In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXXI

I simply don't know how my parents discovered Camp Sea Gull, which is located in a remote part of coastal North Carolina along the Neuse River. The nearest town is called Arapahoe (which the locals pronounce rappy-hoe); the nearest place of any size is New Bern (pronounced with the accent on "New"), 20 miles upriver. The brochure for Camp Sea Gull appeared in my parents' mail in the same tranche as those for Choate, Groton, and St. Paul's, with what my parents must have felt would be similar prospects, in other words, a place for me to improve my social connections while staying busy with activities more constructive (a term my mother particularly liked) than watching the sun go down out by the railroad tracks.

There's no question I would be improving my social contacts at Camp Sea Gull. I don't believe anyone at Camp Echo Hill was distinguished socially at all. We were all susceptible to butt rash, and we were all inspected for it the same way. Camp Sea Gull, on the other hand, was one of the better places to send your boy -- if, that is, you were a prosperous businessman or banker or state politician in the North Carolina piedmont. Everyone there came from places like Wilson, Goldsboro, Roanoke Rapids, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Henderson, Durham, Rocky Mount, High Point, Raleigh -- and I'm sure that their fathers (in North Carolina, their daddies; I will now switch as appropriate to North Carolina usage) all ran the biggest textile mill or furniture factory or hardware store or funeral parlor or newspaper or construction business in town.

Nor do I mean to disparage these folks in any way; many must work hard just to stay where they are; they and their counterparts everywhere are the core of our economy, we'd all be up the creek without them. Or your daddy could be a doctor in any of those places, for that matter. Doctors were at the absolute top of the heap.

The question in my mind, though, almost from the start, was what in the world I was supposed to be doing there. I was from New Jersey; a couple of years later my family would relocate a little farther south to Maryland -- but of those at the camp, either campers or staff, almost anyone not from North Carolina was likely to be from one of the adjoining states or Georgia; then you got smaller numbers from Florida and Alabama. But each year a couple of guys would turn up from places like Pittsburgh or even Omaha, and the camp would certainly take their daddies' money -- provided, of course, that they passed the DNA test.

Camp Sea Gull, you understand, was open to white boys only. In 1960, the first year I went, it said so flat-out in the brochure. I don't believe that at the time they even had African-Americans in to mow the grass. I have no idea what their current policy is -- they're still around, unlike Echo Hill, though their web site is coy to say the least -- but even after the marches, even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they were still whites-only, since they represented themselves as a private club.

How they brought that one off puzzles me: if I want to buy a drink in a dry county in Texas, for example, the bartender will tell me he can sell me one if I join his private club. I pay him a nominal fee, he gives me a membership card, and off we go. Nobody at Camp Sea Gull ever gave me a membership card that I knew about, and to my knowledge I never signed anything that said I was a member, even after I worked there. I guess the club sort of just happened, everyone thought it was OK, and the US Attorney had other things to do.

The guys from Pittsburgh or New Jersey were tolerated politely -- Southerners are anything if not polite -- pretty much the same way they tolerated carpetbaggers or any other parvenu. Mostly we hung around with each other, with an inchoate sense that we'd somehow wandered into the wrong party. When they sang "Dixie" in the dining hall, they all stood. They always followed it with "God Bless America" (though not "The Star Spangled Banner", which would have been more appropriate), but my last year there, 1966, I drew the Camp Director's public rebuke for not standing for "Dixie". I'll have more to say about this.

I simply don't know how the daddies of the outliers like me found out about the place or thought it would be a good way for their boys to make useful friends. I had a few tenuous connections to North Carolina, chiefly that my daddy's parents had lived briefly in Lenoir -- but Lenoir is in the mountains, not the piedmont, and as a result may as well have been in Utah for all it mattered to Camp Sea Gull. The only explanation I can think of is that some word-of-mouth reached people like my daddy and the daddies in Pittsburgh and Omaha, and they didn't think things all the way through before they sent a check. A really great camp on the coast of North Carolina, socially upscale, with a great sailing program.

That was my own daddy, of course, never quite thinking anything all the way through. The only way Camp Sea Gull might have helped me in later life would have been if I'd chosen to work there summer after summer, perhaps to fill out the unpaid months in a teaching career, or if I'd decided to move to North Carolina and go into local politics. Neither was ever likely. The sailing -- I'll get to that -- likely wouldn't have helped anywhere near as much as golf or tennis, and my daddy ought to have known that, too. Except, I suppose, that you can always bore more people at a party talking about your boat. My daddy's vision for me was always, I think, that I be more of a stuffed shirt than a real success, though that was likely because he could never see the difference, and that was a big reason I wound up at Camp Sea Gull.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXX

After they abandoned the Gordonstoun idea, my parents continued the second phase of their improvement project by sending for the catalogs of all the usual-suspect New England prep schools, but again, after studying these over dinner for several evenings, they dropped the idea. I imagine they all cost too much money. I stayed home and attended the Canterbury, New Jersey, public school system.

The next logical step, given the prohibitive expense of sending me to a prep school, was to upgrade my summer camp. That would mean paying for a month of rat-race social hobnobbing, rather than a whole school year. For a couple of years I'd been going to Camp Echo Hill in New Jersey's rural Hunterdon County, a place of which I still have fond memories. The camp had been founded in 1936 by Robert Lechner, who continued to run it in the late 1950s. I remember Lechner as a figure of near-Dickensian benevolence who cared genuinely about the campers, knew them all by name, and even knew something about each of them and how they enjoyed themselves at camp.

Lechner had cobbled the camp together from bits and pieces of an early nineteenth-century farm, but during World War II he also bought a nearby unused railroad station from the Lehigh Valley Railroad and had it moved to the camp. He must have had some fondness for the old Lehigh Valley, whose tracks adjoined the property, because one of the organized activities was for a counselor to take a group of those campers who wished to do so across the road to a spot where the tracks could be seen, and we'd watch trains after dinner until the sun went down.

Trainwatching, of course, is a lot like fishing, in that the putative focus of the activity is often unpredictable, and there's a lot of undirected time spent in the middle of nature waiting for either a fish or a train. There are those who fish, and those who watch trains as well, who maintain that the time spent is eminently worthwhile even if neither fish nor train ever appears. Most evenings spent watching trains at Camp Echo Hill were of this sort, gazing over the empty rails, ties, and ballast, listening to the buzzing of the insects and the cries of the birds, seeing the light get sweeter as the sun went down. I remember just one train coming by during any of those evenings, a small cohort of diesels hauling only a caboose, hardly a sight worth any of those excursions, but they were in fact well worth the minimal trouble.

I think this was what Lechner actually had in mind when he sent us out there. Most of my memories of that place are like that: I think Lechner genuinely understood what some boys needed, a low-pressure, almost Tom Sawyer-like environment, and he provided it. Not that the camp was completely laid back, though. Every camp has its ailment-of-choice on which the infirmary staff concentrates, and as far as I can see, no two camps focus on the same one. At Camp Echo Hill, the nurses were the scourge of butt rash.

There were butt-rash inspections, I think on a weekly basis -- my memory is Saturdays. Every camper had to drop his drawers and spread his cheeks in front of two nurses, whose impassive expressions were the essence of jaded. The nurses would use flashlights to inspect our crevices. "You have butt rash," was the almost universal diagnosis, and I simply can't remember what the cure was. Maybe it was some kind of powder. But the inspection and diagnosis were far more memorable than the remedy.

My strong point at Camp Echo Hill was arts and crafts. They had what was likely a very good program. You could buy projects from the camp commissary, or you could just as easily go out and bring in found items to work with. The regular arts and crafts counselors thought I was pretty good. One morning I started working on a project using some paint that another counselor thought was too expensive for my skill level. A more senior guy corrected him right away -- "no, let him use whatever he wants." It was a tiny moment of justice of which I'd already seen too few.

In fact, on the day at the end of the session when parents were to pick up their boys, there was a kind of tour of camp activities where the counselors told the parents how their kids had done. "John is our best camper in arts and crafts," a counselor told my mother. I could tell from her expression that she wasn't pleased. Painting little wooden craft items or watching the sun go down out by the railroad tracks wasn't her idea of how I should be spending my time, not by a long shot.

Lechner and his wife retired and sold the camp in 1959 -- it passed first to a church group, but in 1973 it became a county park. I'm glad the place and its buildings are still around, but sorry no one like Lechner could carry it on as a summer camp. But I think that whether or not Camp Echo Hill would continue, my parents already had ideas about a better place for me to spend my summers. The following year was my first at Camp Sea Gull.

Thanks for the Link!

My occasional remarks over the past year on hairpieces, poorly fitting and otherwise, have earned me a link from Bad Hairpieces, "Brought to you by Control-Hair-Loss.com", a site which aims, as far as I can tell, to steer its visitors in the direction of remedies for hair loss more permanent than toupees, though not to counsel them that figures from William Shakespeare through Benjamin Franklin through Daniel Webster through Dwight Eisenhower through Yul Brynner through Telly Savalas through Treasury Secretary John Snow appear to have done quite well for themselves without being concerned overmuch about hair loss. I wish I could work out a click-through deal with them, but if the click-through on my hobby site is any indication, my revenues would be negligible. While I've gotten one or two commissions off click-throughs on that site, the total hasn't been enough for the sponsor to bother issuing me a check. But it's nice to be noticed, I suppose, for whatever reason.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXIX

There was no chance I would jump the gun on Larry's plans for fall term, because I'd be spending the summer working at a boys' camp in North Carolina. This was Camp Sea Gull, and while I'd gone there as a camper and then worked there as a counselor for half a dozen years or so, this would be my last summer there.

