Post-Classical Diversions

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IntroductionBooks are bullies. They can really rough you up. At one time or another some badass book has made just about everybody run home to Mother. And why not? If you stood your ground it was never a fair fight. The book had all the advantages: Symbols you couldn’t decipher. Metaphors that were a mystery. Irony. Obscure rhetorical devices. Sentences so tedious, so intolerably convoluted, they turned your mind to mush.Sometimes the words were flung onto the page like birdseed from a park bench. Other times the prose was so rock-hard you couldn’t break through it with a backhoe.If you’ve ever tangled with Kant or Kierkegaard or Heidegger you probably know what I mean. Not to mention Finnegans Wake or the late novels of Henry James. Or, heaven help you, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, To the Lighthouse, T.S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, As I Lay Dying, Gravity s Rainbow, John Ashbery, Roger Penrose, or A Brief History of Time. Books and writers like these can make practically anybody cry uncle. Even Jonathan Swift and James Fenimore Cooper, once thought to be children s authors, are not for the faint of heart.That s one side of the story. Books are lovable, too. Did someone read to you as a child? Dad? Grandma? Your kindergarten teacher? If so, you know how words can warm you, wrap you in their mellifluous embrace, how they can jiggle and dance and come to crazy life before your mind’s eye. And even if, reading-wise, you had to go it alone, chances are you can look back fondly on late-night rendezvous with Dr. Seuss or Nancy Drew or Albus Dumbledore. Books were your friends.As you grew older you continued to crave the companionship of books. But the books you prized were grown up too--worldly, mysterious, out of reach. Maybe you were afraid they would laugh in your face. So maybe you took the easy way out: “Those dumb old books don’t have anything for me. I m better off over here by myself.”Deep inside you knew better, for who hasn t longed to be literate?There’s something about the really well-read. Intimacy with books creates an aura of authority, of imperturbability, of—let’s face it—infuriating self-assurance. We envy the literate their intimacy with the limitless world of words. We are mesmerized by their smooth repartee, their razor-edged wit, their refusal to be cowed by blowhards and know-it-alls. We too would like to pluck the perfect riposte out of the air. Most of all, we yearn to view the human panorama with fresh eyes—to gaze on people, places, and happenings beyond the ken of strangers to the written word.If we’d had the luck to be born Adamses, Brontes, Huxleys, or Jameses, we’d have gotten a first-rate head start, the best possible leg up on literacy. Coming of age in a bookish clan we’d have imbibed eloquence at the dining room table or while being dandled on Grandpa’s knee. But such advantages belong only to the precious few. (Nowadays how many of us even have dining room tables?) So when it comes to reading, writing, and speaking we pretty much have to fend for ourselves.There’s a bright side. Advanced literacy can be acquired--if necessary against tremendous odds. Think of young Benjamin Franklin copying out Addison and Steele, Abe Lincoln poring over borrowed books by firelight, Malcolm X in his prison cell, memorizing the dictionary. And not only these paragons. Finding out how to speak, read, and write like an expert is within the reach of us all. A healthy measure of literacy can be achieved by practically anybody.Not that it’s easy. But you don’t need to tackle it all at once. Only one of the literacy skills is crucial. The key to them all. Reading.It s the first of the three R’s. When you’ve learned to read--really read, not just pass your eyes over the page—you re ready to write at an elevated level. And speaking too is easier when you’ve figured out how the written word works. Think of it. Each of us can peek over the shoulders of the most eloquent wordsmiths in recorded history just by opening their books. Could we ask for a better chance to polish our verbal skills? Needless to say, mastering the written word takes exposure to how it’s done—and lots of patient practice. Above all it takes persistence, the kind that comes from a deeply-rooted faith in oneself and one’s mentors. This goes for literacy at the expert level, as it does for any skill that’s worth mastering: speaking Italian, hitting a golf ball, whipping up a soufflé. Not everybody has the luck to grow up in Fiesole or the good fortune to be named Nicklaus or Mickelson. Few have Emeril’s private number. The rest of us need to push especially hard if we want to perfect our skills. Maybe it’s just as well. Independent, challenging work, pursued against odds, can bring intense satisfactions. If it were otherwise even more lost souls would be slumped in front of the TV, subsisting on bonbons and the QVC.The usual way to acquire a difficult skill is by taking lessons. These come in two very different forms. Call one immersion, the other coercion. You’ve probably had plenty of the latter. It’s what happens in many classrooms. First you’re taught something—how to diagram a sentence, say, or organize a paragraph—and then you’re told to work an exercise, take a quiz, or fill in some blanks. It s the same on the practice range: a golf pro explains the ideal chip shot while you look on with your hands in your pockets.Sure enough, coercion can teach you a lot.But if you’re lucky somebody will just put a golf club in your hands and get out of the way. The theories can wait for later, after you’ve smashed a few windows. Because not everybody wants to listen patiently to some fellow in polyester pontificate about the overlapping grip. Lots of us just want to whale away.Maybe you’re one of these people. If so, you’ve come to the right place. If “coercion” were going to work for you, it would have done so by now. You’d be as literate as hell and ready to compose your own book on how to read like an expert.If, on the other hand, you still have a bit to learn, and especially if you’re fed up with being kicked around by really tough books, maybe it’s time for you to renounce “coercion” for “immersion”--to learn by doing and leave the general principles for later. After all, immersion seems to work fine for newlyweds, not to mention boot camp and Berlitz. Why not for one’s native tongue?That’s why this book starts with real writing by real writers—and ends there too. In between, you ll find something many experts leave out: word-by-word explanations of exactly what’s going on in black and white. What the writer put on the page. You’d think that’s where the experts would start, with the words on the page. If they’d show you real writing in action, pretty soon you’d get the hang of it yourself. But often that’s the last thing on their minds.It’s really quite amazing how some experts can rattle on about books while pretty much ignoring what’s right before their eyes. If you don’t believe me, spend an hour in a university lecture hall, or peer into a critical text. What are you likely to find? Some adenoidal assistant professor pontificating about literary history, or theory, or how to dig symbols out of a book like raisins from a bun. As for the digging itself—the experts leave it to you. And that’s just not right.Because digging is the hard part. Blathering about irony or symbols or, ugh, “logocentrism”—why, to tell the truth, that’s easy as pie. It’s almost always easier to talk about something than actually to do it. On the other hand, showing how real language works on a real page—that’s as tough as can be.So the format of Extreme Reading is unique. Each chapter opens with a passage from the writings of a different author. You are shown how the passage works, often within a paragraph or two. Out of this comes a technique for future use. (Think of the technique as a tool, a fresh way to dig into difficult books.) In each chapter of this book, a new set of reading tools is explained and applied to further passages. As you go along, you collect more and more of these tools. As the tools accumulate, they help you delve deeply into new and more difficult writings. Ultimately, they will equip you to tackle the toughest books of all—a skill you will find useful long after you’ve polished off Extreme Reading.In general, the passages analyzed here progress from the mildly challenging (Robert Frost) to the virtually incomprehensible (Martin Heidegger).Our first chapter opens with a few lines of verse by Frost and Robert Burns, our second with a passage from the autobiography of Russell Baker. What is learned from Frost and Burns is applied to Baker. In turn, Frost, Burns, and Baker inform our reading of the next writer, the Greek dramatist Sophocles. And so on. Each chapter yields fresh analytic techniques. Chances are you will need them. The last chapters of this book bring you face to face with the writings of several fiendishly difficult authors, including one who claimed almost always to say the opposite of what he really meant—as a matter of principle! By the end of Extreme Reading, you will be armed and ready to take on books like these--the toughest books of all. Over the centuries humankind has accumulated a priceless trove of lasting literature. We have many more first-rate books than anyone can possibly absorb in a single lifetime. What we don’t have more than enough of are first-rate readers.The plain fact is that great writers need great readers. History shows that without a pool of capable, demanding, highly literate readers, writing begins to atrophy. This is one reader’s effort to help enlarge the pool. I Nobody has to guess where I got my degree. Arrogance, complacency, and a few unshakable opinions have left precious little room for doubt. So it is surprising that Stanford and I never really hit it off. Sure, we had our brief, fumbling honeymoon, but for the next few years the university and I just went through the motions. Then we parted, energy spent, with strained smiles and a quick handshake. Yes, I too made my way up to the platform on that sunlit day in June. And, yes, the Provost called my name. But even then something had to go wrong. He did his best, but the perspiring fellow couldn’t get my name right. I didn’t hold it against him. As a matter of fact, it seemed a fitting end to an uneasy, even abrasive, relationship. Things hadn’t started out that way. Far from it. The acceptance letter was, to my mind, a stroke of impossibly good fortune--like being visited by Zeus in a shower of gold or snagging a date with the homecoming queen. Or both, with the keys to an XKE thrown in. I dimly perceived that in the future things might not be quite the