My Old Friend, St. Sophia

My Old Friend, St. Sophia
The best learning comes to us outside the classroom.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Saturday, August 12, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT

ISTANBUL, Turkey--It's late at night, and from a hotel rooftop garden here I am looking across this city at the dome of one of the world's great buildings, the old St. Sophia. Built as a church in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, St. Sophia was one of the final prizes of the Byzantine empire to be conquered by the Turks, in 1453. It then served for centuries as a mosque. These days, it is simply a huge landmark, open six days a week for an admission fee of a few dollars.

So what's the Sophia doing in a column on America? It happens to be a place I first learned about in college, back home in America, more than 25 years ago. Knowing it was out there seemed of small practical use at the time. But life can deal some odd hands, and over the years it has become something of an old friend--a hulking buddy on the Bosporus. In some ways, it is one of the greatest treasures extracted from four years of college in which I learned many things that back then seemed more important to my future, and have probably been of more direct use since--though it's hard to remember what most of them were.

Tonight, the Sophia looms big enough to make me think that American practicality, for all its high value, sometimes needs setting aside, especially during the course of that amorphous American specialty known as getting a liberal arts education.

All the more because with the school season almost upon us, a colleague back home has been worrying about her daughter's choice of university. "Where you go to college seems so important," my colleague has been saying. Can't it shape the rest of a person's life?

The answer is yes, but not always in the ways you'd expect. As a form of credential, it can be fraught. For those lucky enough to be in the running for some of the country's good schools, the teenage years can be a minefield of grade point averages and test scores. Nor does the anxiety end when the academic stint begins. There is the apparently earthshaking matter of choosing which subject to major in, followed by the awesome need after graduation to embark on a "real" job, with all its thunderous implication of choosing a career path--perhaps for life? As I recall, it all seemed almost too momentous to face.

In fact, I probably caused my own parents much despair by not facing it. I graduated from an Ivy League school and promptly went off in great confusion to make a living for a time waiting on tables. It turned out, in its own way, to be a handy part of a journalist's education. If you go on to interview people for a living, there may be few better training grounds than working the breakfast counter in a Greek diner, serving eggs to the Chicago cops. But that was accidental learning, and not a plan that did much for a rÈsumÈ.

Which brings me back to St. Sophia. Its meaning in my own life has less to do with its place in the pantheon of famous sites than with where it stood in the affections of my best friend, David, whom I met in college. David was an American, but he had grown up in the Middle East. He loved Greek, Roman and Byzantine history--not solely as academic themes, but as playing fields for the imagination.

In class, it took serious study to pass our exams. But the deeper current of this education came in frivolous form. We would pool our funds to buy a pint of vodka and some cheap cigars, go sit on the college roof and talk about grand dreams. We were young, life seemed limitless, and what we were really doing was mapping out the metaphors that would matter long after we had forgotten whatever it was we wrote about in our college papers.

David and I made an appointment to meet on my 40th birthday at the St. Sophia, which I had never seen. But he couldn't make our date. David had juvenile diabetes, and nine years ago it killed him. When my birthday rolled around, I went to Istanbul without him.

Meeting on my birthday had been his idea, and I discovered it was his private joke. It turns out I was born on the anniversary of the fall of Byzantium to the Turks, an event in which the final battle, 547 years ago, took place at the doors of the St. Sophia itself. In Turkey it is a holiday, celebrated with fireworks.

From time to time I go back. This year I'm a few months late for the fireworks, but still find much to celebrate. By now, I come less in mourning than with gratitude that at a crucial time, when I was young, I was in the right spot to find a friend who could transform tales of an ancient, far-off church into a license to roam the world and, in strange places, to feel at home.

And though Byzantine history has never surfaced in my daily work, for me this building did come to symbolize the idea that the world is wide open, that life is one long education, in which what college teaches you is less a precise subject, but rather, ways of learning.

I say this not to minimize the value of work, study and credentials. But my advice to my colleague, and to all parents about to dispatch the kid to college, is: Relax. The joy of an American liberal arts education at its best is that it offers a portal not to a trade, but to ways of appreciating the world. The rest, you learn on the job.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America" and Saturdays on OpinionJournal.com.