Reading During the Revolutions

MOST Harvard students are so thoroughly primed in the rigors of dishonest politeness that when asked "How was your winter vacation?", they'll volley a blank, unthinking "Good and yours?" without batting even a nose hair.

This year, however, I noticed a difference. People seemed to be owning up to their lives. They uttered ambivalences. "Not bad." "So-so." "Uneventful." Even "Boring." What is this? Do the '90s mark the start of a new era in which compulsory cynicism infects even the smallest of small talk, even at hardyhar-Harvard?

Maybe you think I'm noticing things that aren't there. Maybe you think I also saw Nicolae Ceaucescu and Samuel Beckett dancing a polka in the stacks of Widener last night. You're wrong. I know what I noticed. People were not very enthusiastic about their vacations this year. That's a fact.

And I have a theory as to why. It's 'cause nothing happened in the good ol' USA this holiday season. Sure, by invading Panama, our faithful president tried to stir up some yuletide cheer. But that just didn't cut the turkey. There was a revolution going on in Rumania! They were electing a playwright president in Czechoslovakia! They were dancing in the streets in East Germany! And it was boring as hell back home.

The rest of the world loomed large this fall and winter, and it continues to do so. Our own existence seems pettier every day.

RETURNING to Cambridge in January for Reading Period can truly broaden horizons, as any Harvard student will confirm. Education is all about broadening horizons, and of course Reading Period is all about education. This year was hard, though. The newspapers would not let us forget how narrow Harvard's horizons are. For the rest of Boston, Reading with a capital R is pronounced not "Reeding" but "Redding." As in Reading, Mass., where Charles and Carol Stuart owned their nice, comfortable suburban home.

When a man kills his wife because he wants to open a restaurant with the insurance money, studying for exams can seem pretty trivial.

The Stuart Case wasn't a revolution. It didn't grant any new freedoms or even any access to Western consumer goods. It didn't even take any away, at least not permanently. But still, it was a veritable event, an honest-to-goodness happening.

Unlike Martin Luther King's birthday, the Stuart Case didn't stop the mail; also unlike Monday's holiday, the Stuarts' travails were too big for even Harvard to ignore. who wants to read textbooks when the headlines in The Globe resemble a clan of giant cockroaches? Who wants to study for "Social Analysis 34. Knowledge of Language" when there's racial strife going on right now, right here in Boston?

OR am I just looking for an excuse not to study? Am I scraping logic's limits in disparaging my own lifestyle just because it doesn't make headlines?

If Harvard students feel a need to be at the center of things, last Tuesday answered that need. It had snowed Monday morning, but the first day of exams--the day of my first exam--springtime sunshine melted all dreariness away.

Does Harvard sit at the center of the universe after all? Do the sun and the moon follow the registrar hither and thither? (And does Congress? Is that why Martin Luther King's birthday comes so neatly sandwiched right where it doesn't count?)

After my morning exam, I rode my bike into Boston to celebrate the weather. The Charles (the River, I mean; not the Stuart) was still frozen. It didn't care that this was Exam Period.

The ducks in front of MIT sat oblivious and white on top of their ice. They obviously had no idea I'd taken an exam that very morning.

The Hancock Tower stood straight and green as ever; the State House dome floated gold as ever; the Longfellow Bridge stretched stony as ever, with the 'T' slinking red and slow as ever across its back. I simply could not escape my irrelevance: there it grinned, wherever I turned.

When I got back to campus, someone asked me how my exam had gone. "My exam?" I said. "Oh, not bad. So-so. Uneventful. Boring."