I'm reading the fascinating book "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" by Ross Douthat, causing me to reminisce...
Harvard. The mere word connoted a magisterial sense that appealed to my young brain. After all, it was the best and why bother with anything less? What is interesting in mediocrity?
Its rich, arterial crimson seemed to denote its excellence, a dream land where there were castles and kings and moats about which crews sculled. Crimson was the cloth of regents and the color of blood, the fluid that sustains earthly and spiritual life, and Cambridge was the first vacation trip I took after getting a real job in the summer of '86. It was to the great Widener Library I first repaired, the beating, bookish heart that fed the far-flung campus.
There was nothing anti-climatic in the trip because I was young and easily impressed. Small things mattered for I was an innocent; it was enough to sit in a Harvard study carol (I'd brought the Greeks in translation to read) or to see students in their natural environs.
I bought a T-shirt at the Co-op endowed with the simplicity only class confers - the unadorned letters "Harvard" across a vast maroon backdrop. For the maker to have embellished the letters or added flourishes would've only gotten in the way of the simplicity of the message. Weeks later I wore it on the dance floor of a dive in Columbus that served beer by the bucket. A young woman came up to me, her eyes large, asking, "did you really go to Harvard?" Apparently I wasn't alone in seeing the mystical where none existed.
College was like a life. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. There were four years, or seasons, at the end of which you felt like a spent salmon who had head-rushed upstream hoping to spawn a Latin phrase of praise on the diploma. We were drunk on nostalgia that last month, trying to absorb every detail from this Land soon Lost, trying to make sense of it all.
Update: Therese Z of Exultet shares an amusing anecdote via email:
"You remind in your Harvard article of when I (fresh out of college and easily impressed) worked for DePaul University (that "Catholic" college) and I had to call colleges all over the country to get information and transcripts. I called them and the operator answered "HAH-vuhd" with a chilly lilt on the first syllable. I was so enchanted that I called back a few minutes later just to hear her say it again, then hung up."
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