My going to Camp Sea Gull had been one of the few concrete results of what I would call the second phase of my parents' campaign for my improvement. I date the first phase to the period, around when I was in the first grade, when my parents decreed that I should say "yes sir" or "no sir" in answer to any question from anyone, sort of like an academy cadet in his or her plebe year. Except, in my parents' view, that the plebe year would never end. "Gee, is it raining outside?" some random person might ask me in later life. "Yes, sir," would be my automatic reply. Pause for my interlocutor to figure out if I'm putting him on, weird, or what.

At some point weeks or months after that unsuccessful attempt to mold my character, my parents dropped the yes sir business and didn't take up similar projects until around the time I was in the seventh grade. The beatings didn't stop, of course, but for those half a dozen years they were simply in reactive mode to my perceived deficiencies, not systematic efforts at my overall improvement.

The improvement projects started again, as best I can measure it, around the time the UK royals sent Prince Charles to a school in Scotland called Gordonstoun. Apparently the press carried this story widely, along with the information that Gordonstoun was the kind of place where you went for a run across the heather after you woke up in the morning, whereupon you returned to take a cold shower, and only then got breakfast. Many years later it came out that Charles hated the place, and it's not hard for me to figure out why.

My parents took it into their heads that I should go to Gordonstoun as well. I know from what they told me at various times that they thought I wasn't quite right in the head -- "a nut", as my father clinically couched it -- though, whatever they actually believed, they weren't the kind to send me to any sort of professional evaluation. It would cost money and might reflect on the family, after all. And for that matter, as they'd already found when they went to the Rev. Onderdonk seeking his blessing for having me say "yes sir" to all comers, things in such an interview could go astonishingly awry. So they must have felt instead that there was no need to consult, the running and cold showers before breakfast would be just the sort of thing to whip my addled brain into shape, and the idea that I might hobnob with royalty was probably very attractive as well.

Their world view -- their sincere world view, not the creeds they mouthed on Sundays -- was an odd mixture of Horatio Alger stories and multi-level marketing pitches. I can see a way in which harsh discipline mixed with the opportunity to kiss a royal personage's bum would appeal to them in a very deep sense -- somehow I would bond with the Prince over our morning oatmeal and thereafter rise in society, always fostered by my royal patron, or something like that. I would become, in short, some sort of intolerable stuffed shirt like my father's good friend Herb, but even more so, because in their dreamlike vision I would become the Earl of Thingummy or something.

And as my parents continued to curry favor themselves with the Van Snoots, they'd have a wonderful conversational entree -- "Our son, you know, became the Earl of Thingummy. He was up at school with the Prince of Wales -- we believe in morning runs and cold showers for children, of course -- and one day the Prince dropped his Latin book, and our son leaped gallantly to pick it up for him, and the Prince awarded him with the title on the spot. Now our son has a country estate in Surrey and is married to Winston Churchill's grand-niece."

Even in the seventh grade I felt pretty sure that nobody was going to let me within half a mile of the Prince of Wales, and that any story of me at Gordonstoun would likely have to do only with early-morning running and cold showers. The oatmeal would probably be gone by the time I got to breakfast. In any case, the Gordonstoun project doesn't seem to have lasted much past the stage of sending for the brochure. I know they got it; they studied it for several evenings at the dinner table, but then they dropped the whole idea, much to my relief.

I imagine my father looked at what the tariff would be for the opportunity to take cold showers before breakfast while hobnobbing with royalty and decided to look elsewhere for ways to fix what ailed me. He may even have given some thought to what sometimes happened to adolescent boys in UK boarding schools, since, in my parents' view, the one thing that hadn't yet gone wrong with me was that I apparently wasn't gay (but they could never be sure of that, and they worried terribly about any particular friendships I might develop among my schoolmates). Or my father may simply have decided the place was too far away, both culturally and geographically, for him to be able to interfere with my education at whim. Nevertheless, even though they dropped that specific project, the Gordonstoun model for my improvement continued to drive my parents' muddled thinking.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXVIII

As Dickerson had intimated, Bill McMann was on his way out. One day he told me he'd thought things over, looked over his finances, and decided not to stay at Dartmouth; he'd leave at the end of his freshman spring term. He didn't say anything about flunking out, but it's almost inevitable that that's what happened.

During the winter, he took a basic skiing class, fell, and shattered his femur; he spent weeks in the infirmary and walked with crutches long after that. The time in the infirmary couldn't have helped his course work. In retrospect, other than complaining about the need to pass certain required courses, he never said anything to me about how his courses were going. He was an open, honest, straightforward guy, within limits.

But he still had qualities, however mitigated, that were hardly present at all in any of my other classmates. Before I knew he'd be leaving, I thought long and hard about asking if he'd be willing to room with me the following year, but then I heard he'd already agreed to room with Larry Burlingame. That, in fact, was how I first learned Larry's importance in the scheme of things. Somehow I'd missed it. It was a big disappointment.

So my task at the end of spring term was to make the best of the time I had left with Bill, recognizing also that he wasn't as good a friend as I'd originally believed (something Dickerson had probably been trying to communicate to me as well). How, I finally put it to Bill and Larry in one of our last late-night discussions, could I continue to look for the kind of insight, stoicism, and maturity that I'd been learning from Bill if Bill wasn't going to be around?

The answer came from Larry. It was almost as though the two of them had anticipated the question, and they were ready for it. I guess Larry in particular had been watching me long enough to decide he could let me in on the secret: I knew Larry was pretty West Coast, pretty laid back, but I didn't know much else about him. They filled me in that night. Larry took LSD. If I wanted insight, there was a way to find it.

Not Bill -- as far as I know, his strongest drugs were always whiskey and Camels. But Bill was leaving the picture, and he was more or less turning me over to Larry to supervise my future development. My reaction was matter-of-fact. I wasn't all that surprised that someone with Fillmore Auditorium posters in his room might be an acidhead; I just hadn't given it much thought. Nor was I much taken aback at the idea that Larry thought I might be a candidate for something like that myself. Looking back, I think I would have to say that Dartmouth up to that time had been such a disappointment that I was ready for anything, or I should say anything else.

There wasn't much time left that spring to experiment with things like LSD, but Larry made it plain that when we came back in the fall, things might well be different. Larry lent me his Alan Watts and Timothy Leary books. There was little danger, though, that I would jump the gun over the summer.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXVII

If he steered our first interview in any particular direction -- and based on his memo, steer it he must certainly have done -- it was toward my relationship with Bill McMann and Larry Burlingame. He had, I now assume, gotten to know them pretty well in prior months. He didn't know me at all, and I think he was working rather deftly to piece out what was going on down in the River Cluster among the three of us.

I had a lot of admiration for Bill McMann, and in fact I still do, in spite of the fact that he'd already managed to steal my Colby Junior College girlfriend, Beth (he did me a big favor, of course). He was a couple of years older and a couple of years more mature than I was, and while the maturity was partly just the result of being alive longer than I'd been, he'd given me some important messages.

One was that -- even if only by using the tricks of a parlor psychic -- you could gain insight into what motivated people and what they were really like behind their social facades. He was clever that way, but I think there was something more to his knowledge of character than just cleverness. If there was a way to find that kind of wisdom, I wanted to find it, and that was one of the things I told Dickerson in the meeting.

The second thing I admired in him was his stoicism. He'd grown up in the Bronx, not well-off, and while he was street-wise, he also had a kind of grace, and it was something I saw that I lacked as a suburban kid who'd in some ways had a better time growing up. A few months earlier, via an upperclassman, I'd gotten hold of a bottle of champagne, which I was saving for an important date. A group of classmates, including Bill, had come into my room. One of them found the bottle of champagne, started clowning around with it, dropped it, and broke it.

The whole idea of the champagne -- likely pretty cheap, likely paid for with a hefty commission to the upperclassman who'd bought it, likely not to have the desired effect with a date anyhow -- was pretty silly. There were all my glitzy expectations fizzing away on the floor amid the pieces of a broken bottle. I'd been running into little experiences like that all fall and winter, instructive vignettes that called my callowness to my own attention. I hated it. I started to rail at the guy who'd dropped my bottle of champagne, telling him he had to pay me for it, but hating myself at the same time for being that way.

Bill looked at me, pulled out his wallet, took out a dollar bill, and tore it up. Then he dropped the pieces in my wastebasket. If I wanted to be paid for the champagne, all I needed to do was fish the pieces of the dollar bill out and tape them together. That was a hard lesson for me, because I had to keep myself from doing that, and it wasn't easy. What Bill was teaching was that things often weren't going to come out even; the only way you could survive and still like yourself was to keep a sense of proportion and a sense of humor.

I couldn't help admiring someone with that attitude. I still admire that side of him. He smoked Camels, which at the time were unfiltered cigarettes, with no filtered version. No Joe Camel back then, no retro cigarette girls, just the camel on the pack. He smoked them with the label outward. I copied him (it took me ten years to break the smoking habit I picked up that way, too).

So I spent much of the meeting telling Dickerson how much I admired Bill, and how far behind him I felt I was. Dickerson's response was twofold. The first thing he did, as I've already mentioned, was to prepare me as best he could for not having Bill around much longer. The second thing he did was this:

"Let me read you something about yourself," he said. I didn't realize, of course, that before anyone walked into his office, he had the guy's whole record in a folder in front of him. That was his job. You didn't just come into his office for an idle chat.

"You visited our admissions office two years ago when you were first considering coming here, didn't you?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"You met with Ed Chamberlain, the Dean of Admissions then, didn't you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"How do you think you did on that interview?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I didn't feel all that good about it."

