Alone among friends
For my money, John’s is the only Gospel in which Jesus seems really lonely.
Picture what you think buildings at Yale University look like: maybe stone gothic or colonial Georgian with beautiful fireplaces and snifters of bourbon.
Now picture what would happen if a fifth-grade boy was given a piece of graph paper and a protractor and told to design the world’s most elaborate ant farm, rampant with multilayer dead-end tunnels just to confuse the ants. Build a four-story mold from his model and fill it with wet concrete. Poke a couple of airholes in it for windows. Then spray it with mildew and Soviet malaise. That was my dorm for four years.
Given the choice, most people would go with the colonial Georgian option. But only legatees—children or siblings of other Yalies—had the option to live in the beautiful dorms their relatives lived in. The rest of us got the leftovers, including the weird 1970s architectural experiments. Most of my college friends lived in my dorm and were the first in their families to go to a place like Yale—many were the first to go to college.