same for me. Even that simple truth took a while to sink in. It wasn’t until my first trip home, after the Fall quarter of 61 . . . I needed to land a job for the holidays, but I hadn’t applied for work when I should have, in mid-November. So a week or two before Christmas I made the rounds of the hometown employers. Maybe somebody was still looking for temporary help. My first stop was Foreman Clark, a clothing store where I’d clerked a few years back. The manager was new. A salesman on the floor pointed him out to me. He didn’t mince words. “You worked here, you ought to know the score. The season started weeks ago. I m overstaffed as it is. Now, if you don’t mind, I‘ve got work to do.” A lull had emptied the store of customers. On my way out, I caught sight of a saleslady I knew. Soon we were joined by two or three former associates. Even the manager drifted over. Someone said, “What have you been up to, Mike?” “Going to school.” “Where at?” “Stanford,” I said. There was a brief pause. “How soon can you start?” the manager said. I d nabbed a short-term gig at a cut-rate clothier. And more, much more. Something precious had landed in my lap, and all at once the scene around me--the smiling sales clerks, the rows of trousers and tee shirts, the cardboard Santa by the door--was bathed in its glow.I got the message, all right: From now on nothing is going to be quite the same for you, pal. And you owe it all to pure dumb luck. II My very first class was scheduled in Cubberly Auditorium. It was to be taught by the chairman of the Classics Department. I arrived ahead of time A blackboard, illuminated by Klieg lights, had been set up on the stage. The rest of the auditorium was veiled in gloom. To my surprise, only one other person had come to class early--Professor Loomis himself. He took no notice of me. How could he? The man was engrossed in a task at the board. Chalk in hand, Professor Loomis was writing, at length, in a monomaniacally precise little script. Tiny characters ran at the very top of the blackboard all the way across to the farthest margin on the right. Each time he got to the end of a line, Professor Loomis retraced his steps and started a new one. By the time the auditorium began to fill, he had covered nearly half of the blackboard and was still scratching doggedly away. From far back in the room, I strained to make out what Professor Loomis was writing. Suddenly he stopped. By this time the front seats were occupied by teaching assistants and upper division students. Lowerclassmen like me had sprinkled themselves here and there around the rest of the auditorium. Professor Loomis turned toward the silent rows, squinting into the dark, and in an ancient, feeble, querulous voice said, “How many of you . . . HAVE Greek?” After a startled moment, maybe three or four of the T.A.s in front raised their hands. Professor Loomis moved slowly. He turned back to the board, took up an eraser, and, at the same snail’s pace, commenced to obliterate the words he had so laboriously put there. The process took several minutes. We waited patiently. No doubt many of those enrolled in Hum 61, Professor Loomis’s survey course, had gone into it with their eyes open. Certainly the T.A.s, battle-hardened veterans, were in the know. But I was a transfer student fresh from junior college. When it came to Professor Loomis, as with so much else, I was a babe in the woods. Ronnie Corso could have clued me in. A Ph.D. candidate in Classics, he later revealed the secrets of a department ritual, one that, had I known, could have prepared me for Professor Loomis. At various times during the school year, in groups of two or three, Classics graduate students were invited to dine at the house of the department chairman. The invitations were both an honor and a trial. Bizarre behavior was sometimes observed. On Ronnie’s night nothing much happened. Except that Professor Loomis wore a three-piece suit of a particularly hairy tweed. And cracked crab was served. Professor Loomis--aged, wiry, undersized--possessed a prodigious appetite, and throughout the lengthy meal, instead of placing his crab shells in the receptacle provided, he let them fall from his glistening fingers. The shells were allowed to remain where they landed. They adhered to his waistcoat, his woolly tie, his sleeves. Some fell into his lap, which he had neglected to protect with a napkin. Many more found their way to the floor. By the end of the meal, as Ronnie told it, there was a ring of shells at the professor’s feet. Indeed, those that had not caught in his cuffs had begun to form a mound. The shells threatened to cover one or both of the professor’s shoes. Ronnie thanked heaven that Professor Loomis didn t wear a beard. By the time the Fall quarter came to an end, we humanities students had learned a lot from Professor Loomis. To my regret, I hadn’t been given a chance to observe the professor at table. However, I was about to discover for myself something almost as revealing. The course grade for Hum 61 was based on a midterm, a final, and a term paper. I had written my essay, a lengthy one, on the Epic of Gilgamish. The other class members’ papers were returned to them on the day of the final. But I had submitted my essay late. If I wanted it back, I’d have to pick it up next month in the office of the Classics Department. In the first week of Winter quarter I presented myself there. Seated at her desk, a secretary looked up at me with narrowed eyes. She knew nothing of my paper, and I was told to return a few days later. When I did, the secretary denied having seen me before. But she assured me that she would look into the matter. The next time, she remembered me but had no idea of the whereabouts of my essay. “Perhaps I could speak to the professor himself?” I said. “That would be difficult. Professor Loomis is doing research in the Aegean. He will not return until the fall.” On my next visit to the Classics Department, the secretary told me she had looked in the file and that my essay was not there. She said, “Are you quite sure you didn’t pick it up last quarter?” Skepticism had crept into her voice. She was beginning to doubt that I’d turned in an essay at all. “Could Professor Loomis have put it somewhere else?” I said. “Young man, in eleven years I have never known Professor Loomis to misplace one of his students’ papers.” “Maybe it’s on his desk,” I suggested. “Impossible. Professor Loomis is extremely well-organized. The place for student papers is in the file.” “If I could just take a peek . . .” I said, casting a wistful glance at the door to Professor Loomis’s private office. “Out of the question. And useless. As I’ve tried to tell you, no one could be more attentive to detail. If the paper is not in the file, I have to conclude that--” Just then, the professor’s door swung open. Out came a man carrying a toolbox. The door was ajar. I found myself staring into Professor Loomis’ sanctum sanctorum. Books, papers, artifacts were stacked everywhere--in bulging bookcases, on the floor, in teetering piles, on every available horizontal surface. Chair seats, window sills, the housing of the steam heater--all groaned under masses of paper. At one end of the room, Professor Loomis’s desk was covered by dozens upon dozens of yellowing documents and monographs--printed detritus of every possible sort, much of it cascading onto the floor. The desk itself was barely visible beneath this avalanche of papers. I turned and departed, and the door to the Classics Department closed behind me. IIIA month or two after my third birthday, my father returned from the war. He noticed that long months of cosseting and coddling by female relatives had left his three-year-old son soft and dreamy-eyed. In a word, “spoiled.” Never one to leave things to chance, my father drew on his infantry experience. I was going to have to be toughened up. So he devised for me a homespun, preschool version of Basic Training. Before long, I found myself trudging behind him on forced marches (he called this “going for a hike”); I submitted to boxing lessons; I was thrown into the deep end of the pool. I was learning how to take it like a man. Most important, I was expected, for the first time in my young life, really to pay attention. Around every corner, it seemed, lay a test. Wherever he and I found ourselves, whatever we were doing, I was expected always to have my eyes peeled, to be on the qui vive. To make sure I wasn’t nodding off, my father posed questions. What is the purpose of this switch? Why does the engine need oil? Where does the gasoline come from? How far have we traveled? Which direction is home? Whenever I didn’t have the answers, he wanted to know why I hadn’t asked. Every day brought its full-dress review. But there was one thing I noticed that I kept quiet about. What I noticed was that my father almost never talked about the war. Our neighborhood was full of fathers who had seen action in Europe or the Pacific. None of them ever seemed to talk about the war. Like my own, several of my playmates’ houses were crammed with wartime souvenirs--German cameras, carved figurines from Bavaria, glossy ceramic panthers (with eyes of green stone) from somewhere in the Pacific, rattan furniture. And under the beds or stowed beneath the rafters, in foot lockers or ammunition boxes, more sinister memorabilia--Nazi uniforms, daggers, medals, Lugers, brass knuckles. It was all there, along with dogtags, greatcoats, French and German phrase books, programs from the Follies Bergere. All just beneath the surface, so to speak. On weekends after lunch, when my father stretched out for a snooze on the living room couch, his sonorous wheezes soon gave way to a restless muttering, and then to articulate speech. “It’s up there. Take it easy, men. We’ll find--” and then silence. Until it started up again. “Watch your step. Back down hill. Need to--” And again nothing. Sometimes my mother crouched down on the rug beside him while he slept. “We’ll find what, Norman?” she said. “Need to what?” I noticed that there never was a reply. IV It has been my experience that one’s fortune--good or bad--is seldom unalloyed. I have learned to take a hard look at the blessings that come my way. There’s likely to be a price tag somewhere. By the same token, bad luck often brings unexpected consolations: lessons learned, friendships renewed, inner resources augmented . Do we deserve any of this? I leave it to the savants. But of one thing I’m sure. Like the fruits of pretty much all human endeavor, luck is equivocal. The feature attraction isn’t going to much resemble the trailer. Fortune-wise, what you see is hardly ever what, in the end, you actually get. Such was the case one sparkling May morning in 1959, near the end of my last year of high school, when