"Let me read you the notes Ed made afterward," he told me. "'Fine boy,' is what he wrote. 'Very well spoken. Very mature. Very intelligent.' I know Ed. I trained him for that job. Ed doesn't write notes like that very often."

I didn't have anything to say. Dickerson just let the words echo, let me think about them.

"You sell yourself short," he said. That was the end of that meeting.

Best Holiday Wishes

I'm taking a blogging break until December 27 or thereabout. Best wishes for the holiday season to all who stop by!

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXVI

The note from Dickerson read as follows:

Dear John,

I wanted to say how much I enjoyed the discussion I had with you last evening in the River Cluster, but I also noticed that we'd never previously had a chance to get together for a chat. I wonder if you would be kind enough to drop by at 10:30 AM on Tuesday. Looking forward to it!

Al Dickerson

Following Dickerson's death in 1972, Dartmouth published a book of his selected writings, many of which deal with his time as Dean of Freshmen. He was noted for witty and informative letters that he sent periodically to all the freshman parents, and samples of those are included in the book. Various other memos-to-the-file cover how he handled disciplinary matters, the quirks of individual students, and the routine tasks of his work. From those I can begin to piece together what may have been on his mind in talking to me, and why Bill and Larry couldn't stand him.

The first thing I began to understand when I revisited my relationship with him via Selected Writings was that, even though it was the middle of Spring Term by the time I met him, that had been for a reason. The reason was that I hadn't caused him enough trouble to call me in earlier. I hadn't received any warnings of unsatisfactory grades, and I hadn't received any final Ds or Es, either. Other students had, and they were the ones on whom he was spending his time.

This appears to be why Bill and Larry had gotten to know him before I had, and they'd both gotten to know him well enough to have pretty inflexible attitudes by then. Why? I simply hadn't given this question any thought. Wasn't everyone else just like me, doing OK with their grades, even if not at the top of the class? Apparently not.

One of the memos reproduced in Selected Writings, dating from 1964, or about a year before his first meeting with me, gives his normal approach to an interview with a freshman:

Anyway, for better or for worse, let me give you my routine:

Usually I start off with a relaxed "How are things going?" -- to give the interview a routine complexion.

Then I usually go course by course to find how they are doing, who are their teachers, how they react to them, and how much time they are spending, per assignment, in studying for each course.

For the obviously highly successful student, I don't spend much time on study techniques. For the others -- the majority -- I usually ask how much time they spend studying, per assignment, where they study, how late they study, whether they have learned to use the daytime hour here and there between classes, etc. If they appear unorganized about study, I suggest working out a schedule and refer them to [______]'s course in reading and study techniques. . . .

After surveying courses and study habits, I usually ask about their prospective major and career goals. Unless they are doing very well in the most importantly relevant courses and know clearly what they want to do, I almost always suggest going to the Office of Student Counseling for a reading of the Strong Vocational Interest Inventories. . . .

If a man has a set of high MMPI scores, I tend to prolong the conference to get a fuller reading on the boy. . . .

Then the questions about roommates and dormitory conditions to get a picture of the student's social relationships. . . .

On one hand, this memo makes it easier for me to visualize the meetings he must have had, months earlier, with Bill and Larry. I have a hard time avoiding the feeling that those meetings had gone according to his normal scheme; they'd likely occurred because they'd both attracted his attention in some way, which means probably not a good way; and those interviews had gone badly. In fact, when I told him in this first meeting how much regard I had for Bill McMann, Dickerson seems to have gently set me up for what was to come: "Bill was what I guess we would call an experiment," he told me. "Every year we admit a few students that are wild cards. . ." but then he shook his head sadly and had nothing else to say about Bill. Bill, I now realize, was flunking out, and he'd likely had not one but several discussions with Dickerson on how things were going.

But the thing that impresses me is how little any of my meetings with Dickerson resembled the outline.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXV

Dean Dickerson came back to the River Cluster a day or two later, after dinner. It was just me, Bill, and Larry talking to him this time in a basement rec room, and I wound up doing more than my share of the talking. I had to. Bill and Larry couldn't hold their own with the guy. He was still wearing his suit, chain smoking the cigarettes that would kill him half a dozen years later, and he'd brought a tiny terrier with him that could hardly reach anyone's knee with its front paws.

Bill and Larry would raise some point along the line of "society sucks", which didn't go over nearly as well as it did in a town-meeting style crowd, and I'd bail them out, saying "what they really mean to say is. . ." I had several major concerns that I wanted to raise about Dartmouth, all of which had come up in the late-night discussions I'd been having with Bill and Larry, but I was having to talk more than my share to keep all three of us from looking stupid.

My first concern was that the place seemed to be rewarding the wrong kind of behavior. Bill was the guy who'd first begun to raise the question of why everyone was diligently hitting the books, but nobody seemed to be getting any smarter. I'd begun to look around me, and I agreed. Everyone was wrapped up in routine studying, in fact often compulsively, but nobody seemed to be getting better-educated. Somehow Dartmouth had set up incentives to allow this -- even encourage it -- to happen. So I was deferential, I told the Dean that Bill had started this ball rolling, but I thought he was right.

Neither Bill nor Larry was keen on the required basic courses, and they kept insisting that they shouldn't have to take them, based on their point that nobody who was taking them was really getting the benefit they were supposed to get. You could get an A in freshman comp and still not have gotten an education, or even the fraction of an education that freshman comp should have given you.

I took the "what they really mean to say. . ." approach again. Dickerson was beginning to listen. I said that what was beginning to bother me was that you could learn basic clear expression or syllogistic logic, and if you took the principles of disciplined thought and reasoned discourse up to intermediate-level courses, you were being asked to suspend disbelief. My discovery of intellectual shantytowns like Frazer's The Golden Bough was still off in the future, but I was beginning to see that intermediate-level material in a good many disciplines was shabby --radical behaviorism taught in Psychology, for instance, or tooth-fairy versions of reality in Economics -- that field was in its last halcyon years before the supply-side revolution, and we who studied it at the time were its victims.

Bill was also deeply skeptical of the cultural paradigms that Dartmouth was giving us, which were largely the unquestioned assumptions of the upper middle class and wannabes like my parents, larded with self-congratulation among all those who found themselves in Hanover. I went beyond that and said that as far as I could see, we were floundering in a foggy swamp with little opportunity to evaluate the few landmarks we could see. You didn't need to be Bob Dylan to see the inadequacy of the value systems that drove people like my parents. All Dartmouth was doing was saying in response was "that's OK, you're at Dartmouth, everything is great." I gave Bill credit for planting these ideas in my head; I kept dressing what I told Dickerson up as what Bill and Larry really meant to say.

Where was self-knowledge in all this, I asked? Where was self-control? It seemed like we were getting pretty much everything but what we needed. Dickerson had less and less to say in reply. He kept chain smoking. His little dog finally began to agitate for a return home, and he excused himself.

Bill and Larry weren't pleased with me as we went back to our rooms. They thought I'd shown Dickerson too much deference. "He's never left this place since he graduated," said Bill. "He's never seen anything else of the world. He's totally wrapped up in Dartmouth, doesn't think anything else exists. And did you see the dog? He brought the dog to protect himself, to distract us. He's afraid of us." Lots of protection you can get from a little dog like that, I thought. The thing was half the size of a typical cat.

The next day there was a note from Dickerson in my campus mailbox asking me to drop by his office for a chat.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXIV

If there was one frequent topic in our late-night discussions other than my inability to confront my father the way I should, though, it was Albert I. Dickerson, Dean of Freshmen, whom we last saw in May 1969 being carried bodily in his chair from Parkhurst Hall by members of the SDS and their sympathizers. Bill and Larry hated Dickerson. I was never exactly sure why -- I hadn't even met the man, other than in a group meeting in our dorm's common room. The River Cluster dorms housed mostly freshmen. Nobody who knew the campus (unlike incoming freshmen) wanted to live there, but the College in its capacity as Green Bummer felt that putting freshmen there, in an otherwise isolated part of the campus, built class solidarity, or something like that.

In any case, Dickerson, as Dean of Freshmen, occasionally conducted town meeting style get-togethers in the common rooms of those dorms. The discussions were freewheeling, anything could come up, and Dickerson, although in late middle age, was often (as I saw it) sympathetic, gracious, and even entertaining as he traded ripostes. There was no comparison with Thaddeus Seymour -- Dickerson was likely in the wrong job.

Once I listened to Seymour in a similar dorm common room discussion; Seymour's major point all evening was he'd known a guy who, while rowing in a crew regatta, caught a crab, which means that his oar got out of sync with the rest of the boat and was violently pulled from him by the current. This caused substantial injury to his chest muscles, but, rather than interfere with his teammates' chances of winning, the poor guy continued to pull his oar as best he could, given his injury, to the end of the race. As a result of the unnecessary exertion, the fellow became crippled for life, explained Seymour. If he hadn't put out that extra effort, he could have gone home from the race a fully functional human being. But he hadn't, and he'd done it for Dartmouth.

This was Seymour's inspirational message to all of us. I don't mean to harp on Dad Thad here, but in view of his legendary status at Dartmouth, I feel the need to assert that every encounter I had with him suggested he wasn't up to the requirements of his job in important ways. In his view here, I can't help seeing a certain similarity to my father's attitude: we see authoritarian structures that provide variously racing shells and Model A Fords on which the more gung-ho among our youth are permitted to sacrifice themselves needlessly. Thus do Dartmouth's values, or at least the more strenuous ones advocated by our Dad Thads, seep into, and in fact buttress, the cultural pathology at large.

