The Trouble With Monday

Nine o'Clock

The year's first Monday is a big day for all those with the wisdom to avoid Saturday classes. Early-rising auditors with a taste for genuine esoterica can begin their morning in the Robinson Seminar Room where Architectural Sciences 253 takes a full two hours to probe the mysteries of Reinforced Concrete, a three part course examining the respective problems of slabs, beams and columns. Those foregoing breakfast may prefer a broadening hour in Pierce 226, during which the theoretical chemistry of coagulation, corrosion, and sludge digestion are surveyed in Engineering 271a, guaranteed to make undergraduates flush with excitement.

Ten O'clock

An crowded hour with popular classes. The two hundred and twenty-five elect who made it into Comp Lit 166 will file into Longfellow Alumnae with a sizeable vanguard of embittered auditors to hear Professor Guerard launch his whirlwind tour of modern novels from Bovary to Absolom. Fieser, Krall, et al, will start their annual purge of Harvard's pre-med ranks in Mallinc-krodt MB9. Expressly designed to separate the men from the boys, Chem 20 will again swell the number of English concentrators by not-a-few.

Especially timely is Soc Sci 127, an analysis of the History and Civilization of the Middle East given by Professor Gibb and members of the staff of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies in Sever 29. The well-informed will be torn by a simultaneous desire to be in Harvard 5 where Professor Brzezinski lectures on International Communism and the Soviet Orbit. Aesthetes will jam Room 2 of the Music Building to attend the long-awaited new harmony course for laymen, Music 2.

Eleven O'clock

Hays-Bick will adjourn for an hour so its caffeinized contingents of the anguished and the unwashed can make a bee-line for Emerson Hall. Visiting Professor Earle will try to fill huge vacuum in Harvard's Philosophy department by discussing the heresies of European existentialism in Room F. Orthodox analysts down the hall in Emerson A will smirk smugly at 138a's talk of being and angst while they doodle rigorously with 140's metamathematical p's and q's. The literati, both serious and dilantante, will feel all the agonies of existentialist Choice themselves in deciding between Harbage's survey of Shakespeare in Room 18, 2 Divinity Avenue, and Brower's reading in Yeats, Eliot, Frost, and Stevens in the Longfellow Alumnae Room.

Twelve O'clock

Noon mainly means lunch, but the abstemious will profit by visiting any one of Harvard's mid-day standards:

Fogg Lecture Room--where "Darkness at Noon," Fine Arts 13, shows enough slides of masterpieces to get the most confirmed boor safely through the artiest cocktail party.

New Lecture Hall--where the sectioning scramble will take place for Harvard's largest course, Economics 1, perrennial prerequisite of the political aware, painful for some, but universially enlightening.

Sever 11--where connoisseurs of double-entre end will be straining their ears by mid-term to catch sly references to the congressional campaigns in Schlesinger's popular lectures on American Intellectual History since 1789.

Nat Sci 9 should also attract a host of auditors on opening day, even from among those who have long transcended the elementary stuff. Clambering up the Gropius-bleachers in Burr A gives one a chance to view both Sputnik-spotting Dr. Hynek, and cigarette-dangling Payne-Gaposchkin, Harvard's first woman professor, world authority on variable stars, and beloved eccentric of the first order.

The one O'clock bells bring lunch at last, an end to auditing, and opportunity for the yet vacillating to fight an informed and final bout with the Official Register. Let not those with minds made up rest easy, however, for, as Scarlette O'Hara once observed, "Tomorrow is another day."