I heard my name being called. “Michael! Michael! Guess what?” It was Bobbie Hersch. From time to time, Bobbie, in her angora sweaters, had adorned the front seat of my father’s Chevy, when Pop let me borrow the car. With her spun gold tresses and silken skin, Bobbie was sweet as cotton candy, the kind of coed to whom, then as now, cloying metaphors just naturally cling. “The class standings have come out!” Hearing Bobbie speak of class standings would have given anyone a bit of a start. Lithe and lovely, Bobbie was notable, all right, but hardly for her interest in academic achievement. “We tied!” It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. Honest. I’d planted myself at the rickety desk in my bedroom most every night. But I just couldn’t concentrate. Teacher after teacher, perceiving “promise” without “product,” tried to find a way to close my achievement gap. Mr. Abramson tried. So did Mr. Nielsen. Mr. Ross, the journalism teacher, worked like a galley slave. But no dice. Even Miss Wahl gave it a shot. In her case, failure was preordained. Toothsome little morsel that she was, Miss Wahl only added fuel to the fire. For what, after all, was clouding my mind? Thousands of things. But mostly girls. Since at least the fifth grade, I’d thought of little else. By high school, I was a roiling cauldron of teenage lust. Many adolescents go a little girl crazy. Adults, too. In my lifetime, I’ve known plenty of both. But I’ve never met a single one worthy of shining my shoes, none who even approached the level of obsession with the opposite sex I’d already reached by the age of twelve. Please don’t imagine that I’d had much success. For one thing, I was a year or two younger than my classmates--immature for my age, to boot. Bobbie was an enthusiastic kisser, but her angora sweaters pretty much stayed where they belonged. Once, when I actually managed to cajole a willing girl into my bed, I was overcome by anxiety that my parents might get home early. Anxiety did not improve my performance. For my next opportunity, I would have to wait several long years. But frustrated or not, I had to find a way to get through high school. So, early in my sophomore year, I decided to throw myself into extracurricular activities. Here too I came up short. As a Thespian, I mostly languished in supporting roles. In the jazz band, I couldn’t get past second chair. On the school newspaper, somebody else was appointed editor-in-chief. And the golf coach, an astute judge of talent, declined to name me “first man.” Oh, I was active all right, frenetically so. But the vigorous public life wasn’t much more fruitful for me than the private, contemplative one. At best it could be said that, in the soothing catch phrase of the day, I was ”above average.” But at the same time--almost in the same breath--”not working to potential.” So on that bright spring morning, as Bobbie smiled up at me, I found myself face to face with a disturbing image. My own. Bobbie and I had tied for 151st. In a class of 302. Smack dab in the middle. This time, I thought, it’s official. Statistics don’t lie. Forget “above.” I am just plain average. V Newly admitted male transfer students were lodged in Stanford Village, converted wartime housing way out on Middlefield Road. The rows of wooden structures were little more than glorified barracks. One almost expected to meet up with Beetle Bailey or Sergeant Bilko. Individual rooms, each supplied with a metal bed, a government issue wardrobe, and steam heat, gave onto a linoleum corridor, straight as a string. The walls were paper thin. After dinner, when most of the cubicles were occupied, one could hear Joan Baez or Miles Davis--sometimes the same tracks, somewhat out of phase--emanating from radios and portable record players up and down the hall. Reportedly, battle fatigued Naval officers had been billeted there. My heart went out to them. On the day I moved in, the parking lot outside Sterling Hall was nearly full. Unlike me, practically all my fellow students seemed to have cars. Few of them were jalopies. A good portion were of foreign make--many, gleaming convertibles. To be sure, plenty of Volkswagens and Fords, but also a Triumph TR2, an Austin Cooper, a candy-apple red Corvette, a Mercedes Benz roadster or two. Occasionally in evidence was Ronnie Corso’s block-long Hispano-Suiza, a car so spectacular as to take anybody’s breath away. All in all, the Sterling Hall parking lot--a repository of vehicles belonging, for the most part, to mere teenagers--gave that of my hometown country club a better than good run for its money. Across the street was St. Patrick’s seminary. Upstairs were the Zulus, members of a fraternity only recently reinstated after repeated offenses against God, man, and the Fundamental Standard. The Zulus were said to have done something that outshone even John Belushi at his most inventive. They had burned down their own fraternity house. We newcomers thus found ourselves suspended, as it were, between heaven and hell. As is often the case, the latter had the firmer hold. The fraternity boys upstairs soon discovered an inventive use for their lengthy, resonant corridor. Early some Sunday mornings, the first of a series of dull, rumbling roars could be heard. They began at one end, reached a crescendo over one’s sleepy head, and then proceeded on to the anticipated crash at the far end of the hall. The “pins” were recently emptied beer bottles, the “setters” downy-faced Zulu pledges--equipped, as I imagined, with safety glasses, catchers’ mitts, and, of course, industrial grade earplugs. We on the ground floor, sleep deprived but unbowed, inspired no doubt by our barracks environment, endured these indignities like stalwart soldiers. My fellow transfer students, most of them members of the junior class, had been drawn from colleges and universities across the land. Taken as a group, they were almost stereotypically representative of middle- to upper-middle-class white North America. Just as the cast of the regulation World War II movie needed its streetwise Brooklynite, its soft-spoken Hispanic, its taciturn sharpshooter from Appalachia, so too Sterling Hall boasted Hank Adams, our patrician ex-Yalie; steady Fred Smith, from Swarthmore; Monk’ (I ve forgotten his last name), a worshipper of The Beach Boys; Ricardo Weil, our world-weary Argentine; ironic Stan Williams--from, er, Williams. Others came from Texas, Illinois, New York, Maryland, North Carolina. Only a few of us were sophomores, one a nervous fugitive from an honors program in Oregon. The four or five other junior college transfers were, I believe, all upperclassmen. Among them was Doug Malloy, destined to have a powerful influence on my Stanford future. And there was Rico, from Buenos Aires. He too would leave his mark. VI Throughout my childhood, I was universally acknowledged to be a world-class bookworm, a demon reader, an avatar of infantile literacy. Mine was a reputation almost wholly undeserved. In fact, I was well into adolescence before making anything like a serious effort to justify my bookish persona. What was the origin of this myth, so tenacious, so defiant of reality? In a way, I guess, it was inevitable. After all, what was I but a skinny, myopic kid with no apparent talent for traditional male pursuits? And what are such boys, inept at boxing and baseball, supposed to do? Moreover, in the literacy sweepstakes I had two enormous advantages. Both of my parents, though by no means avid book readers themselves, were nevertheless possessed of an imposing and, under the circumstances, mysterious verbal facility. Neither my mother nor my father had gone beyond high school. Indeed, it’s possible that Mother never received a diploma at all. Certainly neither of my parents had ever set foot on a college campus. (In this, of course, they resembled the majority of their Depression Era age-mates.) But back then, high school meant more than it does today, and my parents had made the most of it. Not only had they picked up a good deal of geography, history, and the like, but they had acquired uncommon verbal skills, especially of the speaking variety. But the rigors of public education do not fully explain my parents’ unusual--in some ways, bizarre--intimacy with words. Before the war, my father had briefly seen a future for himself as a professional writer. While serving in the infantry, he found the time and energy to compose and send home lengthy original stories, often featuring popular comic strip characters of the day, for my mother to read aloud to me. When, after VE Day, the family was reunited, he sometimes regaled Mother and me at the breakfast table with accounts of his “dreams”--tall tales about “The Land of the Upside-Downies,” a place where everything happens in reverse. Often, family meals were uproarious affairs, the three of us communicating almost entirely in a private dialect made up of Pig Latin, baby talk, disarranged political and advertising slogans, butchered foreign words, and cant phrases of the day--all rattled off at a furious Preston Sturges pace. My father’s taste for nonsense narrative was shared by my mother, and she added to it a high-spirited penchant for purely verbal invention. She was addicted to words of her own devising, like “apple-tite” (i.e., hunger), “slickery” (slick and slippery), and “altitude” (as in “Don’t take that altitude with me, young man”). She liked to construct her own brand of malapropisms (“nasturtium” for nostrum). In moments of seriousness my mother exhibited the vocabulary of a doctoral student. At the end of her life, in her mid- eighties and deeply senile, she retained the capacity to startle her caregivers with utterances like “I am afraid that someone may have absconded with my reticule.” Mother’s verbal facility was all the more mystifying to me, for only once in my life did I see her actually sit down to read an adult book. And it isn’t as if she were doing so on the sly, in the wee hours of the morning. To tell the truth, there were hardly any grown-up books around the house to be read by anyone, no matter what the time of day or night. Nevertheless, throughout my early childhood, Mother and Father read aloud to me daily, at bedtime. These readings--Alice in Wonderland, The House at Pooh Corner, Little Black Sambo, The Nine Little Goblins --often caused me bewilderment, even alarm. The world around me made little enough sense as it was. Disappearing schoolgirls and dissolving tigers did nothing to dispel the confusion. Tenniel’s drawings of the dyspeptic Duchess and the unfortunate flamingos were particularly disturbing. And to my infant mind, James Whitcomb Riley’s verses left plenty to be desired. But I was being read to by my parents. As I know now, the particular reading matter wasn’t what counted. And