My feelings toward Dickerson were never like that. Nevertheless, the subject of Albert Dickerson never failed to raise Bill's and Larry's hackles. As best I can reconstruct it, their animus got started in one of those town meetings, or maybe I should say that the animus took a precise shape there. Bill was unhappy that he had to get some minimum grade in freshman comp or take it again, I believe. It didn't occur to me at the time that the source of Bill's irritation was that he likely wasn't getting the grade he needed to get -- instead, Bill was treating this as a matter of principle.

Nobody should have to score any particular grade to get out of freshman comp, in Bill's view. Nobody should have to take freshman comp at all. In the real world, you had secretaries to check your spelling and punctuation. Why were we wasting time with all this sixth-grade level stuff? Henry Adams and Robert Graves themselves were even saying school was all silly anyhow. Why bother with education at all?

I think Dickerson did something like pull his pipe from his mouth with a wry grin and gently say something like "Why indeed? It was your decision to come here. What do you want to get from this place?" Bill just got madder, of course. The discussion turned into a long, pointless wrangle, and Dickerson finally said he really needed to get home and get to bed, but he'd be happy to come back at a time of Bill's and Larry's choosing to continue it. Bill and Larry asked me to be there when he came back, probably because I was more articulate than either one of them, though they'd never admit that was the reason.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXIII

Actually, by avoiding busy times on the Interstate, staying in the far right-hand lane, judicious downshifting, and frequent use of the emergency brake to supplement the service brakes, I was able to forestall the inevitable for several weeks. In the process, I learned that a Model A is not just dangerous because of its brakes; its rollover potential is much worse than a present-day SUV. I learned that the hard way going into a sharp S-curve under an overpass in Vermont; for a moment it was touch and go which way the thing was going to fall after the right-side wheels left the pavement, but that one just cost me some missed heartbeats.

Luck finally ran out as I drove southbound in Massachusetts. Actually, at the time, the I-91 wasn't complete, and for some distance you still had to use the old two-lane US 5. That was my undoing; a car stopped ahead of me to make a sudden left turn faster than I could allow for it, and I rear-ended him. I'd already downshifted and yanked hard on the emergency lever, nobody was injured, and there was no damage to the other car. The guy didn't even file an insurance claim. But my car was a mess. Was my father disappointed to hear me report the accident, rather than a highway patrol officer? I don't know. He was oddly restrained at the news.

The car went back to a classic-car body shop for several thousand dollars more in repair work, but the brakes still weren't replaced. The guy looked 'em over and tightened 'em up or something, as I recall. As far as I can see, my father simply expected I'd keep on driving it. What he felt, if anything, about the odds that involved, especially when the danger now couldn't have been more concrete, I simply don't know. Again, there was no discussion along the line of "Wow, John, now I realize this isn't going to work out unless . . ." and so forth.

What likely saved me was that the car was never quite right after the accident. You could never get it to go over a hundred miles without some major problem after that, and one day on the way home it pooped out in such a way that I couldn't nurse it any further without a long rest for repairs. I left it in storage in Meriden, Connecticut, and took the train the rest of the way to Washington. My father traded it to someone for a Mercedes-Benz, which became his car, not mine, and I went back to riding the train, which was what I'd always preferred anyhow.

I've spent more time than I'd originally planned in talking about my father, but once I got to Dad Thad, one thing simply led to another. And in fact this gives a little more perspective as I get back to Bill McMann and Larry Burlingame. Bill and Larry, by the end of my freshman year, had pretty much decided I wasn't quite such a lost cause as the other guys in the River Cluster, but my problem was, as they saw it, that I was afraid of my father. I needed to stand up to my father more. This became the verdict of many late-night deliberations.

Let's back off again and put ourselves in the perspective of what I've just recounted. What, under those circumstances, would have been the effect of taking Bill's and Larry's advice and just standing up to my father more? "Dad, I've quit the ROTC," they'd like me to say. "You were interfering in my life without even telling me what you were doing, and I didn't like it." Dad here is a guy who may have had a very serious issue with the need to plan $30,000 to $50,000 of future college payments, money he wasn't going to be able to spend on anything else, like his boat or some other thing I didn't know about, exactly as he pleased. His thought processes may not have put the problem in those specific terms -- he may just have been very angry at the whole vague situation. He may even have been mooting a convenient way for the proximate cause of that whole vague situation to leave the picture.

Young John felt very uncomfortable with Dad (though he felt bad about it); John in later life would say that Dad's behavior throughout John's college years was, at best, impulsive, reckless, and erratic, though malicious couldn't be fully ruled out. Both young John and older John would probably agree that any attempt to stand up to Dad in the ways Bill and Larry urged would produce, as the computer manuals deftly couch it, unpredictable results.

One possibility, at the less bizarre end of the scale, would simply be for Dad to refuse to continue paying the college bills. There could plausibly be outcomes less happy than that. Bill and Larry at that point were living in some sort of fantasy world, common in universities but certainly not limited to them, where all you needed to do was utter a primal scream and face your inner whatever, have it out with whoever was laying a bad trip on you, and everyone would hug and live happily ever after. Actually, the hug is an anachronism. Ostentatious public hugging didn't get started until the seventies. I don't know what people thought you did instead of hugging in the sixties, but then, Oprah was still a long way away. Many of the other pieces, though, were already there. All John needs to do is let go. That's his problem, he just can't let go.

My more or less conscious strategy in dealing with my father was to temporize, take on each problem as it came, and handle it with what computer programmers in subsequent years would call the least-drastic solution. It didn't look good to Bill and Larry. I looked like a wimp. I felt bad about it myself; I felt bad about my father; I felt bad about nearly everything. I suppose a good part of it simply stems from the pressure on an abused child to be mature enough to handle a situation where nobody else is being mature. This completely eluded Bill and Larry, whose diverse life experiences nevertheless hadn't taught either one much about maturity.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXII

Naturally I tried to get my father's version of the phone call to Dean Seymour, but my parents both denied that any such call had taken place. At some times, I imagine that my father felt some remorse, or maybe more accurately some desire to conceal what he'd done, in interfering with my college career, and in fact not long after he and Col. Ditherspoon signed me up for Army ROTC, he began a bizarre episode that might, from one viewpoint, be construed as an effort to make up for that.

In fact, I think the project got started in the spring break that came soon after the Freshman Father's Weekend during which my induction into Army ROTC had been engineered. My father was going to buy me a car. Apparently he meant this as a kind of amends for the ROTC ploy, or at least he was going to allow me to think of it as such. Not that the ROTC decision was to be reversed, of course.

There were several puzzling aspects to this. One was that, up to this point, the family finances had been represented to me as straitened (though not, as we've seen, so straitened as to compel my father to complete a financial aid application form). It was expected, though never explicitly stated, that all, meaning a hundred percent, of my earnings from vacation and summer jobs were to be put toward college bills. A hobby-related purchase of about $14 from job earnings had already drawn my father's ire.

I should add that the family's assets at the time included a substantial brick house in an affluent Washington, DC suburb; two large, recent automobiles; and a sizeable motor cruiser at a marina in Annapolis; my sister attended an exclusive private school in Washington. My impression from this remove is that my father primarily resented any circumstance that might potentially prod him to plan, budget, or prioritize -- he felt his discretion over finances should be so absolute as to cross into the pathological. Thus the unwillingness to complete a financial aid application, which might have been the occasion for probing questions about the yacht, the usual and voracious destination for all disposable income and more.

But all of a sudden, there was money to buy me a car. Why did I need a car? While Dartmouth isn't an urban campus by any means, there was and is adequate public transportation to the Hanover area by highway, rail, and air -- actually, I preferred the train rides back and forth from Maryland at term time. The campus itself is negotiable on foot without difficulty. Students without cars can easily carpool for weekend road trips, since those with cars often advertise for riders to share fuel costs. As with the ROTC decision, nobody asked me if in fact I wanted a car. I really didn't. It was simply decided that I would be getting one. Wasn't that great?

THe next problem is more disturbing to me the more I think about it. Not long ago I was visiting my dentist, and as he worked on my teeth, he explained to me that he'd just finished finding his son a good used car for his own college use (in California a car for college is more necessary). It was the kind of thing you enjoy hearing about -- how my dentist had figured how much he could afford, how he then went looking for the best bargain that would be something his son would appreciate, and then how he'd taken the thing to a dealer to go over with a fine-toothed comb to be sure it was safe.

That was the crux as far as my dentist was concerned. He didn't want to put his son into a deathtrap. This, it seems to me, is what you might expect of a normal father. You might envision my father thinking the same way -- in 1966, what kind of a used VW beetle or Dodge Dart might he be able to buy that would be both serviceable and safe for his son to drive back and forth to Hanover? You might expect my father to think that way, but you would be wrong.

My father's approach was radically different. The seed of his idea to buy me a car was the availability of a Model A Ford hulk up in rural Maryland. We picked up the hulk in some guy's barn and towed it back, where my father turned it over to a shop that restored antique cars. My car was going to be a fully restored 1928 Model A Sport Coupe. The project would last over the summer, and the car would be ready for me to drive to Hanover for the Fall Term of my sophomore year. It goes without saying that this was an open-ended money pit, a piece of sheer extravagance, the precise opposite of finding your kid a cost-effective used car for college.

On top of that, there was the issue of the brakes. The original Model A brake system was a collection of rods and wedges that transferred the pressure on the brake pedal to the brake drums on the wheels. These never worked very well, which is to say that a Model A Ford with its original brake system isn't safe. Sane people, if they intend to drive a restored Model A at all, replace the original brake system with aftermarket hydraulic brakes like those on a normal car, but this affected the car's value as an antique -- just the same as a neutered dog can't win in a pet show.

