A Philadelphia Filly with La Flemme, or To Eat and Be Satisfied
Resist the stagnancy of college life! // In my headphones: Magdalena Bay—Image (2024)
This article was originally published in The Dartmouth, in its April 30, 2025 issue.
A filly is a female horse who is too young to be called a mare. That is how I feel, basking in the sunshine on this terrace at an unnamed university outside Philadelphia, visiting a friend. The academic references are the same across college consortiums, as is the language for expressing intellectual attitudes and the student’s routine on a slow Sunday morning. I feel young. I feel refreshed by the breeze. The trees are green. It is already spring in the mid-Atlantic.
The drive into Philadelphia from this remote collegiate outpost is similar to the drive into Boston from Hanover. When you board the train, you are excited, maybe freshly showered, enthusiastic about the vitality of the city. When you arrive, you are caught off-guard by the strangeness of it — the number of people, the youngness of the babies, the variance of smells. You are frightened by the rundown, soulless apartment blocks, the impossibly intimidating windows of glossy corporations. When you leave you are exhausted, tired, maybe your head hurts. You want to curl up in your room and do something mindless.
Philadelphia is comparable to Boston in many ways. It is a cradle of American ideology that reached its heyday over two hundred years ago; it is likewise not New York City, and it is a place for students suffering from la flemme — lethargy — to go when campus gets too claustrophobic.
My friend’s college campus is much the same as mine. On the side of one stone building, a placard reads, “Dare to be wise.” On the back of a stall in the bathroom, a yellow laminate sign reads, succinctly, “Don’t flush:” followed by a list of inappropriate throw-aways and then “money, hopes, dreams.” A boy with blonde hair and a backwards baseball cap walks into the intercultural center and exclaims to his friend, “Woah. I’ve never been in here.”
It is well and truly springtime, and the green is so verdant it is almost yellow across the clear blue sky. The wind rattles the trees and they shake and dance; their branches move while their trunks stand firm. The Collegiate Gothic bell tower, too, stands firm. What to do on a Sunday afternoon when you have homework to turn in, fast? You throw up your hands, and you say, “I do not want to be here. There’s nothing to do. I don’t feel like doing anything.”
Why don’t you ask yourself where you do want to be, what you can do, what you do want to do?
There is a group of students walking to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia from this sleepy campus tomorrow at noon. What will they do when they arrive, I wonder? I saw the bell through a glass window yesterday, and it is clear to me they cannot see it freely, unless they wait in a very long line. Will they glance at the bell through the window as I did? Will they take a photograph of it, in front of it, or beside it?
Perhaps they will walk past it, around Independence Hall, and through the leafy comfort of the nearby neo-Georgian neighborhood to reach South Street, where they will eat Venezuelan food and rifle through thrifted clothes, as I did. Maybe after they begin to feel their face coat with the sweat of a thrifted dress’s past life, they will eat a chocolate-chip-walnut cookie at Famous Fourth Street Deli. Maybe they will be charmed by the self-mocking signs in the bathroom or the pretty, doe-eyed waitress who offers them another cup of coffee. Then they could walk back through Washington Square Park — one of William Penn’s five original squares! — and admire the cute, medium-sized dogs sitting on leashes attached to their owners as they try to decipher what retired men are reading these days.
Maybe they will take the train home and read about the world in their dorm rooms. Hopefully they will read and think about the world. And then what will they do? Will they go and eat dinner in the dining hall with their friends, all the while dreaming of eating something else? Will they feel grateful to eat in a collegiate dining hall in the first place? The dining hall is a valorous thing — at least it can be, if one makes it so. The problem is simply that this particular group, the one returning from their visit to the Liberty Bell, does not like their food, even though they are grateful for it. Perhaps they are opposed to the inequality in being served. Perhaps they are tired of the repetition. They eat it still.
But might they say they do not like the food and then do something about it? Might they refuse to dine there, even though the world says to eat and be satisfied? Where might they dine instead? Might they cook for themselves?
Eating is much like studying. At dinner, we talk about a life beyond the Gothic Revival walls.
What is the point of learning? Is it to actualize abstract ideas into thoughts? And then what? Where do those thoughts go? What do they do? Do they have to do anything at all? So much talk of hindsight and foresight leaves me wondering what is left in the present.
It’s easy to say you don’t like something. It’s harder to pinpoint what you love. It’s even harder to achieve what you love. What good is our learning in the absence of action? The human experience does not reside alone in the mind. It lies in the soles of our feet too.
Professors tell me that I am a filly. I do not know a good thing when I see it. Perhaps that is true. But I do know a bad thing when I feel it, and if I refuse it, then so much the better for me. The filly is meant to race, to jump the Gothic fences. La flemme does not breed strong horses — passion does.
Excellent column- liked especially the line about human experience also being in the soles of your feet.