After Four Long Years, Reflections on Departure

There are all these ideas the and seems laden with them, sometimes Actually. I guess Harvard is not much different from anywhere else, even in this respect, but people talk about it differently, and that can't help but have an effect. And there are all those people who've read books and newspapers and heard records and discussions, and that's a lot of what they know and talk and think about.

Sometimes it seems a little like this Berryman poem I like, about the screen images of rats in childhood prison movies--where "the rats have grown up, mostly, and this is for real"--but usually it all seems civilized and ceremonious and pleasant. One of the articles that helped turn me fully against the war, I realized this year, was about how the Vietnamese were our time's Meursaults: like the people Camus tried to described, they had a faceless, irrational and overpowering enemy, and though they were not classical heroes they attained nobility by fighting oppression. Every day, hundreds of Vietnamese were being killed, real Vietnamese, and the most effective way to make me understand this was to compare them to a character in a novel. Real life, for me, was just reflecting and idea--it was like when I was a kid, happy if a book described something I could remember me that my feeling, because it reassured me that my feelings and I had the ring of artistic truth. It made us seem more real.

And the ideas don't just circulate at Harvard; they are designed to explain Harvard, too. Theories about the University mostly contradict one another, but like Kipling's nine and sixty ways of performing tribal lays, every single one of them is right. One theory stresses the number of knowledgeable people at Harvard--and the theory is true. Harvard is a center of scholarship and thinking. Another theory stresses how Harvard cuts students adrift from their old ways of thinking, until if they still can't choose where to live and what to live for, they at least share Thoreau's suspicion that resignation to a predetermined role would just mean confirmed desperation.

And this theory is right, too, even if most of Harvard's graduates end up comfortable, secure, and untroubled by the mundane economic woes that affect their comparatively uncultured subordinates--victims, at most, of a quiet kind of desperation. Harvard does train staffers for the corporate state--business executives, lawyers who work for them and act charming and liberal out in the suburbs. Henry A. Kissinger '50 who bombs islands and hospitals to show that the United States is tough. For the people who get bombed or who work under the executives' direction, the theory that stresses this aspect of Harvard--its uses and importance in American society today--dwarfs the others in importance.

But even though all the theories are true, none of them ever seemed quite home-grown to me--they all depended on larger ideas. The first analysis of Harvard that struck me as just needing experience to understand came not from a professor or book or leaflet but from a photographer--if you want a theory about that, I guess you could associate it with photographers' just recording things they see, not pretending to explain them.

This photographer is small and hairy-looking (some people called him Flea), and I guess he was one of the best potters at Harvard--at least, he once showed me all the pots he'd made, stacked up like the books in a faculty office, and I commented as extensively as I could on which glazes and shapes I liked the best. They all looked pretty much the same to me, but the photographer had liked me ever since I didn't realize he'd gone to prep school, and I guess I was trying to live up to his expectations. "I like this green one." I would say, pointing to a pot that was unmistakable blue. When he seemed hurt. I'd say it was just a slip of the tongue, and he never looked too suspicious--he was one of the least distrustful people I knew. The only known exception to this rule was his Inquiry listing a string of actions by the History faculty, that ranged from declining to waive department requirements to acting rude to him in elevators. "None of this was in my self-interest," he wrote, in a classic expression of Harvard paranoia. "I began to see the pattern emerging."

This photographer was living in Apley Court when he explained his theory, with his pots and his cameras and the ever-growing draft of his complaint and maybe a roommate or two, and he wasn't too happy about it. "I'd kind of like to live in a House," he said wistfully, "but I tried it and there are just too many stimuli, you know? --Everywhere you look, there are signs and people and things to do, stimuli. I've tried it, and I just couldn't manage it--this is as close as I can come."

He cupped his hand in a vaguely conspiratorial way. "You know how Harvard works?" he said. "Harvard can't do anything to you you don't deserve. If you have no weaknesses, you can just sit back and enjoy it--you're golden." I waited for the rest of the theory--we were going to see some movie, I think, meeting some weird friend of his from New York who'd come to Boston to run in the Marathon, even though he was half crippled, or something.

"But if you have the slightest weakness," he continued easily--it was obviously something he'd thought about a lot, no sudden outburst but a considered theory--if you have the slightest weakness. Harvard will pick it up, and play on it, and bring it out, and lean on it, and you won't be able to straighten out until you leave.

