The Education of Herbert

Herbert entered Harvard speaking standard American English and thinking uncomplicated thoughts. When he was sure of something--his career plans for instance--he would say: "I'm sure I want to be a lawyer." When he was enthusiastic about something he let people know in no uncertain terms: "Boy, this is really great." And when he talked about his high school sweetheart he would do so with a simple conviction that never failed to disarm his listener: "You know, Mary is the most wonderful girl in the world."

Herbert first came into the Yard through the famous gate inscribed "Enter To Grow In Wisdom" and, ambitious Freshman that he was, determined to grow Harvard wise. He quickly learned the primary lesson that there are smooth and rough, weil-considered and ill-considered ways of saying things. It was rough and offensive not to qualify adjectives. To say, "This book is good," is too direct, too hard on the sensibilities. How much better to say, "This book is quite good," "rather good," or "sort of good." Herbert also discovered the devastating effect of the words "indeed," "thus we see," and "needless to say." They gave an authoritative air to his conversation.

His first Christmas vacation home he told his parents about all the wonders of Harvard and concluded, "Indeed, it is the best college in the world." To his friends and assembled relatives he tried variations. "Thus we see," he would summarize, "that Harvard is rather a fine college." Or: "Needless to say, the college as a whole is quite good." In his conversations with Mary he used all his new words with great success. He sounded "like a professor," she told him admiringly, and she melted into his arms when tenderly he said, "Mary, I rather think you are indeed the most wonderful girl in the world."

But when Herbert returned to Harvard he learned how ill-considered such sweeping superlatives were. With the evidence always so dense, the number of opinions so diverse, and the ever-present danger of falling into a "value judgment," unequivocal statements were most prudently qualified by "perhaps." Herbert picked up the word from one of his professors who called a certain novel "perhaps one of the five best of the last century, Dickens works only excluded." Herbert immediately wrote his parents: "I will perhaps be a lawyer." Not that his intention to go into law was in any way altered, but in this complex world of the Twentieth Century, characterized as it is by break-throughs in technology and the explosion of knowledge, Herbert found it increasingly hard to be sure of anything.

At this time he also began to let people know that anything he said was only his opinion. "In my opinion," he confided to his roommate, "Mary is perhaps the most wonderful girl in the world." He wrote the same sentence to Mary in a letter at the beginning of his sophomore year. She was a bit disturbed by the "perhaps" but was pleased as punch with "in my opinion," which made it seem as if Herbert had carefully considered all the evidence and come to an unshakable scientific conclusion.

Meanwhile, Herbert was quickly learning how little his opinion was worth. How dare he, a mere sophomore, set up his views against the considered judgment of men who had devoted their lives to thought in a given field. In the Spring of the year he determined to purge himself of egotism and sit at the feet of the masters. Instead of "I" he now referred to himself as "one" and did others a similar courtesy. He became subjunctive in his mood, conditional in his attitude and more professional in his vocabulary. Instead of "I think" he said, "One might contend." He began using the Latin abbreviations i.e., e.g., and viz. in his speech as well as his writing. By the beginning of his junior year he could use "be that as it may," "moreover," "albeit" and "to the contrary notwithstanding" without giving them a second thought.

"One might contend," he wrote to Mary at the beginning of his junior year, "that you are perhaps the most wonderful girl in the world, i.e. the girl with whom one is most pleased."

"Dear Herbert," Mary wrote in the return mail, "I have decided to get engaged to John [John was Herbert's high-school rival]. He thinks I am the most wonderful girl in the world."

Herbert sighed and grew still wiser. It occurred to him that his speech still lacked color. How smashing it would be to spice it up with occasional quotations, foreign phrases, and literary allusions. When his parents observed that he had stopped going to church on Sundays he quipped, hardly to their amusement, "Gott ist tot, you know." When one of his roommates complained that Herbert badly needed a haircut, he answered gravely "De gustibus..." and left it to his listener to supply the ending. And when his other roommate asked to borrow ten dollars for a date, Herbert came back with "Neither a borrower nor a lender be, and it shall follow as night the day thou canst not be false to any man." "Oh shut up," said the roommate.

In his senior year Herbert lived alone. He wrote his honors thesis. Only now did he come to realize how much precision was demanded of the man who would express himself as befits a scholar, and how onerous were the burdens of composition. First, there was the matter of terminology: his field (economics) had no shortage of scientific words, which, since they represented the collected wisdom of the discipline, must be not only used but totally assimilated as well. Soon he was thinking in terms of maximized efficiency, input-output ratios, and consumer indifference curves. Second, there was the need to guard against vague language. On those occasions when he permitted himself a metaphor Herbert always added "so to speak" or "as it were" so that it would be clear that he was merely using a figure of speech.

"One has, as it were, plotted his indifference curves," he wrote in his application essay for law school, "and has concluded that one would not be altogether unhappy in the courts of the land. On the contrary...." The admissions officer had read such statements before; invariably they were accompanied by grades so high as to make any other considerations superfluous. Herbert's case was typical.

And so Herbert left Harvard through the famous gate inscribed "Depart To Serve Better Thy Country And Thy Kind." Exception might be taken to the unreflective urgency of the imperative, but, surely, Herbert thought, one could embrace the desire to invigorate the public sector.