they read aloud to each other. Not from books. Before television, magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post, with their illustrated nonfiction “articles,” short stories, cartoons, and colorful advertisements, performed a function not unlike that soon to be taken over by TV. Thus, in our household at least, the Post was a kind of freeze-frame, hard-copy precursor of the telly. Just about my happiest childhood memories are of fires crackling in the fireplace on stormy nights, my mother stitching a slipcover or braiding a rug on the living room floor after dinner, me playing with my Erector Set, and Father on a couch reading aloud a Post story about Tugboat Annie or Alexander Botts of the Earthworm Tractor Company. VII Eventually, the reading aloud would play its part in extricating me from my academic morass. But this was yet to be revealed. On that fateful May morning in 1959, as I watched Bobbie Hersch traipse off to her next class, I took a quick, anxiety-driven personal inventory. I was a nearly penniless high school senior. And I was about to be thrown out into the cruel world with absolutely no prospects whatsoever. Throughout my childhood, my father had reminded me time and again that when I finished high school I was going to be on my own. He and Mother would continue to provide moral support, but I would need to find a job, win a scholarship, go into the military. Or something. The free ride would be over. The Army wouldn’t have me. This I had discovered a few weeks before graduation while researching a story for the school newspaper. The oculist at the Induction Center hadn’t known it was a dry run. Before he could be told, I was classified 4-F. Needless to say, a scholarship was out of the question. That left a job. Where? Doing what? Just then came one of those strokes of luck that now and then bring deliverance to the undeserving. A full-time news reporter for a local weekly, the Walnut Creek Sun, had been offered an out-of-town promotion. He accepted, on condition that he not be permanently replaced during his tryout period. The managing editor, only slightly less generous than he was foolhardy, offered me the job. I was given to understood that, if my predecessor exercised his right of return, I’d have to relinquish the position. Thus, a few days before my seventeenth birthday, I became the youngest full-time newspaper reporter in the Western Hemisphere. Also, quite possibly the tallest. Not to mention the skinniest. And the worst.Dick Osborn must have known almost immediately that he’d made a terrible mistake. I didn’t have a clue about how to cover my beat, in part because I hadn’t the slightest idea how a city, especially one in transition from dusty hamlet to suburban powerhouse, was run. I attended Planning Commission meetings, but I had only the foggiest ideas about zoning and variances. I tried to cover a sewer bond controversy without understanding liens, condemnations, or rights of way. What mattered? What didn’t? What made the city tick? It was a mystery to me. Fortunately, city government operated at half speed during the summer. And luckily there were no really big stories--no bank robberies, no earthquakes, no four-alarm fires. Soon I was reduced to little more than cutting and pasting press releases from Job’s Daughters and the I.O.O.F. After six weeks or so, to everyone’s relief, the man I had tried to replace returned to reclaim his former position. Thus I escaped being fired from my first real job. A high school friend had been working as a grocery clerk at the Berkeley Co-op. Now, as the end of the summer approached, he was off to college. Jim was so well regarded at the supermarket that when he recommended me as his replacement, the hiring interview became a mere formality. I would be taken on initially as part of the night crew. So I began my second career, at twice my newspaper wage. I wasn’t any better suited to stocking groceries than I had been to reporting news. And this was the night shift. Some people can adjust to going to sleep in the morning and waking to darkness. I could not. After working all night, often I had to hitchhike the twenty or so miles home. I was perpetually exhausted. I became depressed. Then I was trained as a grocery checker and moved to a day schedule. All in all, I lasted about nine months. I had just enough time to collect a few weeks’ unemployment compensation before taking another stab at scholastic adequacy. VIII In 1824, with his father facing debtors’ prison, the twelve-year-old Charles Dickens was torn from the family hearth and sent to work in a dark, grimy, rat-infested shoe polish warehouse. For the rest of his life, Dickens was tormented by memories of his nightmarish five months in the “blacking factory.” I couldn’t claim that my eight-hour night shift at the Berkeley Co-op was comparable to Dickens’s daily grind at Warren’s Blacking. For one thing, I was seventeen years of age, while Dickens had not yet entered his teens. For another, I was working forty, not sixty, hours a week. Nevertheless, the long, lonely nights at the supermarket had given me plenty to think about. My pallid ambition was now bolstered by stark fear. Somehow, if I was to avoid a lifetime of drudgery--my personal “blacking factory”--I was going to have to win a scholarship, and I had a scant two years in which to achieve it. I had one last opportunity to show that I was not a bonehead but a “late bloomer.” This time, I knew first hand exactly what was at stake, and I knew enough to thank whatever gods may be for California s post-secondary education system. My second chance was coming to me courtesy of the open-admission, tuition-free local junior college. I’d saved enough money from childhood paper routes and yard work, summer and Christmas employment, and my stint at the Co-op to pay for food, clothing, and textbooks. And as long as I remained a full-time student, my father would allow me the use of my old bedroom at home, within bicycling distance of Diablo Valley College. I was leaving nothing to chance. Needless to say, I would study like a man possessed. I couldn’t afford a third and fourth year of college without a scholarship. Moreover, to win one I figured I’d have to demonstrate something extra, some talent or accomplishment irresistible to an admissions officer. Back in high school, I’d made a desperate effort to appear “well- rounded.” In doing so, I had “spread myself too thin.” Now I was going to have to specialize. And, if possible, find a sponsor. The junior college had recently hired a new theatre director. He was to teach classes in speech as well as drama. Harvey Berman had already achieved local celebrity by directing an actual Hollywood film, a classic “teensploitation” B-movie, right there in the Diablo Valley. The previous summer, while I was sweating over the Walnut Creek police blotter, several of my high school classmates had found work as extras on this film. Two of the starring roles had been filled by Hollywood actors under contract to Roger Corman, the producer. A third leading part was assigned to a gifted high school classmate. I decided that Mr. Berman was my ticket to scholastic salvation. As a first step I would enroll in as many of his courses as I could fit onto my crowded study list. So I made room in the Fall for his morning Introduction to Speech and his afternoon Stagecraft class--and I declared to him my consuming passion for speech and drama. In October, Mr. Berman appointed me his production coordinator. And when an actor fell ill midway through the run of The Skin of Our Teeth, I replaced him too. After hearing me read aloud, Mr. Berman coached me in oral interpretation. Steeped in my father’s Saturday Evening Post recitations, I discovered that declamation came to me as if by second nature. While I didn’t win any speech contests, I gained valuable points with the person who counted most. Then he cast me as the Narrator, one of the leads, in the Spring play, I Knock at the Door. The Kimball family dinner table had been a first-rate training ground. One night after rehearsals Mr. Berman told me about a college classmate of his, a former fellow graduate student in drama, who was planning to visit Diablo Valley College. Dr. Farnsworth now worked as an assistant dean of admissions at Stanford University. Mr. Berman might just as well have announced that he was acquainted with Marie of Roumania--and that she was on her way to recruit a successor to the throne. All the same, at the appointed hour, carrying an ice cream cone and Kafka s Amerika, I sat down with Dr. Farnsworth. Between bites, I told him that I was only a freshman, that I planned to spend another year at DVC before transferring, that I couldn’t possibly qualify for, much less afford, a private college. With admirable self-restraint, Dr. Farnsworth found a tactful way to hint that, as a representative of the Stanford Office of Admissions, he was well-positioned to estimate my chances of getting into the university. And that Stanford was not lacking in resources for candidates with demonstrable financial need. Dr. Farnsworth made me promise to write for the necessary application materials. He told me he would stay in touch. IX The attentive reader will have observed my surprising metamorphosis from prepubescent bibliophobe to Kafka-toting teenager. How had this transformation been effected? In a word, comics. It was late 1945. Back from the war, my father was bent on shaking me out of my juvenile torpor. I was going to have to start arming myself for life’s struggles, and that meant paying much closer attention to the world around me--in my father’s words, “taking notice.” Once a week the two of us engaged in a cooperative venture called “reading the Sunday paper.” It was my job to fetch the Tribune from the driveway. I was rewarded with the comic strip section, and Pop started in on the front page. But I was an unlettered three-year-old, and soon I was pestering my father to read the funny papers to me. With characteristic cunning, he decided to use this opportunity to advance my lagging literacy. I was going to have to sing for my supper. If I wanted him to read me The Phantom, or L’il Abner, or Prince Valiant, I must first “read” The Little King to him. Since this strip had no captions and no dialogue balloons, I would have to describe the actions in my own words. “The Little King, he’s . . . sitting.” “Yes. What is he sitting on?”