"And then everything will be all right again," he added firmly--he always took a hopeful view of things. Later in the year he took out a classified ad, under the heading "Sugar Daddies", and inquired whether anyone rice wanted to support him after he graduated. No one ever responded, so he went off to San Francisco instead. Dispite this discouragement. I think he still ligured his memories of Harvard would come right out in the end.

A lot of my memories of Harvard seem to be associated with specific places--since the places are still there, the memories are still there too, waiting. They're not memories of changing relationships with people but just static: of walking past the Newell boathouse with the sun coming up, say, and someone I didn't know looking surprised to see me and wishing me good morning. The memories being associated with specific places might seem to make them more concrete, but I think it's really just the opposite--the places aren't settings for real people as much as distillations of an apparently unchanging atmosphere, existing off by itself as an idea, a little like the theories of Harvard that are true but seem somewhat abstract. Harvard's just been around so long that it's relatively easy to think about it as solid, consistent and unchanging. The plaque on the Lowell belltower may say Cognosce Occasionem--like the "Seize the time" Black Panther sympathizers used to scrawl on black boards in high school--but Harvard seems so much less transient than any high school, and its walls so far removed from the prisons where the government used to throw the Panthers, that the plaque hardly has much effect.

To give another example of a memory that seems outside of time, the Cambridge public library carries, for me, two separate, equally static images: The main reading room is filled with older people and Cambridge kids and anyone who has nothing to do with Harvard--it reminds me of walking up toward Fresh Pond. Where the houses are small and have American flags, on the first day of summer. And the library music-listening room involves this demonstration I was covering for The Crimson, only the demonstrators never showed up. The demonstration was outside 545 Tech Square, where the CIA has its local office. And the leaflet mentioned the CIA, as well as the usefulness of the Polaroid. Corporation--which also had its office there--to the South African government. But in its blurry way, the leaflet focused on Polaroid's local usefulness; it was signed by People Against National Identity Cards.

Someone told me that PANIC consisted of one thirtyish black guy who worked in the public library music room, so when I'd waited for half an hour or so and the cops agreed that the demonstrators probably weren't coming--"they must have gone to the beach," one cop said scornfully--I went over to the library to see of I'd got the date wrong, or something.

"The demo was a big success," the thirtyish black guy informed me proudly. He was friendly and cheerful and seemed perfectly sane, but it didn't seem to make sense, even when he asked me if I'd counted the cars--"the cars, man, didn't you notice how heavy the traffic was?"--that had turned out to protest against Polaroid. Where had he himself been during the demonstration, for example?

He gave me a hearty, pitying laugh--he was too polite to say it was Harvard's effect on people's weaknesses. "I come up from "Whind," he confided cannily, "you don't think I was going to come up to the front door and have Polaroid just take my picture, do you?" He chortied triumphantly--he might be crazy (who else would take on Polaroid?) but he was nobody's fool. It had been a highly successful protest that so one else could see, a little like the night softball game I almost played in this spring--I cherished this ambition, of hitting the ball out of the infield just twice in a single game, and here was a chance to do it under the light. But when we got to the field it was pouring rain, and a game seemed about as likely as an anti-Polaroid demonstration.

So we sat in a car at the field, waiting for the Mount Auburn Hospital Workers to show up and admiring the windshield wipers. "Well," the game's organizer said finally, "if it keeps raining for another half hour or so, and the other guys don't show up, and nobody turns the field lights on--why didn't somebody remind me to bring a tarp?--then I guess some of you probably won't want to play?" It was still pouring when we got back to Cambridge.

Apart from my static memories and my incompetence at softball. I felt depressed about my future and about me. I couldn't seem to figure out my future. Midway through April a graduate student. I knew developed a scheme to go to work for Saudi Arabia. "But there are some drawbacks," he would concede. "They don't treat Jews well-they might not even hire me. My social life there--well, let's not talk about it. But they pay well, and if I learned Arabic, when I came back I could find a job teaching that." My schemes weren't even at this stage: I was as bewildered as a friend who took the OGCP's interest test and found that whereas freshman year he'd been interested in Music and Art now he was only interested in Having Adventures. He didn't know where to prepare for this career, so he applied to the London School of Economics.

As for being depressed about me, if the photographer's point about the stimuli didn't seem to apply--except in sports, Kirkland House has never been famous as a center of thriving. stimulating activity--the stuff about getting what you deserve certainly did.

The evidence the photographer offered for this part of his theory was a mutual friend so in love he'd pur-