A Mind That Hums Its Own Tune: A profile of Eleanor Elliott

A Mind That Hums Its Own Tune: A profile of Eleanor Elliott

By Kai Englisch

This is a profile I did here on a Johnnie classmate and acquaintance of mine, the lovely Eleanor Elliott. It ended up not getting picked up by the student newspaper, so here it is. 

I had a chance to sit down with Eleanor Elliot while we were both patients in the quarantine suite together, a highlight to an otherwise dreary sequence of days spent pining for Bacchic release during Symposium week (what better elicitor of undergraduate misery than forbidden parties?). We had known each other peripherally for a couple years, but never on a deeper level than light passing banter. The first thing I noticed about her when I first met her in our freshman year was the way she would hula-hoop in the courtyard, seeming to all the world to be utterly free of awkwardness and self-consciousness (a feeling she later told me she actively has to cultivate within herself, perhaps making it more admirable). Right from the get go we clicked, and our conversations flowed for a couple hours each day. Besides talking about family, we talked about spirituality, conformity, society, and of course, life at St. Johns—always a wellspring of juicy conversation. She’d politely wait for me to engage her—usually after class was done and we were moping around in mutual boredom and a heavy touch of self-pity. A captivating person, she speaks with the sort of natural conviction and sincerity behind her eyes that only comes from an intensely felt inner life. At one point during one of our conversations, while talking about conformity, a classmate walks by and laughs to herself. “Of course I’d find you talking about exactly that!” she says to Eleanor with a laugh. Her friends know where to find her, because that's where it seems like Eleanor is much of the time, while hula-hooping, playing guitar, smoking, talking to me. In a world that lives in a mind that hums its own tune.

In a way Eleanor is a contradiction, the sort that whispers at you to be unraveled. Perhaps it's a certain kind of energy she radiates. It’s expansive and light, but very inward and focused, almost shy in relation to other people. This contradiction is never more apparent than when she laughs. It’s one of the first things that sticks out when you meet her. It's infectious and bubbling, girlish in its innocent invitation to play. It surprises though because of the times it makes its appearance. In the midst of talking about conformity, pain, and beauty, she’d utter a turn of phrase or light anecdote that would catch me by surprise, and that playful child would stick its head out. Not to say that our conversation ever felt heavy and severe. On the contrary, a tone of lightness pervaded everything we talked about, humor naturally finding its way into the conversation from the innocent way that Eleanor sees the world.

But there's a mind filled with weighty concerns attached to that light heart. Through the course of getting to know her, I began to realize Eleanor is a person deeply conflicted by her relationship to other people. This conflict is perhaps borne out of a stark divide between the world Eleanor was allowed to inhabit as a child, and the harshly conformist world she was thrust into during her adolescent years. The daughter of a great books professor and a sculptor, growing up in an isolated place on a hill in rural Kentucky, she was gifted with a childhood of freedom. There, she made those few acres a palace built on foundations of an imagination that was treasured and allowed to roam free. There is an undercurrent of nostalgia in the way she describes her childhood, the way she felt free to swim in a world of color and dreams. In most people, the rich internal labyrinths of childhood are blocked out with one’s introduction into the society of others, forgotten and left to crumble. But Eleanor's was nourished and allowed to sow deep roots in her life.

That all changed though when she was enrolled in a private high school at 14, surrounded by the scions of wealthy horse breeding families. It was here among the culture of the old-monied American aristocracy that she began to shut down, outcast socially for being seen as weird (that vague existential threat dreaded by every teenager) in an unfamiliar world of convention and status. “I had that perfect garden of Eden—ideal world in my head. Free land, [one where] you get to make up the whole world. So it was really abrupt to be placed in society, to have to figure out [a world of social dynamics].” So she retreated, into an internal world, a place familiar and comfortable to her. But this once loving and free place now provided no respite. “I just wanted to not exist. I didn’t want to take up any space. It’s sort of this tic I have now, sneaking up on people because I walk so quietly. It’s not intentional, it’s just what I do. I spent years trying to become a full observer. Like I’m not a character in this world. I always felt like I didn’t have a personality…I didn’t know what ‘I’ would say. Like, what would ‘Eleanor’ say in this situation? How would she communicate with these people?”

To discover the frightening power that social judgment wields over one’s head is perhaps the universal inheritance of adolescence. But what is striking is the artistic, even literary way in which Eleanor describes her feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness. This brings to light a terrible irony. Her rich imagination, vivid inner life, and sensitivity, treasured and fostered during her childhood, were the very instruments wielded in provoking intense feelings of isolation and inadequacy. Tried and prosecuted by the very friends that she had cherished her whole life.

But despite this, the person that sits before me is one full of life and play. She has a natural sense of play about her, easy to be around like a child. And perhaps this is a testament to an internal well of strength within her, a sort of idealism that is both starry-eyed and resilient. “I really try and let myself feel as much joy as possible” she says to me “Even if there are voices in my head that are telling me I shouldn’t. I think my quest is to embrace the human experience as thoroughly and as genuinely as possible…I’ve never really had a dream career, or thought in terms of that. I’ve always thought more in terms of who I want to be. Y’know, I want to be the kind of person who can carry their words confidently, and can speak to other people empathetically.” Eleanor is a person concerned almost obsessively with the subjective feeling of her world, her life a mirror of the constant shifting and recalculation in nuances of idea and feeling that goes on constantly in her head. It's an internal landscape that's never settled, always moving, feeling, changing. So perhaps where Eleanor lives today, is in the space between ideas, alive to their constant collision. Between individualism and conformity, joy and pain, heaviness and lightness. In between, in the midst of it all, in a mind that hums its own tune.