My father was determined to keep the value of his investment, and he wasn't going to replace the brakes. It wouldn't surprise me if the decision was actually just a nickel-and-dime question of how much he'd have to pay the shop to install the aftermarket hydraulic brakes. Heaven knows how many thousands of dollars the thing eventually cost him, but he wouldn't spring for good brakes -- maybe he needed a new winch for the boat instead, for all I know. And in 1966 you could get a perfectly good used car for well under a thousand bucks.

The combination of the bad brakes, the lack of turn signals, and various other safety problems meant the only way the car could be registered in Maryland was with antique plates. Those meant the car wasn't roadworthy, but you could drive it on public streets under limited circumstances, like in parades or going to and from antique car meets. It was not to be used for trips to the grocery, much less driving back and forth to college on the I-95. I was nearly cited several times as a result, but the police always let me go if I promised not to do it again.

So my father sent me off to college in a car he knew full well shouldn't, for safety reasons, have been on the road at all. Beyond that, he tested it when he first picked it up from the shop, and by the time he got it home to have me try it out, he was already warning me that I would need to leave more space than usual between me and the cars ahead. A lot more space.

He rode shotgun on our first few trials, and he was nearly hysterical in telling me "you've got to leave more space in front of you! Now, now, you've got to step on the brakes now! You've got to stop sooner! This isn't like other cars!" He was hysterical, of course, because he was also in the car. At no point did he ever say anything like, "Gee, John, I know this will disappoint both of us, but I don't think I can let you drive a car with brakes like this. I've got to figure out Plan B. I'm sorry, but it's your life that's at stake here. I didn't realize the brakes would be like this." Never the tiniest qualm about me driving it, naturally as long as he wasn't riding shotgun.

Was my father just culpably negligent, just unbelievably pigheaded, just astonishingly obtuse, or did he have more definite ideas about what might happen to me driving my wonderful restored Model A Ford back to college? Several thousand invested in the car now (it had liability insurance, though not collision), but after the tragic accident, no need to pay another three years' room, board, and tuition bills. No prosecutor would touch a case like that -- his parents wanted him to have everything, what a tragedy.

For that matter, continuing in what for me is not a pleasant direction, I was also covered by at least two insurance policies, with my father as beneficiary -- one, though small, would have paid for a good part of the car; the other, as far as I understand it, would, if I had died, have released cash value equivalent to savings for my college education, money which otherwise would have had to go exclusively for that purpose. I can't rule out other coverage, such as any group policies that may have been in force while I was a Dartmouth student. The amounts wouldn't have been enough to attract undue attention, but could well have bailed him out of financial difficulties.

I was 18 years old, not as smart as I thought I was, and I hadn't seen enough of life to know what fathers sometimes do; I just wished he'd gotten me something sensible like a used VW beetle, if he was going to get me anything at all. I couldn't really refuse to drive it; it was an incredibly generous gift, I'd be ungrateful not to -- even churlish to insist there was something wrong with it. I can't say with any certainty what my father had in mind, but I'm very sorry that, given what in retrospect I would have to characterize as erratic, abusive, narcissistic, even pathological behavior, I can't rule the possibility out that he was more than just stupid.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XXI

I hadn't yet met Albert I. Dickerson, who was Dean of Freshmen at the time, so I had no idea yet of what to expect from him, and I never at the time considered going to a Dean of any sort over the problem. Deans, by and large, were people who got you into trouble, not out of it. In view of the risks I've outlined below in taking my problem to a Dean, I was prudent not to.

On the other hand, Dean Dickerson was unique, and while I don't want to over-idealize him in retrospect, I think that if anyone could have handled my problem by doing something rather than doing nothing, it was probably he. Let me give a concrete example of what I mean, and I will go back to the May 8, 1969 Parkhurst Hall takeover by the SDS to make my case.

The accounts of what happened during the takeover are fairly clear on what the College's chief administrators, who worked there, did when it began: President John Sloan Dickey immediately left the building under his own steam, shouting "Get out of my way!" to the invaders. This might seem a virile response; certainly the accounts of the episode suggest it was what President Dickey had in mind. But there's, shall we say, a certain Gallic quality to President Dickey's heroism: "Get out of my way!" is not what we expect soldiers to say when they're leaping from the trenches to charge the enemy. It sounds more like what a French colonel might shout to those of his troops who were tardy to move in the opposite direction.

Contrast John Sloan Dickey's behavior with Albert I. Dickerson in the same situation on the same day. As the protesters entered his office, by all accounts, Dickerson remained seated. He refused to move. And he refused to move, one 60-year-old guy, in the face of what must have been twelve or twenty scruffy-looking students who were clearly ready for something other than irregular conjugations. No band of thugs was going to frighten him into the halls and out the door, no matter what he yelled to make it look like he wasn't running away. They had to pick up Dickerson's chair and carry him, still seated in the chair, bodily out of the building. I assume Dickerson, in refusing to move, had been ready for less satisfactory outcomes.

Which administrator, I put it to the reader, swung the syllabic Dick at the forepart of his surname with greater justice? Dean of the College Thaddeus "Dad Thad" Seymour, a much younger, more robust man than either Dickey or Dickerson, also seems to have done what he could to avoid direct confontation with the protesters, though physically, bullet-headed, broad-shouldered, and well over six feet, he probably could have taken out any three of them at once. Seymour, in fact, was the only administrator who had to deal directly with my father, but this was a year or so after the ROTC issue came up.

One day I found a note in my campus mailbox summoning me to meet with Dean Seymour in his office the following morning. When I got there, Seymour, who I've already said was physicaily imposing, reared up to his full height in his chair and roared, "WOULD YOU SAY YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR FATHER IS GOOD?"

This was a question that, like the unfinished sentence on Communist revolutions in the ROTC quiz, could have been answered with volumes. "It's not what it should be," I ventured. Judging by how the session got started, I sensed I was going to be told it was all my fault.

"Hrummph," hrumphed Dad Thad. "Not what it should be. Not what it should be indeed." He gave me a long look. "YOU ARE DELIBERATELY TRYING TO DO THINGS TO IRRITATE YOUR FATHER." He had a copy of Eric Berne's book Games People Play prominently displayed on his desk. I had a feeling it was a sort of prop, to forestall any quibbling or sissified pettifoggery over his pronouncements. He knew all the games, you'd better not try any with him.

"Gee," I asked, "what makes you think that?" He didn't like that question, but he more or less had to answer it. As best I could make out, my father had called Seymour at home several evenings previous. It appears that not only did Seymour resent the interruption, but my father was probably pretty well tanked when he made the call. The tenor of the conversation appears to have been something like this: if Dartmouth is such a great place, how come my son isn't making straight A's? I would guess the actual words from my father's side of the conversation weren't as coherent as Seymour was trying to make them -- at this point, he had to have a reason to bring me into his office other than plain irritation.

If it were me now, I probably would make a reply to the Dean that went something like this: "Well, Dean Seymour, I'm very sorry you had that call from my father. I don't know if he was at home or traveling on business, I don't know what else was on his mind, and I don't know how much he might have had to drink. You may want to investigate ways in which you can screen calls like that to avoid those sorts of interruptions at home. An unlisted number might help, but my time machine tells me that in another dozen years, telephone answering machines will make this whole problem much easier to deal with. But I want to stress to you that on the evening when my father made the call, I was up here in Hanover conjugating irregular verbs, and I was simply not in a position to control my father's behavior. There was no way I could have revoked his phone privileges. In fact, people normally expect parents to control their children's behavior, not the other way around, as you seem to have it. I'm not sure what else this meeting is about. Are we finished?"

I didn't say that, of course. We played a cat-and-mouse routine for half an hour, in which Seymour felt I was probably doing SOMETHING deliberately to tick my father off, and he was trying to find out what it was, so he could get ticked off about it too, and if possible, put me on probation. I parried all of his probes, and the meeting ended without any real conclusion, except that I decided the Dean of the College was nothing but an overrated enabler, and for that matter a bully.

What has me shaking my head as I write this is the assumption behind his calling me in, that I should somehow be more adult than the adult, that I should in some way have controlled my father's behavior. Now and then, when I read discussions of the pressures on children in abusive situations, I see observations that children are forced into role-reversals, often having to adopt quasi-parental responsibility to deal with their alcoholic or violent parents. And here was Dad Thad on my case because I couldn't control my father. Some Dean. Some College.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XX

What, given several decades' perspective, could I, or should I, have done when my father and the colonel got together and signed me up for ROTC? Clearly the thing to do would have been to go to the Dean of Freshmen, or any available Assistant Dean, that Monday and explain the whole situation. I hadn't been consulted, it had been done behind my back. I'd chosen my courses and activities based on what I thought was an understanding (since it was never mentioned) with my father that I wasn't expected to sign up for ROTC. Having chosen my courses given that, adding ROTC to my schedule was likely to threaten my performance.

I probably did try to reason this way with my father when he announced that I would be going into the ROTC, but it was of no avail. I was to suck it in, join the ROTC, and cease this silly blather. My parents, in fact, had a long history of unrealistic expectations: when I was about six years old, my father decided that I should say "yes, sir" or "no, sir" in answer to every question, from everyone, for the rest of my life.

I should say my father, who served briefly in the Army at home during World War II, had no other military background and was actually one of those people who thought military discipline was great for others, not himself. By his account, he hated every instant of the time he was in the Army and was thereafter unable to stand in a line of any sort, or to countenance remotely eating anything that reminded him of SOS. He stressed his particular hatred for the officers, and for that reason I never understood why he thought I should be one.

