Ode to the Sunken Garden
March 20, 2006 | 12:00am
For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been running almost every afternoon around UP Diliman’s Academic Oval – that inner core of the campus with the Administration Building at one end and the Sunken Garden on the other. The reason is plain and painful: I need to lose about 15 to 20 pounds of impacted lard, which will probably take me about three years of running (make that brisk walking, with stops for ice cream and photography) thrice around the oval every day to achieve, at the rate I’m going. But never mind the official excuse.
I love walking around Diliman – where I also happen to live – because it just happens to be one of the last vestiges of (for want of a better term) the pastoral life in the city, the kind where you expect to see luxuriant groves of bamboo and grass-chewing animals tethered to the boles of trees.
I usually head out to the oval at 5 o’clock, which gives me just enough time to make two rounds within one hour (three, on certain days when I’m buoyed up or weighted down by the loftiest or lowest of feelings), always starting from the west end at Quezon Hall and moving counterclockwise past Palma Hall. The highlight of this routine is the long turn around the Sunken Garden – that wide and, yes, sunken sward behind the Library, large enough to be host and home, all at once, to footballers, joggers, Frisbee fanatics, couples falling in and out of love, families on a picnic, protesters and proselytizers, rockers, oddballs, and plain kibitzers.
On Sunday afternoons, it might seem like half of Diliman converges there, seeking refuge and restoration, content to sit on the garden’s beveled edges like a crowd on the shore of a green but waterless ocean. And on nearly every afternoon this time of year, there’s always that moment, around 5:30 p.m., when the setting sun is at its most intense, bathing everyone and everything in that garden in a golden, beatific glow.
I don’t know who designed the Sunken Garden, or caused it to be put where it is, when UP moved from Padre Faura to Diliman in the early ’50s. Certainly no one calls it today by its formal name – believe it or not, the M. H. del Pilar Parade Grounds. No offense to Plaridel, but even the sonorousness of his name pales beside the quiet magic of "Sunken Garden." It isn’t so much the rhyme as its mystery, the embedded notion of untold riches and pleasures beneath one’s feet, awaiting discovery. I’ve resolved that if and when I ever become a publisher or a bookseller, my shop will be called "Sunken Garden Books," in honor of a corner of Diliman that will be, truly, ever green.
The Collegian, of course, has had a long and illustrious history, counting among its past editors such luminaries and personalities as Wenceslao Vinzons, Armando Malay, Angel Baking, Enrique Voltaire Garcia II, and, all right, Miriam Defensor.
Even when I was in high school, it was my burning ambition to join the staff of the Collegian as soon as I got into UP; my physics teacher, Vic Manarang, had been one of its editors in chief, and many of the people whose writing I admired – Joey Arcellana, Gary Olivar, and Rey Vea – had already served it or were on board. Sure enough, I joined the Collegian as a freshman in the heady days of the First Quarter Storm, and there met more activist stalwarts such as Tony Tagamolila, Ed Gonzalez, and Popoy Valencia (all of whom became EICs at one time or another); Willie Nepomuceno (yes, the very same funnyman) was our staff artist. As an unexpected bonus, I met my first girlfriend (whose name shall go unmentioned, to spare her the embarrassment) in the Collegian, our first movie date enabled by the P20 allowance we received per issue.
I have a thousand stories to tell about the Collegian, but I’ll save them for another time. Suffice it to say that I grew up with it, in it, as a young man and as a writer. I didn’t stay in school long enough to realize my own dream of becoming its editor in chief; fired up with journalistic zeal, I dropped out of college at age 18 and finagled my way into reporting for the Philippines Herald and Taliba until the guillotine of martial law put an abrupt end to my first foray into newspapering.
It’s a long and wayward introduction to how I felt, sitting on that panel to choose the next Collegian editor, but I think it’s important to establish how personal that function was to me, even if, over the years, the Collegian itself seems to have lost its primacy of place in the ordinary student’s consciousness – not to mention its readership. (Or could I just be romanticizing the past, by imagining that the student paper mattered more to people in our time?)
I’m not going to talk here about whom we chose in the end and how that person was chosen, beyond saying that we scrupulously observed the rules and followed the publicly prescribed criteria: editorial writing, 70 percent; newswriting, 20 percent; layout and headline writing, 10 percent.
What was most interesting for me was our discussion, among the judges, of possible changes that could be made to the rules and to the Collegian itself, given the realities and challenges of 21st-century journalism. (And these ideas apply not only to UP, but to campus newspapers elsewhere.)
For one thing, we found it strange that despite the fact that modern editorship is as much a matter of office and people management as it is of writing skill, no provisions have been made to interview the applicants (or even, say, the top three finalists) to get some idea of their vision for the paper and of their people skills.
As they stand, the rules (and the whole idea of a college editorship) favor and glorify the best writer of argumentative prose – in other words, the essayist. We are judging, in effect, an essay contest (with a small nod to layouting, which should really be removed and left to the paper’s layout artist, although headline writing might be left in place).
Ironically, at a time when the Collegian needs to adapt to a changing readership (who might, for example, favor an on-line, blog-type edition to which they can instantly and freely respond), it remains bound by age-old rules which successive boards of judges have had to follow to the letter on pain of being sued by some aggrieved loser. Alas, in today’s university, litigiousness has overtaken good sense in many matters academic and otherwise.
In any event, we wish our final choice the best of luck, and pray that the new Collegian editor runs the paper and infuses it with new ideas – beyond, of course, writing clear, sensible, and memorable prose.
Also, the Philippine Science High School National Alumni Association (PSHS-NAA) will hold its annual membership meeting on April 1, 2 p.m., at the Gregorio Velasquez Hall, PSHS, Agham Road, Diliman, Quezon City. Aside from the customary reports, important amendments to the by-laws will be presented for ratification. The PSHS Alumni Networking Portal will also be launched. If you can’t come, please write me and I’ll e-mail you a proxy form you can send to the PSHS-NAA.
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