“A chair.” “The king’s chair is called . . . ?” “Dunno.” “A throne. . . . And what’s this?” “Red.” “A red what? . . . You walk on it.” “The floor?” In this tortuous fashion, I had to attach a running narrative to The Little King. Only then would my father read one of my favorites aloud. While he read to me, I followed along. I started to pick up some of the more common words. Soon I was able to decipher a few of them on my own. It was a bit like a baseball player’s swinging a weighted bat. After my struggle to narrate comics that had no dialogue, real reading didn t seem such a daunting task. After all, as I could see, books had authors--that is, the words were thoughtfully supplied by someone else. Real reading seemed a good deal easier than “reading.” At least you didn’t have to come up with the descriptions all by yourself. Such were my first encounters with the printed page. Soon I was not only reading but “writing”--with less satisfactory results. The family library was minuscule. Most of our twenty or so books had probably been purchased from department store remainder bins. My parents owned a massive, unreadable one-volume edition of Shakespeare (“with Temple notes”); two or three forgotten novels, among them Tomorrow Never Comes, “by the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”; something called Wild Geese Calling; the collected stories of Dorothy Parker; In Bed We Cry, a memoir by Ilka Chase; biographies of the comedian W.C. Fields and the golfer Walter Hagen; Snoot If You Must, a collection of Lucius Beebe’s newspaper columns. In the seventeen years I was a resident member of the Kimball household, nobody was ever observed, even once, to open any of these books. There were also oversized collections of cartoons by Peter Arno and R. Taylor, artists associated with the New Yorker magazine. For some reason, my father, no more a reader of the New Yorker than of the Upanishads, counted these books among his most prized possessions. This was not known to me on the day when, upon opening one of them, I instantly perceived a grave omission. Unaccountably, some of the cartoons had not been supplied with captions. Little more than a toddler, I didn’t yet know how to write. So beneath each of these drawings--wordless, no doubt, due to the artist’s oversight--I penciled in a neat little row of ersatz hieroglyphs. When my father discovered these additions, Mother was quick to point out that I had done nothing more than carry his “reading” game to its logical next step. X As I grew into boyhood, reading and writing had to take a backseat to other pursuits--Saturday morning moviegoing, cowboys and Indians, stamp collecting, Cub Scouts, music lessons. On several occasions, misguided adult inticements nearly extinguished my nascent reading impulse. That it survived at all was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle. One of my grandparents made me a Christmas present of Gulliver’s Travels. A well-meaning lady across the street loaned me her copy of the Leatherstocking Tales. That any sentient being could consider Jonathan Swift or James Fenimore Cooper suitable reading for a seven-year-old was to me then, as now, an impenetrable mystery. Despite these early setbacks, the adults in my life didn’t flinch or falter. A classmate’s mother was peddling the World Book Encyclopedia. My parents plotted together with her to ensnare me in its web of predigested erudition. The neighbor’s sales pitch, replete with pastel-colored fold-out maps and Morocco bindings, somehow captured my boyish imagination. I had to have that encyclopedia! So a time-payment plan was arranged, and I started drumming up yard work. Together with my paper routes, odd jobs would eventually pay for my precious World Books. Today, more than sixty years later, I have not forgotten the morning when those twenty-three volumes arrived at the house, nor their appearance, nor their smell, nor their magenta covers, pebbly to the touch. Arrayed in blue-painted orange crates at the head of my “Hollywood” bed, they became a constant source of satisfaction to me. Diving into their pages thrust the appeal of cowboys and Indians into the shade. The encyclopedia produced a potent emotional payoff, one not unlike that of my stamp collection. As I look back, I sense psychic resonances that far transcended the literal content of my treasured volumes. Perhaps it would take a psychoanalyst to explain the appeal--and the unconscious symbolism--of the neat row of books, uniform in size, shape, and binding, that stood day and night like faithful sentinels at the head of my bed. This much I know for sure: for a time the World Book exemplified that rarest of all material objects, the acquisition whose appeal never seems to fade. Nevertheless, within a few short years I would fall under heady new literary influences--older schoolmates; charismatic teachers; a bookseller of highbrow paperbacks. As a reader, I would begin to branch out, eventually leaving the encyclopedia behind. But the World Book would have served its purpose, and then some, one that put me on the meandering path that in time would lead to the Walnut Creek Sun, Kafka’s Amerika, Sterling Hall, and beyond. Soon after entering high school, I made my first grown-up book purchases, Isak Denisen’s Seven Gothic Tales and Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. A year or so later, my thirst for a certain kind of quasi-Bohemian esoterica suddenly became unquenchable. To the astonishment of all, I was threatening to turn myself myself into a demi-intellectual. From Dwight Macdonald’s column in my father’s Esquire I learned about the Partisan Review, and I became a subscriber. I practically memorized a Caedmon record of Dylan Thomas reciting his poems. I sent away for a copy of the Evergreen Review. I was a devotee of Henry Miller and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Steppenwolf and Waiting for Godot. I cannot claim to have made much sense of these books. But somehow the physical objects themselves, if little else, seemed to provide needed nourishment. I started to read Albert Camus and Kierkegaard and Sartre. I was on my way to becoming a junior grade existentialist, complete with Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, a paper-covered copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, and strong coffee in little cups. To this day, when former high school classmates gather, someone is likely to recall the occasion when Miss Kyne, our senior- year English teacher, her patience stretched beyond endurance, addressed me through clenched teeth. “Michael Kimball, you supercilious little pseudo-intellectual, get out of my classroom.” My loyal high school buddies are quick to point out her quite shockingly inaccurate use of the word “little.” XIGetting thrown out of Stanford has never been easy. In fact, I’ve known only one fellow who managed to pull it off. And in a peculiar way he was the most gifted of us all. As part of my financial aid package I was librarian of Sterling Hall, the undergraduate wing of Stanford Village. Every night after dinner I unlocked the door to the tiny cubicle that housed our meager book collection. And just about as regularly, Bill Morrow, a transfer student from Annapolis, sauntered in for a chat. This went on for several days. “Don’t you have any studying to do?” I asked. “Sure. I mean, I’m done.” “What courses are you taking? I want them too.” He recited his study list, fifteen units of solid upper division coursework. “How do you do it?” I asked. “I don’t mind telling you,” he said. “But I’d rather not have it get around. I have a photographic memory.” Bill explained. In a sense, he told me, just about everybody’s memory is “photographic.” That is, we remember what we see, some of it at least. Bill’s memory was no different. Except that he remembered it all. And when Bill said “all” he meant “every little bit.” After a few minutes’ concentration, he could summon a page to mind just as if the textbook were open in his lap. He demonstrated this ability for me. Given a half hour or so, Bill said, he was able to memorize multiple pages so well that he could mentally peruse them at any time of the day or night. When he felt like it, he could put footnotes into his examination papers. He demonstrated this talent, too, for me. He was working, he said, on committing complete volumes to memory, page numbers and all. Then at examination time he could simply look up what he needed in the index and turn immediately to the desired passages--entirely in his head. He wasn’t quite there yet. I kept Bill’s secret. But word got out anyway. He refused to be turned into a “performing seal,” so most of the other guys had to take his powers on faith. Then something astonishing happened. He failed to return in the Spring. The reason, it was rumored, was that in his two quarters at Stanford, Bill had passed only four classes. To me his defeat seemed beyond comprehension--that is, until it was explained by Stan Williams. “Old Morrow memorized the books all right. What he forgot to do was read the doggone things.” Another library visitor was Ricardo Weil, a young Argentine who somehow managed to combine an aura of steamships and polo ponies with a mystifying and irascible intensity that always put me on my guard. This much was clear: Rico had not spent his childhood mowing the lawn of a lower middle-class tract house in East Contra Costa County. One day he brought me the final draft of an essay he’d written for Professor Loomis. Weil’s thesis was that the Aeneid could be read as a complex allegory, one involving, among other things, postwar South American politics. Rico told me he wanted my opinion of his work. To this day I do not know what possessed me to treat his question as a dispassionate scholarly inquiry. I can hardly claim, in my defense, that my response was motivated by a rigid regard for the unvarnished truth. Indeed, with an upbringing such as mine, saturated in play-acting, contradiction, neologism, and nonsense, it’s a wonder I ever got anywhere at all in the effort to distinguish reality from illusion. The way things really are from the way they merely seem.Fact from fiction. Truth from falsity. Honesty from dishonesty. For, in a sense, I never really did. Not, at least, for many long years. To me, it was sinful to impede a good yarn by slavish adherence to fact. To my mind, there just wasn’t very much difference between little white lies and big black ones, candid assessments and sales pitches, sacred vows and balderdash. And even if I understood that a difference existed, I wasn’t always able, in practice, to put it into play. Certainly not in the lively after-hours bull sessions that often took place in one or another of the Sterling Hall dorm rooms. Somehow, improbable as my story already was, I felt the need to burnish it to an even higher sheen. So I added a bit of glamour to my accounts--or glossed over the mundane details. If only by implication, my few weeks at the Sun grew into a mini-career. My single paid “gig” transformed me into a professional musician. My fumbling sexual encounters expanded to fill the available