“There’s supposed to be a ghost up there” is what my peer leader declared as we crossed the oval days before my first year of college.
I had moved my entire life into a cramped dorm room only days before, wondering what melancholic mystery was in store for me
We crane our necks, following her index finger to the rectangular structure rising from the top of Ohio State’s Thompson Library, the light from its windows emanating rounded segments of a distant, hazy glow into the sky. A warm and somehow nostalgic night.
I’d been to the famed 11th floor, its slanted ceilings softened by wooden paneling and antique tapestry and brown leather sofas, windows overlooking the Oval.
That night, I was standing on campus in the dark, thinking there was nothing more “dark academia” than the attic level of a shadowy collegiate library.
At the same time, I find dark academia somewhat difficult to define, possibly due to the shrouded mystery comprising the concept itself.
In the media, the subculture commonly manifests as a series of scenes; A mahogany shelf of hardcovers stripped of their jackets, pleated skirts in plaid and navy, a campus of Gothic architecture and arcane whispers.
If asked to conjure proverbial dark academia, I could pick out items from my own closet; The tartan miniskirts, collared blouses, brown knit sweaters and cashmere v-necks in burgundy and navy. My staple brown leather messenger crossbody, a vintage Coach bag from my local consignment shop. My wool peacoat in the shade “cigar,” my black leather platform Oxfords.
I can look at myself and point out things that trigger similar associations; A solemnity in my features, my inclination to literature and the macabre and dreary.
When I dig for my idea of dark academia on a more practical level, the images that pulse in my head are not so romantic, but rather are images from when I entered undergraduate school at Ohio State, hiding behind a projection of medical school and Medical College Administration Test (MCAT) preparations and wet lab research, intending to do more proving than living.
The stark lab coats I wore when handling micropipettes, the centrifuge and glass flasks. The voice of my research lab’s principal investigator who spoke as if he held my future in his hands and the unthinkable favors he asked of me.
Now identifying with a double major in biology and English, I struggle to reconcile the dark academia scrawled into my own history. The spice-toned sweaters, khaki trousers and leather loafers that sit in my closet evoke a warm and magnificent type of dark academia, one that should ideally be pondered in a room with an old-fashioned fireplace or over a steaming cup of mulled cider.
It is not the same dark academia that I had once lived and felt.. Even writing this, I feel a sense of shame in the narrow-mindedness of boxing up an experimental concept into such limited categories.
There is a sense of travesty, reducing it from abstract to painfully worldly. I remind myself that perhaps I have it all wrong, perhaps there is no such thing as “traditional” dark academia at all, and I am only attempting to make sense of relationships between things that don’t exist.
I often do my work in the Grand Reading Room in Thompson Library, a room in which there is a Greek statue perched at the front.
According to the silver inscription, the statue is a replica of Nike of Samothrace, also known as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, characteristically stripped of her head and arms upon excavation.
Sometimes when I work in the Grand Reading Room and look up to ponder something, Nike of Samothrace catches my eye as I liken myself to this particular statue — tethered to my own expectations as if anchored down with marble or plaster — feeling stunted and sightless despite all those possibilities I could grasp, possibilities that I’d say extend beyond even something as mystical as wings.
