verini wrote in the New Yorker that “This Must 
Be the Place” is the song that explains the Talking Heads. 
“It’s been covered by Arcade Fire, MGMT, and the jam 
band The String Cheese Incident, among others,” he 
writes. “There are books named for it. Hip brides march 
down the aisle to it. It’s quoted in mawkish editorials.”
What he means, I think, is that “This Must Be the 
Place” has become synonymous with a sort of ironic senti-
mentality, a wistful self-awareness that feels particularly 
easy to pin on young people (and people who miss being 
young). This article might very well be the mawkish edi-
torial that Verini dismisses. But I’d much rather be mawk-
ish than apathetic. I’m thinking of Leslie Jamison when 
she wrote, “I want our hearts to be open.” It seems both 
especially easy and especially hard to have open hearts 
in college. We want to be known for who we are, but we 
also wonder: Who are we? Perhaps having open hearts is 
the problem and the solution; we find those who make our 
hearts feel open by first opening them.
Humans are pack animals, college students even more 
so. We want to figure it out. A pizza is ordered; a final is 
failed; we call home. We call each other. We try to find 
the people who will help us move forward into the future 
and for whom we are able to do the same — the ones who 
bolster our certainty that the world is endlessly capable of 
containing whatever we can manifest.
Verini writes, “‘This must be the place’—it’s not a state-
ment of certainty, is it? It’s not ‘This is the place.’ It’s more 
‘This is what someone said the place was.’ It’s even a little 
desperate. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if this isn’t the place.’”
College: Someone once told us that this was the place, 
and now we’re trying to see exactly what kind of place 
that is, and where within it we are supposed to fit. This 
must be the place — but only because we’re here together, 
because it’s all happening right now and this is where.

From Page 5B

