Dear Antioch,
Between periods of extreme stress and sadness I have thought about what this all means for me and my future, but mostly my heart goes out to others. I came here not too sure about how I would feel about this place, in fact, after I came here to visit I had a lot of doubts about whether I really wanted to come here. I remember that some people were doing an art project called ‘Antioch is Fucked’ and I asked them, “Is Antioch fucked because of us (the incoming class) or without us?” “Both,” they told me. While I have come to realize that while they had a point, there is also a lot of “the new class is so watered-down, the real Antioch is dead, etc.” Well, for my part, I’m pretty watery but besides our poor grassroots recruitment I think that people always idealize the past. Antioch may only have a hundred students but it remains a vibrant community and an amazingly educational place. I think that Antiochians remain concerned about this place, what it is becoming, what it maybe used to have been, because the idea of Antioch is so beautiful. That same idea remains today. It is, and always has been, an image. Despite that, Antioch, the people here, the environment, has helped to me find that image for myself, not of a flourishing progressive bastion of education and social activism, but of the personal. For me there is always an ideal, and there is reality, what we want to become, and what we are. Whether these differences are real or just mental, Antioch has taken me closer to my image of the world and myself than I have ever experienced. I have seen glimpses of what life can be and I think that the freedom that Antioch creates, freedom to express as well as to learn, makes it a sanctuary. Continue reading Letter from Alex Mette