FEATURE
Hannah Arendt, Biographical Thinking, and the Kitchen “The Human Condition” and life at Swarthmore by Jonathan Kay
D
uring my freshman year, I struggled to understand exactly why I was depressed. It wasn’t any single issue so much as a claustrophobic malignity etched into every part of life on campus; my unhappiness was vague, directionless, and constant. Simple things were complicated, and easy things were hard. Part of the problem was that there was no escape. When the pressure threatened to overwhelm me, I had nowhere to go. Stress is cumulative, and over the course of the year, my daily routine—hours spent in libraries, eating at Sharples— became unbearable. So I moved to the Barn. At the time, it was what passed for Swarthmore’s “alternative” community, which mostly meant that it had a higher concentration of stick-and-pokes, smokers, and Soc-Anth majors. Having decided that summer that I liked to cook—or, at least, that I wanted to be the kind of person who liked to cook—I leapt off the meal plan and began making dinner every night. There was something vital about cooking, something unmediated by campus life or my own anxieties. Cooking wasn’t “productive.” It contributed nothing to my resumé or my aspirations of who I wanted to be. It had no place in my usual triage of academic responsibilities—but each time I chose to do it, it was a personal commitment to rediscover a life outside of work. Carrying groceries the half-block walk past the edge of Worth to the Barn took me miles from campus. My schoolwork, however, still demanded the same feverish intensity. Cooking was just another extracurricular, one on which it was hard to justify spending several hours a week when I had deadlines to meet. I started mooching off of friends’ meal swipes, became a regular at Bamboo Bistro. What started as a torrent of shopping lists and dinner dates 4
SEPTEMBER 2019 SWARTHMORE REVIEW
had become a trickle by the spring. By my junior fall, I hardly cooked at all.
In “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt argues that our contemporary world suffers from a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between the private life of the household and the public life of politics. The same problem of confused boundaries underpinned my freshman year depression.
Cooking wasn’t “productive.” It had no place in my usual triage of academic responsibilities—but each time I chose to do it, it was a personal commitment to rediscover a life outside of work. Arendt’s central concern is the construction of a “common world” through which humans could relate to one another and themselves. Without this shared world of physical artifacts, art, and even memories, we exist in isolation, unable to relate to each other, alienated from the world. Without that relation and togetherness, we lose something fundamental to our humanity. She saw the classical Greek understanding of politics as key to maintaining this shared world. To the Greeks, politics was more than lawmaking—it was an attempt to find glory and honor through public displays of excellence, “brave