space. Even my father’s literary ambitions were at last realized. In almost every case, my tall tales derived from a kernel of truth. By subtle elaboration, or omission, or, less often, pure fancy, the events of my young life were given the polish I believed they deserved. True to my code, I was seldom inhibited by a strict regard for the truth. Except when Ricardo Weil came to see me in the library. So I told him exactly what I thought of his paper. Fortunately for Weil, Professor Loomis saw it differently. And my clumsy handling of Rico’s visit to the library put the two of us on a collision course. Soon a brief excursion of mine into dorm politics provided him with an opportunity to bring his antagonism into the open. Once again, Rico appeared at my door. This time he leveled specific allegations of wrongdoing, including the claim that I was responsible for the misuse of a sum of money, a contribution he had made to the dorm party fund. I regret to report that, in this particular at least, his charge was justified. Ricardo went even further. Having detected exaggeration in my tales of past glory, he had come to doubt just about everything I’d ever said, or said I’d done. Weil accused me of wholly fabricating my musical, dramatic, and journalistic backgrounds--bases for my admission to the university. And to these charges he added another. He told me I was a racist. When I denied his accusations, he threatened to take the gravest of them to the college authorities. XII The best academic advice I ever got came from two of my undergraduate classmates. As a matter of fact, theirs was just about the only counsel I ever received at Stanford. In the early ‘sixties, the university had not yet established the “support services” that today envelop students from academic cradle to grave. In my day, the English Department academic advisor was a nearsighted assistant prof for whom I and my challenges were so far down the list of priorities as to be, practically speaking, invisible. From almost the moment we were thrown together in Sterling Hall, my fellow transfer students and I discussed, debated, and wrangled over just about every topic we could think of. And we could think of plenty. We gabbed about the nature of Greek tragedy, the viability of nonviolence, the paucity of acceptable female companionship. We chewed over religion, technology, the causes of war. Individualism, materialism, solipsism, existentialism. We were true aficionados of the bull session. And like all good dorm debaters, we struggled to find ways to resolve our disputes; failing that, to dazzle others with our rhetorical skills; above all, to vanquish our verbal adversaries. We often demanded of our friendly antagonists that they “define their terms.” Defining one’s terms became a kind of mantra, especially for me. I had spent enough of my life in uncertainty. I wanted a tool for replacing endless equivocation with conclusions that potentially might add up to something. I needed to get to the bottom of things. And that’s where Doug Malloy and Ted Wilkins came in. They were planning to major in philosophy. How they had come to this decision I don’t know. Nor can I explain how they had divined that the Stanford Philosophy Department was about to experience a notable flowering, one that soon would place it near the top of the academic heap. In 1961 its star, Professor Donald Davidson, had not yet published his groundbreaking work in action theory or philosophy of language. His essays had circulated only in mimeographed form. But Doug and Ted knew somehow that he was destined to become one of the most celebrated philosophers in the Anglo-American world. My two classmates were fully aware of the opportunity Davidson’s presence represented. And they were even willing to share their knowledge with me, a lowly English major. So they suggested that I take as many philosophy courses as possible. I soon discovered that symbolic logic and value theory are not subjects in which you can get by on facile generalizations and a puffed-up vocabulary. But I stuck with them anyway. And I ended up “minoring” in a subject that brought me exasperation, endless fascination--even a measure of humility--one that in the end succeeded in inoculating me against some of the more pernicious fads of fin de siecle academia. Without the influence of Doug and Ted, none of this would have entered my mind. Toward the end of my second year at the university, Dr. Farnsworth got me on the telephone. It wasn’t a social call. I hadn’t heard much from him in the past couple of years. Not since our meeting at Diablo Valley College, when I was just starting my college career. Back then, Dr. Farnsworth had been as good as his word. When I was slow to request the Stanford application materials, he had sent them to me anyway. When I held on to them too long, he practically filled them out for me himself. My acceptance came, it seemed, by return mail. Dr. Farnsworth had cherished high hopes for me. He had expected me to justify the university’s investment. I was going to contribute my labor and talents to the Stanford drama program. Mine was going to be a significant contribution. That Dr. Farnsworth’s expectations were not fulfilled hadn’t been entirely my fault. With no private transport besides a bicycle, I had been assigned to a dorm several miles from campus. My evenings were devoted to my job in the dorm library. Coursework at a major university brought demands I was only barely able to meet. None of my explanations had any effect on Dr. Farnsworth. And when I mentioned my brief excursion into dorm politics, his snappish reply brought a sudden realization of what I was up against. Dr. Farnsworth repeated the allegations I had first heard from the mouth of my former dormmate Rico Weil. Fortunately for me, Weil was about to graduate and, Phi Beta Kappa key in hand, enter a Midwestern graduate school of business. I couldn’t imagine that he would interrupt his new life to travel halfway across the country to testify against me. So I challenged Dr. Farnsworth to produce evidence of my misbehavior, and I reminded him of my right to confront my accuser. Once again I had slipped in just under the wire. Weil could not be produced. The accusations withered away. The next quarter my “leadership award” was downgraded to a garden variety tuition waiver. But I wasn’t cut off altogether. Never again did I cross paths with Dr. Farnsworth, to whom I owed so much and whom I had disappointed so thoroughly. How had I allowed such a promising start to go so disastrously wrong? If I were able explain it now, I would gladly do so. To this day it remains a mystery, even to me. Especially, perhaps, to me. XIII The rest of my Stanford story requires but few words. It was now the last quarter of my senior year. Professor Moiso, who ran the Freshman English program, also wanted to talk to me. He called me to his office. “Do you know why I’ve asked you to come here?” “No, sir.” “Our records indicate that you have not completed Freshman English.” I had taken the second semester of Frosh Comp at the junior college. But in my first semester there, none of the English composition classes had openings. When I informed him of this, Professor Moiso reminded me that Freshman English was a full year’s requirement. My reply was not a model of diplomacy. “Professor Moiso, this is the last quarter of my senior year. I have passed all the courses for the English major. I thought freshman English was designed to prepare you for college writing. Haven’t I amply demonstrated that I can write at the college level?” The professor gave me a look of mingled vexation and, I thought, loathing. “Mr. Kimball. We cannot take lightly a graduation requirement of the university.” Several days later, Professor Moiso rang me up again, this time with a grudging acknowledgement of my good luck. In my three years at Stanford I had taken one more English class than the number required for graduation as an English major. “It has been decided to allow you to substitute Professor Ackerman s Chaucer course for the first half of the Freshman English requirement.” Professor Moiso had couched his message in the passive voice. His meaning was clear. Had the matter been his alone to decide, I wouldn’t be graduating in June. At best, I’d have to return the summer after my senior year. To take the first half of Freshman English. I can’t imagine how Professor Reynoso-Diaz got saddled with Physical Science 101. He’d been a member of the Chemistry faculty since 1940, decades of service that should have exempted him from teaching an elementary laboratory science course, especially one designed for hopelessly unscientific humanities students. It was a graduation requirement none of us could avoid, no matter how good we were at analyzing the Epic of Gilgamish. A few students no doubt postponed taking their lab science courses, but hardly anyone waited more than a few quarters--certainly not until the very end of the senior year. So, on the first day of class, twenty-seven eager freshmen vied for the privilege of being the lone senior’s lab partner. By the second day, I had a bunsen burner to myself. It had taken me no time at all to demonstrate the cause of my delay in signing up for Physical Science. Even my freshman classmates could see that the depths of my incompetence were pretty close to unplumbable. By this time I was employed at Escondido Village, the newly-built housing complex for married students. Two of my three fellow night clerks were graduate students in petroleum engineering. One of them, Syed Aziz, had been assigned as a T.A. in Physical Science 101. The quarter flew by, and as the precious hours passed I fell further and further behind. It was a matter of hanging on by my sulphur-stained fingernails. I did poorly on the midterm. But I had the final before me, an opportunity to make up for earlier shortcomings. The course was to be graded on a curve. On the evening after the final, the T.A.s got together with Professor Reynoso-Diaz at a local pizza parlor. Their purpose was to evaluate the exams and assign course grades. Only four students appeared to have failed utterly. Their scores were clustered far below those of the rest. The teaching assistants took issue with the professor, who considered it his duty to flunk the ones with the very lowest scores. Led by Syed--my Escondido Village colleague--the T.A.s counter-argued. This was a class for non-science majors. The course was only meant to expose them to the scientific method--not, heaven knows, turn them into little Hubbles or Heisenbergs. For students who made a good-faith effort, it was long-standing university policy to extend the benefit of the doubt. Even the four worst students had earned “D”s, grades that, while doing their GPAs no