For some period of weeks or months, my father diligently applied his yes sir, no sir regimen. Any question -- do you need to go to the bathroom before we leave? -- had to be answered with a "sir"; failure to do so was penalized, at minimum, by YES WHAT?, or sometimes by a swat. My parents proudly informed the pastor of our Presbyterian church of their zealous effort to prod me toward this greater godliness, at least as they saw it. The pastor (I can reconstuct this only by piecing together my parents' angry conversation at home afterward) appears to have hemmed, averted his eyes, and mumbled something to my parents about stressing the more important things and passing lightly over those that were of less importance. My parents were indignant over this for days. The Rev. Onderdonk didn't understand true Christianity very well at all.

At one point -- I was a bright kid -- I asked my father whether, if asked a question by a schoolmate in the first grade, I needed to say "yes sir/ma'am" to him or her. His answer was an unequivocal yes, of course. I had to say "sir" or "ma'am" to everyone, under all circumstances. My question actually went to the root of his whole idea, which we might call the linguistic polite versus familiar: there are circumstances where even the Germans say du instead of Sie. There are circumstances where informality allows a relaxation of polite standards. My father was betraying his unrealistic expectations by insisting that informality was never to apply in my case. He had no choice, because as soon as he allowed that I didn't have to say "yes sir" to another six-year-old, he'd be opening the very broad question of when else I didn't really have to say "yes sir", and then we'd be back where we started.

After a very difficult time, it became plain that trying to train me to say "yes sir" to questions like "do you want more milk?" wasn't working out, as it would never work out with any normal six-year-old. My parents dropped it. Not, of course, that they would ever recognize that someone like Rev. Onderdonk had provided sage advice. I began to realize only gradually, much later, that my parents took this tactical withdrawal and others like it and stored them away, not as evidence of minor, self-correcting errors in parenting, but as evidence of my basic contrary nature, to which they would randomly allude in later years to explain my perceived failures to measure up to their expectations. When I was maybe seven or eight, I learned a word that I decided applied pretty well to my father: pigheaded. I always felt bad when something reminded me of how I could apply that word to his attitudes, but I could never find a word that was a better fit.

This is a long way of explaining that there was no way I would ever be able to convince my father that ROTC was a bad idea for me, that it was assuming conditions now would be the same as those when I graduated, that it would take a lot of time that I should be using for better purposes, and that in fact it would put me among a class of people whom my father despised. My father was pigheaded. He wouldn't listen to anything like that -- and long experience told me if he wouldn't hear it from me, he wouldn't hear it from a pastor, he wouldn't hear it from a school principal, and he wouldn't hear it from a Dean.

As a result, if I went to a Dean of any sort about the problem, it wouldn't do for the Dean simply to call my father and try to remonstrate. My father wouldn't listen, he'd throw a tantrum about those liberals up at Dartmouth, and he'd find some way to take it out on me later. The only possible solution would be to find a Dean who was a sufficiently responsible adult to do something like call the ROTC colonel and suggest the move to sign Mr. Bruce up for ROTC had perhaps been too hasty, Mr. Bruce already has a full schedule and is concerned about the impact on his grades if he takes on ROTC now. Perhaps the best thing would be for Col. Ditherspoon himself to call Mr. Bruce's father and explain that the offer had been withdrawn, there had been a mistake. The only counter to the first fait accompli had to be a second one that couldn't be canceled out.

It's only after acquiring some very dearly bought maturity of my own that I can see this as the one potential short-term solution to the problem that might not have wound up making things worse. I had no idea at 18 that it might be possible to take such an approach -- and, depending on how the Dean handled Col. Ditherspoon, it might or might not work. If the Dean simply tried to get between me and my father, it could turn out very badly. It's just as well I didn't try it. My actual response, likely the best I had available, was to temporize, go along with things for now and see what developed.

Quick Digression

If you haven't already, check out David Gelernter's piece at OpinionJournal, wherein he laments IBM's departure from the PC field it created. He does oversimplify: I think a more accurate story of IBM vis-a-vis the PC would be that IBM stumbled on a product that took off in spite of every effort IBM could make to stifle it.

In fact, IBM never knew what to do with the PC. Two major missteps IBM made in its history with the PC were the PC Junior -- deciding that what people really wanted was a dumbed-down, less functional version of the PC -- and OS/2 (remember that? Remember OS/2 Warp?), where IBM belatedly realized they'd given the farm away to Microsoft in allowing them to develop Windows software, which is where the real money and functionality have always been with the PC.

Rather than lament a putative recent decline in IBM, it seems to me that Gelernter should be looking at Microsoft and the reality that the PC platform, combined with IBM's long-standing ineptitude, made a non-IBMer one of the richest people in the world. IBM's spinoff of its PC line is fully consistent with the line's entire history.

Gelernter cites a couple of examples where PC development should be helping users more than it does now, such as the ability to access the most recent version of a document you've been working on no matter whether it's on your home system, your office system, or your laptop; or some type of vague e-mail inbox xummary (you have 82 spam messages, eight Nigerian scam proposals, 56 virus attachments, two legitimate messages from your wife, and three from your boss).

This will hardly transform IBM, which is lucky to have survived on the low-risk, high-margin outsourcing and consulting business it's turned to -- they do multi-year contracts with Fortune 500 companies that are so big they don't know what results they're getting from having IBM on site, so they just keep on paying the bill.

My friend Douglas at Belief Seeking Understanding has had several posts on "The Internet of Things", where in part he talks about ideas his students have come up with in the Networking class he teaches as a Computer Science professor. They've brought up ideas like a "smart medicine cabinet" that can sense what medicines are on the shelf, how many pills are in the bottle, when the prescription will need refilling, any potential conflicts in the medication, and so forth. I commented that those were excellent ideas that could be implemented fairly cheaply with current technology (I suggested an extension of SNMP, but Douglas is dubious) -- but the last time I was at Kaiser, they were still using 5-part carbon forms, goldenrod to Accounting.

Contra Gelernter, I think further progress in computing isn't going to be driven by corporate hierarchies. IBM has always been an organization that's had to survive with low-risk, high-margin strategies that will let it maintain its deadwood. Gates, on the other hand, got rich because the day the IBM guys came calling, he didn't want to wait a couple of days to have a lawyer fine-tune the contract IBM offered to develop DOS, and thereby won out over CP/M. The smart medicine cabinet and various other neat things (in honor of the season, have you seen what moderately priced model train locomotives can do lately? Maybe I'll post on this later) are going to come from small, new companies that have the risk-tolerance and flexibility to find out what the market wants and deliver it in a short period of time. This has never been IBM's strong point.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XIX

In hindsight, it amazes me that the colonel went along with this, since common sense should have told him that things weren’t going to work out with someone whose motivation was so indifferent that he didn’t even know he was being signed up. If luck hadn’t intervened, the situation could have been far worse (as we’ll see), both for me and the ROTC. The colonel was likely wrapping up an undistinguished career with the Army at that point, and any outcome probably wouldn’t have mattered to him. My father’s aspirations for my military and academic career were equally unrealistic. I’d chosen my classes -- such as Greek -- and innocently made up the rest of my schedule without factoring in the time demands that the ROTC made, since I had no idea I would be in it come Spring Term. Clearly the decline in my grades that took place could be laid in part on this poorly-informed move.

At the time, I didn't have a strong opinion on whether the ROTC should be on campus. Looking back, I think there was a remarkable dissonance between the Military Science courses we had to take and the rest of the intellectual life on campus. We did things like disassemble and reassemble World War II-era M1 rifles (M14s and M16s were used in Viet Nam by then). I still remember a question I missed on a Military Science quiz: "Communist revolutions have not succeeded in Western Europe because ___________." There was room for just a few words to complete the sentence. It occurred to me that many books could be written to complete that thought, but apparently I'd missed the real answer in the class I'd cut. We spent a fair amount of spare time polishing our shoes, belt buckles, and brass buttons. All this was nothing but busy work, something you presumably buy into if you're in the military, but we weren't really there, and we had far better things to do with that time.

My fellow ROTC students were a cut below the average that you found at Dartmouth. I'm not sure why this self-selection appeared to take place, but certainly Dartmouth was a bastion of elitism, and by and large, the military wasn't a preferred occupation among people who aspired to the elitist value system I've sketched out now and then here. If your family had a strong military tradition, like Douglas MacArthur or John McCain, you'd more likely go to one of the academies. If you didn't have connections, but had aspirations to rise in the military through grit and hard work, you might enlist and go to OCS or go to a state university and take ROTC there.

So the guys I knew in the ROTC were a pretty dull bunch, the sort who couldn't have imagined anything better to do with their time than polish their shoes. Actually, I remember the names of only two: Ed Sloper, a stereotypical big, dumb guy, maybe six-four, 210 pounds, who seemed to have the permanent duty of carrying the machine gun. Then there was Ellsworth Brunton, or Ello. Every once in a while we had a beer party in the common room of our dorm; Ello lived there, too. Ello would start chugging cans of beer, and at a certain point, he'd get up on the table and announce, "I'M NOT DRUNK."

Originally, I thought this was part of some charming Animal House like routine, ironic, self-deprecating, maybe mixing wacky, entertaining antics that showed he was drunk with hilarious insistence that he wasn't. I chuckled a little in anticipation of what I thought was to come. Ello heard me and glared down from the table. "I'M NOT DRUNK!!" he insisted, his voice full of contempt for me, who hadn't understood (and who, not sharing Ello's code of honorable conduct, was likely getting drunk).

