When I tell people my name, people often ask if I’m named after the city, or, if they’re particularly bookish, the library. I’m actually named after neither. For a long time before I was born, my mother couldn’t figure out what to name me. She really liked Caitlin as a middle name, but had no idea what would be good for my actual name.
This summer, I lived at the very northern end of the 1 train, in Riverdale, Bronx, New York, place names I’d unpack one by one like parts of matroyshka doll whenever anyone asked. Obviously, getting anywhere and back was a little bit of a pain but it was really fine, very feasible, and especially once my roommate and I figured out the quick changes, the express trains, and the fastest bus routes, the commute became a challenge, an adventure, a training in swiftness and staying cool.
I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, a quiet settlement eight miles from Copley Square. The Marathon’s route follows Commonwealth Avenue through Newton into Boston. My house is a block from the Marathon’s 20-mile marker, in the middle of Heartbreak Hill, the most notorious of a series of four steep ascents that runners must endure as they pass through the city.
If there were a billboard advertising you, what would it say?” The final question of the Residential College Adviser application was the one I thought about the most, and I was actually rather proud of my answer. While the application was … Read More
There is nothing original about my name: Nathan Lang Eckstein. The titles are borrowed, purloined from three contexts, two deceased, and bequeathed upon a blank slate demanding some context. My names are people, so let me introduce you.
Just as I started to really enjoy Princeton, I’m going away—for a long time. When I arrived in September, I was a freshman, but not particularly fresh. I’d returned from a gap year that had me doing almost nothing, and certainly nothing that benefited other people particularly (unless you count the two hundred forty Chinese children whom I taught English for a semester—for a decent amount of cash).
I call myself African. Despite being raised in New York, I was born in Ghana and was raised culturally Ghanaian. I understand the language, Twi, though I don’t speak it very well, which people (mostly Ghanaians) point out and make fun of me for.
I recently ran a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles. This is the longest distance that I have ever run. I ran cross country and track all throughout high school, and workouts would foray into the ten mile range once in a while, but, as would soon be reinforced, that extra 3.1 is far from negligible. More to the point, the most I had run at once as a collegiate was only a tad over six, and this was nine days before the half marathon. What I am getting at is the following: this half marathon was a significant undertaking for which I was resoundingly underprepared.
That summer, we set out partially for a family vacation, but also in search for inspiration. The destination was the “west,” or what Dad called “the wild,” far from our oak and pine tree-covered corner of the Northeast. It was my mothers’ idea; she, the architect-turned-artist of the family, decided that in the desolation of the sun-baked clay, she and I would find the subject of a new series of paintings. Setting out in our rented car, we didn’t really know what to expect—would there really be “deserts” and “caverns” like in the westerns, little shacks along the road where old men drank beer and splayed out their feet on the porch, gazing out across dust and childhood dreams?
I would like to sincerely thank you for coming to campus on Thursday, April 18, 2013 to give a lecture titled, “Advice from a Princeton Mother.” Your lecture helped me a great deal. It helped me to understand exactly what is so dangerous about anti-feminist, slut-shaming women like you, and why the backlash you received after your now infamous letter to the editor in the Daily Princetonian was not only deserved, but important to the future of American women.
Probably wearing an oversized baseball cap and a big, sloppy grin, at three years old I stepped onto a characteristically purple and yellow car on the Old Colony Line Railroad with my father. The line extends from Boston down to Kingston, my hometown, and Plymouth, where the rock is, both about an hour away from the city. After decades out of service, the line had just been rebuilt, thanks in part to the concrete my dad poured.
Reluctantly back home with my parents two months after deciding to take time off from Princeton, I wasn’t exactly in prime form. My uncontrollably racing mind had left me sleepless for weeks. The process of peeling away the suffocating layers of anxiety accumulated at prep schools and college was proving to be agonizingly slow.