good, would not hinder their progress toward graduation. After all, Syed argued, these pathetic incompetents were only humanities majors. The debate raged on. The T.A.s, Syed in the lead, plied the Professor with pizza and beer. Finally he agreed. After all, “D”s were not “recommending” grades. It was decided. The students with the lowest scores would pass with “D”s. All but one--the lone, hapless nebbish whose final was twenty points lower than the rest, lower possibly than that of anyone who had ever before enrolled in Physical Science 101. It was nearly 2 a.m. before Syed finally carried the day. In a verbal (and alcoholic) war of attrition he had prevailed. Professor Reynoso-Diaz was at last persuaded to let me escape with a “D minus.” The professor did so, I was given to understand, with Seyd’s solemn assurance that never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, would I again try to gain admittance to a science course at Stanford University. XIV The sun that shone on Frost Amphitheater, while not fierce, was insistent. The whole rigmarole--the procession, the acknowledgments, the distinguished speakers--threatened to go on forever. We soon-to-be graduates had a golden opportunity to confirm the heat-absorbing characteristics of academic garb.The mid-‘sixties were a time when commencement was still a solemn occasion. Few of us craned our necks. No one released balloons, or pigeons, or mice. We just sat there and perspired. In search of something to contemplate besides the speakers’ platitudes, I found my thoughts drifting toward my parents. Somewhere behind me in the crowded amphitheater they were proudly readying themselves for the moment when my name would be called. The graduation ceremony, I knew, meant every bit as much to them as it did to me. And suddenly it seemed imperative that I find a way to pick them out in the crowd. By observing my parents at this crucial moment, I would be able, I felt, to close a sort of celebratory circle, one whose point of origin lay deep in our shared past. To my surprise, I realized that doing so mattered a great deal to me. Several of my still-seated classmates seemed to have similar feelings. They were breaking ranks by turning their heads to search for loved ones. Even if I had permitted myself to do so, peeking over my shoulder was not, I knew, going to help me find my mother and father. Behind me were too many sweating faces. Besides, all of us, graduates and guests alike, were seated at more or less the same level. I would have a few fleeting moments up on the stage before my name was called. There, from a higher vantage point, I might be able to pick them out. If only I knew where my parents were seated . . . Then it came to me.And a few minutes later, from the top of the steps, I quickly scanned the hundreds and hundreds of spectators. Sure enough, there they were, Mother and Father, along with their guests, just where they were supposed to be. When the ceremony was over and my father had offered a toast, I told him about my few seconds on the platform. “You were all standing under a pine tree, way in the back,” I said. “Know how I found you?” I paused for effect. “I just looked for the only guy who was still wearing his blazer.” Mother was happy that I had wanted to find my parents in the crowd. Father, that I had known how to do so. At long last, it seemed, his son was beginning to take notice. # # # The above record is factual. Names and identifying characteristics of those still living have been altered. Here and there, mild hyperbole has been employed. Related articlesExtreme Reading: How to Tackle the Toughest Books 12/2/09 Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol (1843). 1/6/10 D.H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley s Lover (1928). 2/3/10 Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of the Day (1989). 3/3/10 Genesis. The Holy Bible, King James Version (c. 1,500 B.C.; tr. 1611). 4/7/10 Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth (1905). 5/5/10 Anton Chekhov. The Essential Chekhov Tales (Richard Ford, ed.): The Kiss, Lady with a Dog, Ward No. 6, Peasants, Gooseberries, The Betrothed, Neighbors. 6/2/10 Rebecca West. The Return of the Soldier (1918). 7/7/10 Evelyn Waugh. Scoop (1938). 8/4/10 P. G. Wodehouse. Leave It to Psmith (1923). 9/1/10 Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Scarlet Letter (1850). 10/6/10 John Updike. Rabbit, Run (1960).11/3/10 Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse (1927).12/1/10 Sinclair Lewis. Babbit (1922). 1/5/10 Stella Gibbons. Cold Comfort Farm (1932). 2/2/11 Francine Prose. The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women the Artists They Inspired (2002). 3/2/11 Van Wyck Brooks. The Flowering of New England (1937). 4/6/11 Iris Murdock. A Severed Head (1961). 5/4/11 Karen Armstrong. The Battle for God. 6/1/11 Saul Bellow. Herzog (1964). 7/6/11 Alfred Habegger. My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (2001). 8/3/11 A.S. Byatt. Possession. 9/7/11 Janet Wallach. Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell; Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia.10/5/11 Margaret Drabble. The Ice Age.11/2/11 Steven Johnson. The Ghost Map.12/7/11 Wilkie Collins. The Moonstone. 1/4/12 Erik Larson. The Devil in the White City. 2/1/12 Thomas Hardy. The Mayor of Casterbridge. 3/7/12 David McCullough. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. 4/4/12 Willa Cather. My Antonia. 5/2/12 Bill Bryson. A Short History of Nearly Everything. 6/6/12 E.M. Forster. A Passage to India.7/11/12 Edmund de Waal. The Hare with the Amber Eyes. 8/1/12 Stendhal. The Red and The Black. 9/5/12 Sarah Vowell. The Wordy Shipmates.10/3/12 Erik Larson. In the Garden of the Beast.11/7/12 Joseph Heller. Catch-22.12/5/12 Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart. 1/9/13 Emile Zola. Nana. 2/6/13 Richard Holmes. The Age of Wonder. 3/6/13 Graham Greene. Brighton Rock. 4/3/13 David Brooks. The Social Animal. 5/1/13 Elise Miller. A Time to Cast Away Stones. 6/5/13 Sven Beckert. The Monied Metropolis. 7/3/13 Thomas Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49. 8/7/13 Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady (1881; 1908). 9/4/13 Virginia Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway (1925).10/2/13 Simon Winchester. The Meaning of Everything (2003).11/6/13 Barabara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977).12/4/13 John Cheever. Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982). 1/8/14 James Wood. How Fiction Works (2008). 2/5/14 William Shakespeare. King Lear (1605). 3/5/14 Bernard Malamud. The Assistant (1957). 4/2/14 David Halberstam. The Fifties (1993). Chs. 1-15, 22, 23, 28, and 44-46. 5/7/14 Mary McCarthy. The Group (1963). 6/4/14 Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (1962). 7/2/14 Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man (1952). 8/6/14 Orville Prescott, ed. Mid-Century: An Anthology of Distinguished Contemporary American Short Stories (1958): Jessamyn West, A Little Collar for the Monkey (1948); Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (1948); Hortense Calisher, In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks (1951); E.B. White, The Hour of Letdown (1951). 9/3/14 Walker Percy. The Moviegoer (1961). 10/1/14 David Brooks. Bobos in Paradise (2000). 11/5/14 William Shakespeare. Julius Caesar (1599). 12/3/14 Robert Penn Warren. All the King s Men (1946). 1/7/15 DNM 2/5/15 DNM 3/4/15 Homer. The Odyssey (c. 850 B.C.). 4/1/15 Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain (1997). 5/6/15 Aeschylus. Agamemnon (458 B.C.). 6/3/15 A.J. Liebling. The Telephone Booth Indian (1942). 7/8/15 Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis (1915). 8/12/15 John McPhee. A Sense of Where You Are (1965). 9/2/15 Nathanael West. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). 10/7/15 Joseph Bedier, ed. Tristan and Iseult (12th century). 11/4/15 Graham Greene. Our Man in Havana (1958). 12/2/15 Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapters I-XXVI (1843-4) 1/6/16 Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapters XXVII-LIV (1843-4) 2/3/16 DNM 3/2/16 Flannery O Connor, The Life You Save May Be Your Own (1955); Joseph Conrad, Il Conde (1908); Raymond Carver, Cathedral (1983); George Saunders, Pastorali (2000); Anton Chekov, The Looking-glass (1885); Alice Munro, Cortes Island (1998); Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (1948); Tim O Brien, The Things They Carried (1990); Albert Camus, The Guest (1957); H.H. Monroe [Saki], The Open Window (1914) 4/6/16 Helen Macdonald. H is for Hawk (2014) 5/4/16 T.H. White. The Sword in the Stone (1938) 6/1/16 Barbara Pym. No Fond Return of Love (1961) 7/6/16 Harold Pinter. No Man s Land (1975) 8/3/16 Nadine Gordimer. The Conservationist (1974) 9/7/16 Marcel Proust. Swann’s Way (1913)10/5/16 Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot (1949)11/2/16 Rebecca Mead. My Life in Middlemarch (2014)12/7/16 Henry James. The Turn of the Screw (1898) 1/4/17 F. Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night (1934) 2/1/17 David Lodge. Nice Work (1988) 3/8/17 Anthony Bailey. A View of Delft (2001) 4/5/17 Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence (1920) 5/3/17 Benjamin Taylor. Proust: The Search (2016) 6/7/17 F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925) 7/12/17 Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March (1953) (Chs. 1-13) 8/2/17 Saul Bellow. The Adventures of Augie March (1953) (Chs. 14-26) 9/6/17 Lawrence Durrell. Justine (1957)10/4/17 Joseph Conrad. Youth (1898)11/1/17 James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1915)12/6/17 James M. Cain. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) 1/3/18 Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895/1899) 2/7/18 Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot (1868-9) (Part I) 3/7/18 Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Idiot (1868-9) (Part II) 4/5/18 Henry Green. Loving (1945) 5/3/18 Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre (1847) (Part I) 6/7/18 Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre (1847) (Part II) 7/11/18 Anthony Trollope. The Warden (1855) 8/1/18 Alfred Hitchcock, dir. Vertigo (1956) 9/5/18 Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim (1900)10/3/18 Ann Patchett. Bel Canto (2001)11/7/18 Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White (1860) (through 2nd Epoch, VIII)12/5/18 Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White (1860) (2nd Epoch, IX to end) 1/2/19 E. M. Forster. A Room With a View (1908) 2/6/19 Philip Roth. The Humbling (2009) 3/6/19 Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary (1857) 4/3/19 Kingsley Amis. Lucky Jim (1954) 5/1/19 Rohinton Mistry. Such a Long Journey (1991) 6/5/19 V. S. Naipaul. A Bend in the River (1979) 7/3/19 William Shakespeare. King Lear (1604-5?) 