After a while, Ello got down from the table, chugged a few more beers, and got back up again. "I'M NOT DRUNK," he announced. That, I realized, was the whole point. That was all that was going to happen. Ello was determined to show he wasn't drunk even though he'd chugged a whole lot of beer. The point wasn't to have fun. The point was to show he would never lose control. Ello was a pretty grim guy. The whole Dartmouth Army ROTC was full of guys like Ello.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XVIII

The ROTC was the main focus for anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations on many campuses. This is because it was the most visible and accessible manifestation of the military. ROTC students wore their uniforms on campus one day a week, since there were training and drills on one weekday afternoon as part of the program. ROTC was one of the ways, along with the military academies and Officer Candidate School, that the military recruited and trained officers.

In the 1960s, its advantages for college students were twofold. First, since able-bodied college-age males were subject to the draft, and the war made the probability of induction high, some felt that if you had to serve, you'd be better off doing so as an officer. The second reason was that during your junior and senior years as an ROTC student, you got a stipend for participating, which was a consideration to those on financial aid. The downside was that you gave up your summers to the program, you had extra classes to attend, and you had the weekly afternoon of exercises. Not everyone liked being so visible wearing a uniform on those days.

By the 1960s, I suspect ROTC's value to the military was marginal. Officers with ROTC commissions were the bottom of the heap in the officer corps, the most likely to be "deselected" for promotion or retention, so it wasn't the best choice for a military career path. The ROTC officers were likely to be less motivated than those from the academies or OCS, especially if their reason for joining was to find a relatively cushy way to fulfill their military obligation.

The Students for a Democratic Society, a left-wing organization that had existed throughout the 1960s, began to advocate violent means to express opposition to the Viet Nam War about 1967. It coordinated many campus anti-ROTC demonstrations nationwide, including the 1969 Dartmouth Parkhurst Hall takeover. The SDS was probably successful at targeting the ROTC presence on campuses simply because the ROTC was of marginal value to the military, and it was perceived by administrators as marginal to the universities' purpose as well. Thus, with minimal organization and few sacrifices, the SDS was able to pick that low-hanging fruit.

At some point after I’d left for Hanover, my father got it into his head that I should have joined the ROTC. I don't think we ever discussed it, and it certainly wasn’t among the activities I signed up for in the fall. By Freshman Father’s Weekend, late in the Winter Term, the idea had become fully formed in his mind, though he still hadn't mentioned it to me. On that weekend, on his visit to Hanover, he found a vacant hour or so, went to see the colonel in charge of the Army ROTC unit, and signed me up. When he saw me again, it was a fait accompli -- I was in the ROTC. My father explained that I was to see the colonel and pick up my uniform the following Monday. He and the colonel had worked things out so that, even though I’d missed two terms, I could double up on my Military Science courses to catch up with the rest of the class.

Even though my tather had stopped beating me when I was about 15, it was plain that he still felt entitled to make major decisions on my behalf without consulting me. As he talked about ROTC and my military obligation, he began to pronounce his words wtih the same strange affectation that he used to do in church if I was due for an extra Sunday whipping. ". . . you may as well serve as an AHHH-fficer," he'd keep repeating. I guess the whole idea sounded better to him that way.

I simply don't know what else may have been behind his idea of putting me in the ROTC. The stipend may have been part of it. He had an aversion to applying for financial aid -- he said he didn't want to disclose the family's financial information on the application form -- but quite possibly he was struggling to pay the Dartmouth bills. The stipend might have helped, but it didn't apply until my junior and senior years. He may simply not have thought that all the way through.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XVII

I've just completed a brief tour of Unofficial Dartmouth, including looks at faculty-student friendships or mentoring relationships, friendships among students, and dating. I'll return to Bill McMann and Larry Burlingame later, but now I want to introduce my last group of subjects, Semi-Official Dartmouth. These are areas with some official connection to the College, but not as rigidly circumscribed as Official Dartmouth.

The pieces that come to mind here include, first, the Reserve Officers Training Corps (or ROTC), the source of major contention while I was an undergraduate. I think I can call it Semi-Official, because the College has been able to turn its relationship with the program on and off at will -- this is not to register a complaint, simply to point out a reality.

The second Semi-Official piece is the Orozco Frescoes in the reserve reading room at Baker Library. These are so striking, and in such contrast to the buttoned down, faux Federal style of the rest of the campus, that I have to consider that they exist in an uneasy relationship to it, even though they're by far the best piece of art that's ever been associated with the place. I don't think it's coincidental that, when I visited in 2001, they were partly covered during building renovations, as if nobody could figure out quite what to do with them.

I almost left out fraternities as a piece of Semi-Official Dartmouth, which should give a clue on how I felt about them. There was considerable controversy several years ago when it appeared that James Wright intended to eliminate them completely as part of the Student Life Initiative, but resistance from alumni was so great that the project appears to have stalled. I was an independent when I was at Dartmouth, so I really don't have a dog in this fight, and my impression of fraternities was never very good. On the other hand, Larry Burlingame was a member of the house that served as the model for the Delta House in Animal House, so I will be able to make some pertinent observations. But my account of fraternities won't be especially well-informed or exhaustive. When I was at Dartmouth, about half the students were independent in any case, and Larry was the only fraternity member I knew well.

The fourth Semi-Official piece is Albert I. Dickerson, who was variously on the staff of Ernest M. Hopkins, Dartmouth's President from 1916 to 1945, then successively under John Sloan Dickey Dean of Admissions and, until his untimely death in 1972, Dean of Freshmen. I don't think it's any more of a coincidence that Dickerson also edited the official description of the Orozco Frescoes. He was Dean of Freshmen when I was at Dartmouth, and my relationship with him was so different from my relationship with the rest of the place that I've got to indicate somehow that it wasn't "Official" in the sense of being part of the Green Bummer.

We had a brief glimpse of Dickerson when I discussed the 1969 Parkhurst Hall takeover, in which he was forcibly carried from his office by anti-ROTC demonstrators, including my sometime friend Larry. As you might suspect from these connections, Dean Dickerson will be an important part of this story.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XVI

On top of that, I was suffering from what William James calls a "heterogeneous temparament". In The Varieties of Religious Experience he quotes Alphonse Daudet to illustrate what he calls "an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution":

"Homo duplex, homo duplex!" writes Alphonse Daudet. "The first time that I perceived that I was two was at the death of my brother Henri, when my father cried out so dramatically, 'He is dead, he is dead!' While my first self wept, my second self thought, 'How truly given was that cry, how fine it would be at the theatre.' I was then fourteen years old.

"This horrible duality has often given me matter for reflection. Oh, this terrible second me, always seated whilst the other is on foot, acting, living, suffering, bestirring itself. This second me that I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, or put to sleep. And how it sees into things, and how it mocks!"

In my case, it would take its most irritating form when I was out on a date. "Here I am, making out with this good-looking chick," I would say to myself, or indeed, "Here I am, making out with this not so good-looking chick, having compromised my standards," and my tendency to stand back and watch myself, rather than simply surrender to the moment, was something I hated. As James points out,

Now in all of us, however constituted, but to a degree the greater in proportion as we are intense and sensitive and subject to diversified temptations, and to the greatest possible degree if we are decidedly psychopathic, does the normal evolution of character chiefly consist in the straightening out and unifying of the inner self. The higher and the lower feelings, the useful and the erring impulses, begin by being a comparative chaos within us- they must end by forming a stable system of functions in right subordination. Unhappiness is apt to characterize the period of order-making and struggle.

I had a girlfriend, Beth, for much of that year, who was a student at the then Colby Junior College. We bickered a lot over issues like how far we were going to go in our make-out sessions, which wasn't very far at all. She was also the first Ayn Rand devotee I'd ever met; she lent me her copy of The Fountainhead. I tried reading it, but after five pages or so I decided it was unreadable. I also found its basic philosophical premise, which seemed to be that you're entitled to everything in the world, so you'd better grab it, repellent.

I didn't have a clear idea of what my values were, in fact, but I decided that if I was at least nominally a Christian, then Randian values were at least nominally in opposition to my values. Beth, on the other hand, thought I didn't recognize how much like Howard Roark I reaslly was, and she felt I didn't measure up to that ideal as a result. We bickered over that, too. In view of what she would and wouldn't let me do in our romantic encounters, I suspect she hadn't fully thought through the part in The Fountainhead where Howard Roark rapes Dominique Francon.

We broke up before the school year was out, which caused me much distress at the time, but certainly was a good thing overall -- she wasn't very smart, and one reason we bickered so much was that there was so little else we had in common. Actually, through me, she met Bill McMann, and she started going out with him. I think she might have seen even more Howard Roark with him than she did with me, but I don't think Bill ever got any farther with her than I did.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XV

I first ran into Bill McMann during an Officially sponsored discussion session of some sort in the common room of the awful River Cluster dorm where I spent freshman year. My first impression was that I thought he was too fond of second-hand opinions, which I felt he mistook for his own. But after several more, Unofficial, late-night bull sessions, he began to grow on me. He was reading The Education of Henry Adams and Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That in his freshman comp class. Some readers, of course, have found a certain facile skepticism in both books, and neither writer was Plato. But McMann, Henry Adams, and Robert Graves were the only intereesting developments I’d run into so far.

Bill was a couple of years older than the rest of us freshmen. He came from a working-class Bronx Irish background, and he’d spent a couple of years clerking on Wall Street before he decided to go to college. In the kind of innovation that appears to date from Albert Dickerson’s time as Dean of Admissions, Dartmouth brought McMann in, older and with some experience of the real world, as a desirable form of diversity in the freshman class (I'll get to Dickerson later; I have no idea if Dartmouth continues this policy). The late-night bull sessions in his room usually centered on whether we and the people we knew were doing what we had theoretically set out to do -- get an education, grow up, acquire our own independent views of the world. He and a few others, including Larry Burlingame, felt that most of our fellow students were too preoccupied with routine studying or conforming to various “big green” expectations to do anything of much importance at Dartmouth.

