Keep it Burning

Night of Fire was good

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The Classical Roots Program is one of those things that’s difficult to describe but easy to understand. If you try to sum it up, you will struggle, but once you see it in person it all makes sense. Why, for instance, would a student agriculture program host an event with bonfires, s’mores, and Olivia Rodrigo covers? One way to get an answer to this question would be to attend the event, which spoke for itself as a worthwhile endeavor. Another way would be to consider the value of embodied experiences.

It’s true to the point of being trite that the modern student is starved for moments of community. The data is in, and it tells us that there is nothing “social” at all in social media, that the whole industry is linked to depression, and that its organizers are no more concerned for a teenager’s welfare than a cigarette company would be: it’s all about the monetization of a child’s attention. Yet to state these things isn’t to present a positive alternative. Nor is it helpful to wax nostalgic about the good old days when we had no phones at all and entertained ourselves by stealing beers from local restaurants or hopping trains. The past is behind us, and we need to work out what school—and by extension, life—is going to look like for our young people in the future. We need to ask ourselves what we’re going to encourage them to pursue.

The Classical Roots Program hosted Night of Fire based on the assumption that our solutions to these strange, isolated times need not be very complicated. As we planned a fall event for our high school and alumni, our mantra was “Give the people what they want.” If you’ve hosted more than one Christmas party in your life, you’ll have learned that no fancy Pinterest recipe, no baked brie or twisted puff-pastry delight, will ever be as welcome as some meatballs you pulled out of the freezer and threw into a crockpot with a jar of marinara and a spoonful of jam. Sometimes you just have to play the hits. And that’s exactly what we did: campfires, cider, hot cocoa, and American Singles, the best student band that our school has ever seen. The air was crisp, a gray moon was on the rise, the smoke hung in the still night, and the people were pleased. They had gotten what they wanted: a chance to get warm, eat well, be outside, and talk to people.

It’s certainly something we’ll do again—in fact, I’ve already been asked if we could host a similar event around Christmas. If I can squeeze a little more funding out of the administration, I’d be very happy to do so, because the thrill of simplicity, the sense of the present moment vividly lived, and the satisfaction of marking the seasons well, all that is as vital as it ever was to the human experience. Classical Roots, in all its quirky and sometimes indescribable hybridity, is about creating spaces for people. Sometimes those spaces are physical, like a garden or a pond. And sometimes they’re carved out of time.

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