Most days my life revolves around stories. I write them, but there is a catch: they are real, stories people told me. I listen, interrupt, take notes, tape, impose my own perceptions on other people’s lives, publish or just jot down ideas in my notepads, notes that will someday become the Book. I never met a journalism student who didn’t at one time dream of writing the Book.
I read a lot, fiction included. But I have yet to find the made up story that outdoes reality. When I tire, I go home. Except that this year in my case, home is the better part of the laboratory called life. Home is Cosmopolitan Club.
Stories have a strange way of letting us know why people do what they do. They give us confidence, they make us dream, they explain things. Sometimes they make us suffer.
I am reminded of my second year of college when, back in Bucharest, my sociology professor explained to us a new meaning of stories. History is sometimes what you read in textbooks. But history is so much more. Over the course of the year, we set out to interview people in order to recreate Bucharest. We asked only two things of the people we interviewed: that they be at least 70 years old and that they have seen the city when they and it were young. We interviewed an accountant, a Jewish man, a former maid of the former aristocracy, a gate keeper, a peasant, an elementary school teacher, all people not mentioned by the textbooks, but whose lives and histories were entwined with our fair city.
We let them talk for hours and their memories constructed a city unlike the one we read about in textbooks. People’s lives are color and music and pain and light and buildings, ice cream cones, parks, world wars, religion.
From that perspective, Cosmopolitan Club is the new Bucharest. It stands still while seasons change, cars pull on the sideway and suitcases are unloaded. It is a form in which shape happens. Students move in, bring a piece of their countries, their stories and their reasons. They are young and they dream big. And they witness history and change. In the ‘50s, only men lived at Cosmo. Classes have changed since then, new courses developed. Civil rights, human rights… the language has changed. Their countries saw military conflicts come, and go, people killed for absurd reasons. The world is full of news and for decades Cosmo lived to see it. This is a new take on history and stories, if you will. Within Cosmo, students grew up. They changed. Some moved on to greater things. Their decisions and studies will have an effect on the world.
While here, Daniela will invent a new algebra. Anand plays with artificial intelligence. Maryann is looking for a cure for Parkinson.
Like I said, the world is full of news. Some of my housemates will make the headlines, just as others have done before them. And while what they accomplished is important, we’ll find that what matters most is not the outcome but the story from here to there. That story unraveled at Cosmo. The Book.
Luiza Ilie is a 23-year-old journalism graduate student from Romania. She can’t cook and starts a lot of her sentences with ‘I.’
Cosmopolitan Club residents at the
22nd International Dinner & Entertainment Night, March 6, 2005.
Front row: Luiza (Romania), Sheila (Malaysia), Young Jae (Korea),
Ana (Romania), Daniela (Germany), Anand (India);
Back row: Moussa (Ivory Coast), Felix (Germany),
and Ajay Sikandar (India).