8/7/19 Louis Malle, dir. Vanya on 42nd Street (1994) 9/4/19 Stendhal (Henri-Marie Beyle). The Red and the Black (1830) 10/2/19 Henry James. Washington Square (1880)11/6/19 Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1918)12/4/19 Muriel Spark. Memento Mori (1959) 1/8/20 Lewis Carroll (C.L. Dodgson). Alice in Wonderland (1865) 2/5/20 Anton Chekov. Uncle Vanya (1898) 3/4/20 DNM4/15/20 William Faulkner. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) 5/6/20 Henry David Thoreau. Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)5/20/20 Henry David Thoreau. Civil Disobedience (1849) 6/3/20 Albert Camus. The Plague (1947)6/17/20 Albert Camus. Exile and the Kingdom: The Guest (1957) 7/1/20 Winston Churchill. My Early Life (1930)7/15/20 8/5/20 Raymond Chandler. The Big Sleep (1939)8/19/20 Howard Hawks, dir. The Big Sleep (1946) 9/2/20 William Dean Howells. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889)9/16/20 10/7/20 John le Carre. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) 11/4/20 John Irvin, dir. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) Jane Austen. Persuasion (1817) 12/2/20 Henry James. Lady Barberina (1884) 1/6/21 John Banville. Mrs Osmond (2017) 2/3/21 Malcolm Gladwell. Talking to Strangers (2019) 3/3/21 Eugene Ionesco. Rhinoceros (1960) 4/7/21 Flannery O Connor. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1948) 5/5/21 Graham Greene. The Quiet American (1955) 6/2/21 Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure (1894) 7/7/21 :“[M]y memories melt together like a bag of chocolates inadvertently left in a hip pocket.”A.J. Liebling. “From Sarah Bernhardt to Yukon Eric,” The Most of A.J. Liebling. (p. 235)***“Mandalay has its name: the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.”W. Somerset Maugham. The Gentleman in the Parlour. (p. 30)“The streets of Mandalay, dusty, crowded, and drenched with a garish sun, are broad and straight. Tramcars lumber down them with a rout of passengers; they fill the seats and gangways and cling thickly to the footboard like flies clustered on an overripe mango.”Loc. cit.“A little to one side but in full view was one of the loveliest of the pagodas. In the setting sun its colours, cream and fawn-gray, were soft like the silk of old dresses in a museum.”Ibid. (p. 20)“The tamarind is a noble tree. Its trunk is rough and gnarled, pale like the teak logs that have been floating down the river, and its roots are like great serpents that writhe upon the earth with a convulsive violence. . . .”Ibid. (p. 37)“‘Information for its own sake is like a flight of steps that leads to a blank wall.’”Ibid. (p. 21)“‘I do not agree with you. Information for its own sake is like a pin you pick up and put in the lapel of your coat or the piece of string that you untie instead of cutting and put away in a drawer. You never know when it will be useful.’“And to show me that he did not choose his metaphors at random the Czecho-Slovak turned up the bottom of his stengah-shifter (which has no lapel) and showed me four pins in a neat row.” Ibid. (pp. 21-22) * * *“Kate’s spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began to prowl around there making a low growling noise.”Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). (p. 19)“She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It was dark and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like the North Sea.”Ibid. (p. 27)“The sun crept slowly across the bedclothes, as if nervous of what it might find among them, slunk down the side of the bed, moved in a rather startled way across some objects it encountered on the floor, toyed nervously with a couple of motes of dust, lit briefly on a stuffed fruit bat hanging in the corner, and fled.”Ibid. (pp. 33-4)# # #The interior smelled of oil paint, turpentine, dust. High windows faced 10th Street below. Steel sashes crisscrossed the windows. Signboard-sized paintings were propped back to front against the walls. Sun struck the raw canvas backs and stretchers and lay in swaths across the floor. Liebengood went to a window and gazed down into the street. Muffled traffic noise could be heard. A passing car blared the ballgame.High above the studio's scarred oaken floor hung a skylight, several panes in a fan-like shape around a central rectangle. Below it, in the middle of the studio, sawhorse tables had been pushed together beside a electric furnace and a stiff-backed cot. A kitchen chair stood on paint-spattered newspapers.Liebengood's paint tubes were strewn across one of the tables, and with them empty soup cans, brushes, rags, crumpled paper. A creased coffee can full of cigar butts sat beside an empty milk bottle. A pair of crumbling work boots lay on the arm of an overstuffed chair. The tables and floor were littered with books and magazines, some open, others in stacks.An alcove held an icebox, a gas range, and a partially-curtained cabinet. Liebengood pushed the curtain aside, raised the lid of the box, and fumbled out a cigar. From the stovetop he took some kitchen matches. These he carried to the center of the room. He fell back onto the narrow bed and looked up toward the sunshine slanting in from high above. The smoke from his cigar drifted toward the skylight. It was mid-afternoon. Shadows from buildings along 10th Street began to gather on the bricks of the north wall.Liebengood listened to the sound of his own erratic heartbeat.The uncertain sun shone down through the skylight. The central pane had once been daubed with paint. Now faded, it lent the room an autumnal hue. Rippling smoke from Liebengood's panatela rose toward the glass. The panels above, traced by his practiced eye, described for him the intricate patterns of a private geometry. As he mused, clouds darkened the studio, then quickly retreated, brightening the glass above him and suffusing the studio with glowing radiance. All at once, in the brilliant sunshine, heavy summer rain reverberated on the roof and skylight overhead. Thunderous sound flooded the room, and Liebengood watched the play of light on the bouncing water. Brimming over the central frame, the rain flowed in streams across the fan-shaped panels high above, bright in the sudden afternoon sun. The cigar was out. Liebengood lay still. # # #“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’”Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). (p. 13)“The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying ‘And another thing . . .’ twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument.”Douglas Adams. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. (p. 12) * * *“Let’s trade fours.”Woody Allen. [In bed with Diane Keaton.] Annie Hall. * * *“. . . I stared through the windows at the macadam shining and reflecting back the street lights. Over the pools of water I could see great palms of wind running.”Antoine de St. Exupery. Wind, Sand and Stars. (p. 22)“I had taken off from the field at Trelew and was flying down to Comodoro-Rivadavia, in the Patagonian Argentine. Here the crust of the earth is as dented as an old boiler.”Ibid. (p. 79)“The high-pressure regions over the Pacific send the winds past the gap in the Andes into a corridor fifty miles wide through which they rush to the Atlantic in a strangled and accelerated buffeting that scrapes the surface of everything in their path.”Loc. cit.“The sole vegetation visible in this barren landscape is a plantation of oil derricks looking like the after-effects of a forest fire.”Loc. cit.“Towering over the round hills on which the winds have left a residue of stony gravel, there rises a chain of prow-shaped, saw-toothed, razor-edged mountains stripped by the elements down to the bare rock.”Loc. cit.“The sky was blue. Pure blue. Too pure. . . . The blue sky glittered like a new-honed knife.”Ibid. (p. 80)“I could see on a level with the mountain peaks not a haze, not a mist, not a sandy fog, but a sort of ash-colored streamer in the sky. I did not like the look of that scarf of filings scraped off the surface of the earth and borne out to sea by the wind.”Loc. cit.“Having banked [the airplane] right in order to correct a sudden drift, I saw the landscape freeze abruptly where it was and remain jiggling on the same spot.”Ibid. (p. 81) “I was making no headway. My wings had ceased to nibble into the outline of the earth. I could see the earth buckle, pivot--but it stayed put. The plane was skidding as if on a toothless cogwheel.”Loc. cit. * * *“Somewhere a clock dropped a stony chime into the night.”James Thurber. The 13 Clocks. (p. 31)“The traveler vanished, like a fly in the mouth of a frog, and the minstrel was left alone in the dark, deserted street.”Loc. cit.# # #“She was rather like one of those innocent-tasting American drinks which creep imperceptibly into your system so that, before you know what you’re doing, you’re starting out to reform the world by force if necessary and pausing on your way to tell the large man in the corner that, if he looks at you like that, you will knock his head off.”P.G. Wodehouse. “The Artistic Career of Corky,” Carry On, Jeeves (1925). (p. 36)“I had on a rather sprightly young check that morning, to which I was a good deal attached; I fancied it, in fact, more than a little. It was perhaps rather sudden till you got used to it. . . .”Wodehouse. “Jeeves Takes Charge,” op. cit. (p. 13)“Jeeves shimmered out and came back with a telegram.” Ibid. (p. 12)“I told him to stagger in, and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr.”Ibid. (p. 10)“This fellow didn’t seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in.”Loc. cit. * * *“[L]ike sending lettuce by rabbit.” Dan Jenkins. [Of lending money to a ne’er-do-well.] Dead Solid Perfect. * * *“A hard dog to keep under the porch.” Source unknown. [Of an indomitable opponent.] * * *“A magician on the beach.” Bing Crosby. [Of a golfer adept at sand shots.] Television broadcast, Pebble Beach Pro-Am Golf Tournament. * * *“[T.S.] Eliot frequently said ‘I’--but it was an ‘I’ set in ice cut from the celestial vault, insistent yet incontestable, serenely sovereign.”Cynthia Ozick. “T.S. Eliot at 101,” Fame & Folly (1996) (p. 29) * * *“[The tragedies of Byron] resemble those pasteboard pictures invented by the friend of children, Mr. Newbery, in which a single movable head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the same face looks out upon us successively, from the uniform of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar. In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of [Childe] Harold were discernible in an instant.” Thomas Babbington Macaulay. “Milton” (p. 12)# # #

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