For The Present

TEN YEARS AGO at the end of the Spring term of my first year as an instructor at Harvard, a senior whom I knew only slightly came up to me on the banks of the Charles to say goodbye. What he had intended to take two or three minutes lasted nearly two hours. He said that, though he had been in Cambridge for four years, Harvard had somehow eluded him. On the surface, he had "done well" yet he was leaving with a sense of lost opportunity, of ideas unexplored, of books unread, of music unheard, of friendships undeveloped, of encounters and conversations not had and never to be had.

Discounting the usual nostalgia and regret that well up in seniors around commencement time, I have nonetheless often been haunted by the intensity with which this senior spoke, almost as if pleading with me at the beginning of my career as a teacher to attend to the problem, to make things different. I thought it an unfair request, of course, especially since the fault seemed to me to lie entirely with him. He obviously hadn't had the sense to "take advantage" of the great resources of Harvard.

Since then I have known a number of good students with that senior's problem, though the recognition seems to occur earlier and earlier. I have read with concern an article by Sylvester Monroe describing how common it is for black undergraduates to exist at Harvard without really sharing in--giving to and receiving from--the intellectual and social and spiritual life of the place. I have also read with only a little amusement a journal entry written by a girl in my nineteenth century novel course in which she compared herself and her undergraduate friends with the prisoners in the Fleet Street Jail in Pickwick Papers, sitting on the stairs "the greater part because they were restless and uncomfortable and not possessed of exactly knowing what to do with themselves."

I'm beginning to wonder whether Harvard--the students as well as faculty and administration--isn't part of the great American conspiracy to eliminate the present. We have always been a people who have looked to the future. That has sometimes been a noble tendency, but it can also be a curse. At its most grotesque, it has led otherwise rational men to argue that massive killing and destruction of property are justifiable because they will bring about a tranquil future. At its most bathetic, it has helped to create an American cult whose holy writ is the Great Insurance Policy in the Sky which helps you "lay away" something for college when you are 16, for medical school when you are 18, for marriage when you are 20, for retirement when you are 25 (with a pre-natal clause for nursery school and a rider which will help those who really care about the future plan their own funerals).

The conspiracy to eliminate the present is usually referred to in polite circles as "planning for the future." A lot of "planning for the future" goes on at Harvard. And I'm not against all of it. But I do worry about the present which, after all, can't be all that worthless since it used to be the future a little while ago. In fact, when you think about it, the present has one or two advantages over the future. For instance, we're all in it together. And then too, though you can't know everything even about the present, there are some things which are obvious. I don't know what the food in the Faculty Club will taste like in ten years, but I know it tastes like poison now. I don't know what DeWolfe Street will look like in ten years, but I know as I walk down to Leverett House that the filth and litter of it weigh on my soul. I don't know what the state of the practicing arts will be like at Harvard in ten years, but I know that, with the exception of the students in Music 180 who gave a stunning recital before Christmas, they are in the doldrums now. I don't know what the Harvard faculty or student body will be like in ten years, but I know that it is an assemblage of diverse and gifted men and women now. I would be sorry if, in our anxiety for the future, for medical school or the great unknown, we overlooked that. Of course, Harvard is a passageway. Every place is. But it is also a stopping place. Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent a little more than half the equivalent of an undergraduate four year term in a Nazi prison before he was murdered. Unlike the fictitious prisoners in Pickwick Papers, his experience taught him the value of time: "As time is the most valuable thing that we have, because it is the most irrevocable, the thought of any lost time troubles us whenever we look back. Time lost is time in which we have failed to live a full human life, gain experience, learn, create, enjoy, and suffer; it is time that has not been filled up, but left empty."

Professors of English are not by nature practical men. They are not accustomed to thinking of work and pleasure as mutually exclusive. They are also self-indulgent. They would not dream of saving up Shakespeare for a rainy day. They are also irrational. They do not readily grasp the logic by which the present is emptied of beauty and significance so that acorns can be stored up for a golden future. A professor of English who becomes a dean is bound to become a hypocrite or a subversive because what he wants is Athens and Florence--and not in ten years.

Robert J. Kiely is the associate dean of the Faculty for Undergraduate Education.