In a sense, my high school career can be boiled down to a question that I’ve received dozens of times, from different teachers, partners, and editors, internal or external, across mediums, time, and place: “Can you please shorten down those damn sentences?” Sometimes I answer caringly; other times, I answer more crassly, making some reference to my favorite Russian or French authors and whether they would want them to shorten their damn sentences.

But always, the question makes me angry––angry in a deep way, where I even stop liking coffee––even though on the surface, it’s a perfectly logical request. I am not writing in Russia in the 1890s; I am writing in America in the 2010s for other Americans, for whom dense, long chains of subordinated clauses and commas rings are about as clear as the technical names of long chains of amino acid.

Yet I like complexity: there’s something magical to me when a bunch of random symbols come together, taking advantage of weird grammar quirks, to form ideas––even complicated ideas––in ways that represent the best of human thinking, of human society.

But, a Parker education, which at its core, seems to be about simplicity. From Lower School and upwards, learning is not always easy––but the goal of the educational apparatus is to make things easy, for things to just make sense with enough practice, time, and instruction. The education is about making complicated things seem simpler.

This is best demonstrated by the Humanities classes in the Upper School, who most broadly seem to be about making harmonic ideas ring through complicated texts and history that culminate in some elegant, simple synthesis. Mathematics and Science classes too are about describing seemingly random systems of movement, growth, and life with some elegant model or algorithm that sums everything up. When things don’t all connect in some way to some grand theory, the classroom just feels off––the melody seems to end abruptly.

Thus, we as a school seek pithy language; we want our language to be a manifestation of the simple elegance of our thinking, in which reality, in general, makes sense, more or less. But reality––the actual nature of the world––does not just make sense.

Real history is long, messy, and bloody, filled with seeming aberrations, bumps, and bruises that cannot be described by any paragraph-long theory. Real behavior, whether of people or molecules, is described by complicated, dense equations, where the terms don’t always cancel out nicely.

Consequently, the most honest, concise portrait of the world in which we live may involve lots of interconnected clauses and lots of separate, often tangential ideas, subordinated and related by commas and context. These portraits may be dense and may not be easy to skim, but relishing complex language is important. It stretches both our brains and our gut feel of how things ought to be. It gives us the tools to deal with ideas outside of the Parker bubble, to deal with a world that never boils down to anything substantial, to deal with an infinite web that is only diverging, to deal with ourselves and our world.