Trivial Pursuit

AYOUNG MAN on the West Coast placed a call to Cambridge the other day. The subject of the call was Harvard. A pre-freshman was asking for advice. The Harvard senior who answered the telephone had no answers--only questions of his won, "Call back," he said. "Call back tomorrow."

I entered my freshman year like an anxious commuter trying to catch the subway-the kind you see all the time on the Red Line, the ones who, hearing any noise from the subway tunnel-closing doors or turning wheels or the wheezing sound of rushing air-dash down the steps, sure that they will miss the train. My caller was stopping already, before he had even paid for his token, to look at the map and decide how to get where he was going.

No one told me why they call it a Sebastian Sandwich. Nobody bothered to let me know about the housing lottery, or when they decide to lock the gates to the Yard or how to cross the street in Harvard Square, or when you are supposed to start writing your exam--when they tell you to, or right when they hand you the blue book.

I am wondering what life would have been like if I had known all of this four years ago--that you don't really have to dial five-five-thousand, just zero, that you get cancer if you put lemon in your tea in a Styrofoam cup, that people are still looking at your freshman facebook picture when you are a senior.

Harvard and I have enjoyed an essentially antagonistic relationship. It is not that we do not like each other, we just like to give each other a hard time. I skip sections; Harvard gives me an exam on the last day of exam period. I sneak into dining halls when there is no interhouse; Harvard serves Halibut-cheese casserole.

ALL OF THIS STARTED on a subway train somewhere near the Charles stop about two weeks into the fall of freshman year. Two classmates and I were taking the train into Boston late at night. We had no destination. We were three Harvard freshmen, newly burdened with the angst of academia, drowning in Harvard and all its implications. "This is great," someone said. "This is exactly what I needed: to get away."

It was the beginning of a long struggle, one that every Harvard student shares. It is the range of emotions between receiving a Coop rebate and missing the last shuttle back from Hilles. It is hearing the pop of a champagne cork after a senior's last exam and it is that sinking feeling you get on the plane after Christmas break--when the pilot says you'll be landing soon at Logan Airport and you look down at the snow-covered frozen city and think you can see the Yard.

The Palatino Thing. That is its only name. No one knows what else to call it. But to those who know it well--those who travel the yellow line from Widener C on a regular basis--it is little more than a thing on the wall with a funny name. It is their thesis or it is the reading period of the spring of their freshman year. I figured out about three years ago that you can exit the Widener stacks from B-level, right out onto Mass. Ave. But I'm not sure I want someone to know that passage without finding it. I would not have appreciated the fact my Coop card will buy me candybars and Pepperidge Farm cookies and toothpaste when I'm out of money if I hadn't run out of money and starved.

"Do I WANT NEATNESS or creative disorder?" the caller wants to know. "Do I want an even balance of social and academic activities or a lively social center?" I asked for two roommates and got five. My compromise in the cleanliness category meant a floor littered with old newspapers and a pizza that sat in a corner all year next to a foot-high stack of records out of their jackets. If we had not been disorderly in such a creative way, maybe we would have had room for a lively social center.

"And how many hours a night do I sleep?" he asks. During my freshman year I usually slept from the time the people next door stopped playing lacrosse against the fire door, until 9:42 a.m. 9:42, according to my digital clock, was when the bells in Memorial Church would ring. No one is sure why.

"There is something to be said," someone told me a couple weeks ago, "for living your entire early adult life within a quarter mile radius." My caller is very excited about going to school in Boston. He wants to know what the city is like.

A year or so from now, my caller will know enough to stop asking these questions--or at least enough not to pay much attention to the answers. By next January's reading period, he will be learning to question the answers, and he will wonder, when he seeks advice, whether to trust his Salada teabag or his Bazooka fortune or the six fortunes in his Hong Kong fortune cookie.

A rumor started going around in the winter of freshman year that the Union's coffee didn't have caffeine. After that, a lot of people wondered how they had been able to pull all those all-nighters. It was about the same time that I was trying to figure out where the pass keys for all the Yard dorms were coming from. And who was Charles Montalbano?

A Harvard education seems not to amount to much more than a continuous chain of unanswered questions. The Real World's equivalent to Harvard's fat envelope of rooming forms and religious preference cards amounts to a yearlong barrage of inquiries from major corporations asking seniors to register for their credit cards. I'm not sure I will need a Sears credit card. Do I want Gulf or Mobil? They both say they won't charge me anything, but "this may be your last chance."

Three years ago, there was some grafitti in a stall on the third level of Pusey Library that said "They won't find this grafitti." A few months after I saw it, some ambitious B&G worker had whitewashed those words and the wall of comments that had surrounded them. And someone wrote "They won't find it again."

I HAVE ALWAYS wondered whether it would be worthwhile to sign up for one of those memory experiments that are always posted on the bulletin board in William James. They usually offer subjects about four dollars to perform some minor task just to see how you do. That is what Harvard is really about. The subjects do what they're supposed to do and wonder what the whole experiment is about.

But they're probably better off not asking, and trying to figure it out for themselves. That's what I'm going to tell my caller--to figure it out for himself. And when he leaves the great Lamont Library that is Harvard, my only hope is that he will be able to pull out his bag of discoveries, to look the Imperial Checker straight in the eye and say: "Just my own."