Along with the skepticism, Bill had a certain ability to see through people. In hindsight, this was mostly because he was older than the rest of us, and his New York street-wise background also helped. But beyond that, had the parlor psychic's ability to spot little clues and take advantage of them -- if he saw prep school buttons on a blazer, he couild say "You're really proud that you went to Choate, aren't you?" and his listener would be surprised and disoriented.

But he could see through me, and I was impressed. “John, I think you said that just to get attention,” he said to me one night in one of those bull sessions, and of course that’s what I’d done. Nobody had ever seen into my motives that way. And this was important because, in the way of all dorm bull sessions, everyone was trying to psychoanalyze everyone else. I think the uniform diagnosis was that we all had problems dealing with our fathers. McMann, seeing the
success of his original observation on my need for attention, followed it up with something like, “. . . and it’s because you haven’t resolved your conflicts with your father.”

I think most young men who listened to the usual stuff about unresolved conflicts with fathers wound up simply going about their business not much the better or worse for it. Looking back, there were as many economic as psychological issues: a college student is struggling for independence, but is still dependent on his or her parents to foot the bills. All kinds of conflicts will emerge in the maturing process, and they will magically disappear in a few years’ time when the student gets a job, fellowship, or whatever, and leaves home for good. And nobody, at least on my floor, seriously entertained the idea of going into analysis.

But I've already mentioned the abuse I'd had from my father, which had only stopped a few years earlier. I certainly thought I needed to grow up. I had no idea whether the abuse I'd suffered would be a stumbling block in that process. Bill seemed to have several years' head start on the rest of us, and I was eager to hear whatever he had to say, especially since he seemed to understand me so well.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XIV

Notice, though, that the academic discussion I've cited says, "These two aspects, Koan exercises and Satori are the central aspects of Zen." This generalization is about as accurate as saying, "These two aspects, the eucharist and predestination, are the central aspects of Christianity." For Christians, it's arguably correct to say that the eucharist is a central aspect of the faith, but predestination is not -- it's taught only by certain Protestant denominations. Anyone who made such a statement about Christianity overall would be betraying a very superficial understanding, and likely disqualifying him or herself as an expert.

There are, in fact, two schools of Zen in the modern environment, Rinzai and Soto. The Rinzai school is the one the academic discussions of Zen mostly mean when they talk about "Zen". But this isn't much different from referring to the Westminster Confession and generalizing it into "Christianity". The Soto school, depending on who you talk to, either doesn't use koans or doesn't emphasize them the way the Rinzai school does. I'm not aware of published statistics, but a cursory review of Zen centers in the US suggests that there are many more Soto Zen adherents than Rinzai, at least over here.

My own first-hand experience, including my suspicion that there are canned answers to koans irrespective of whether the Zen master thinks the student has "realized" the correct answer, makes me think that koans aren't what they're cracked up to be in finding enlightenment. If the Soto school agrees, I'm not surprised. What interests me is why Western textbooks and academic discussions don't mention this. The reason, I feel pretty sure, is that the koans are kinda cute, they make a better story, they have the Zen masters trying to make us think outside the box, which of course is a major tenet of our current non-denominational secular corporate religion.

The fact that real-life Zen involves sitting in meditation several hours a day for both the Rinzai and Soto schools, that this is a difficult thing to do, that the actual mode of Zen life is at least semi-monastic, ritualized, and highly formal, is ignored in academic discussions to the point that I suspect most textbooks are seriously misleading. Alan Watts's books on Zen contributed to this mistaken impression, too, but I have a feeling many academics, without admitting it, have cribbed their versions of Zen from other textbooks instead of undertaking any kind of field research. A scholar has a greater responsibility for accuracy than Alan Watts.

Actually, I recall writing an exam answer in one of Schlatter's courses where I mentioned the "Zen" practice of beating students who didn't answer koans correctly. This is far back in my memory, but I'm almost certain that the textbook we used in the class discussed beating monks as a charactderistic of "Zen" in general, or I wouldn't have written it into the exam. A more accurate discussion of beating monks in Zen is here. The seed for this impression seems to be that a Chinese Zen master, Ma-tsu (709-788 C.E.) a founder of the Rinzai school, was in fact known for beating monks, but I never found, during my own experience with Rinzai Zen, any reference to beatings (and of course, anyone who tried it in the US could wind up in court or in jail). And this wouldn't apply to the Soto school at all. Again, I suspect beatings were added to the text because it seemed interesting, the authors felt they could generalize across millennia, and it conformed with the view that Zen was somehow different or "advanced" or "progressive", but it's another example of how our view of Eastern religions is an abstract, inaccurate picture cobbled together from various assumptions and prejudices. Revisiting this issue gives me a new perspective on the late Edward Said's accusations of Orientalism among Western scholars. In many ways, he has a point.

Once, in graduate school, I met a visiting Religion professor from India. I still hadn't thought through Schlatter's Myth and Ritual approach, and I began to ask him questions about the abstract, generalized "Hinduism" I'd been taught. The vehemence of his reply -- and he was a genuinely nice guy -- suggested he'd already had to deal with Myth and Ritual types many times. "How can you generalize about the myths and the gods?" he asked me. "The meanings of the stories, the roles of the gods, differ from village to village. If you say Kali is this and Shiva is that, you have to recognize that 20 miles down the road, you'll get a different version."

I think I probably took more courses from Hartmut Schlatter than nearly any other prof at Dartmouth -- I was interested in the topic of Eastern religion. But each time I've revisited the subjects he taught, I find I've had to unlearn more. Schlatter rose to be quite high in the Dartmouth adminisitration, so I assume he was always well thought-of there -- he retired fairly recently. But as I look back, he gave only a shoddy imitation of an education to those who took his classes, a set of comfortable prejudices that won't withstand examination. For now, let's wave good-bye to him as he and Larry Burlingame walk across the Green together, their eager conversation puncutated by enthusiastic gestures. Faculty-student friendships, as I said, can be overrated.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XIII

As long as I've mentioned Zen Buddhism, I may as well stick with it. I'll get to how this all got started soon enough, because I'm coming up to the story of Bill McMann, but I should say that after I left Dartmouth, I let the whole question of Eastern religion stew for some years -- all through the time I was in graduate school. But later, working through some other issues, I realized that I was living in Los Angeles, and if I ever had lingering questions about mysticism short of going to the Far East, I was in the right place to see if I could resolve them.

And in fact, because it was LA, I looked under Z in the phone book, and I found a real Japanese Zen master running a meditation hall not far from where I was living. There was my chance: I went and studied Zen for a year or so. I wrote about it in the old Los Angeles Reader about 1980, and I now realize that what I wrote then wasn't enough, and I'll need to say more when the time comes. What I found was nothing like what you read in academic discussions of Zen, including those by Eliade, and what Schlatter covered in his courses at Dartmouth.

Here is a typical academic discussion of the Zen koan; I no longer have my texts from Schlatter's classes, and I don't remember what he used -- but this is standard issue. I found it here:

A[n example of a] Koan is " What is the sound of one hand clapping?" Of course, in terms of the conventional world there can be no sound from a single hand. Sound logically needs two hands clapping. However, the question presumes that one hand clapping has already created a sound and that it can be heard. The question is not about sound or hands clapping, although this is quite conceivable within the context of Zen. The question is rather about hearing the impossible, which is only termed impossible within the framework of conventional reality. The Zen master is therefore pressing and encouraging the student to critique ordinary reality and to force the mind into other areas of understanding.

So I went in to see the Zen master in a specific ceremoney called sanzen. These things don't happen informally, but you see very little published on what actually happens in Zen -- most accounts give you the impression it's just a freewheeling all-day rap session, which it isn't. It's a semi-monastic environment, and as you might expect from the Japanese, it's highly structured and very formal. He gave me a koan to study and try to answer during subsequent sanzen ceremonies. The koan he gave me was -- what else? -- "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

It took me several weeks to answer it; at this remove, I can't remember exactly how long. I was limited in part by the number of sanzen opportunities I got; I think he mostly just did them on weekends. I don't think I'm going to spoil anyone's Zen career or reveal any privileged information if I give the answer: you wave your one hand back and forth in the air in front of you as though you're clapping it. It helps, I suspect, to act as if you've figured it out with some effort, and you're proud of yourself for doing it.

I didn't experience satori in the process of answering the koan (or if I did, I didn't notice), although the very typical discussion I've cited above suggests a strong connection:

Koans are a method of training the mind in order to achieve the state of Satori. Satori is a very difficult concept to describe in a few words. It is essentially the goal of all Zen meditation and can be compared to the term enlightenment or insight into the nature of reality. These two aspects, Koan exercises and Satori are the central aspects of Zen.

I mostly relied on clues of facial expression and body language to figure out whether my answers were getting warm or not each time I went in to give it a shot. It might be possible to say I was somehow "cheating", but that's how all education takes place, it seems to me. I wouldn't have come any closer to an answer no matter how long I sat in meditation on the problem; in the end, I was going to have to learn what the guy wanted.

In fact, I was able to answer several other koans in much the same way, and one impression I took away from my Zen study was that a Cliff's Notes of koans was a practical possibility, though you wouldn't make any money out of it, since almost nobody would be interested. But it raises a question in my mind that's never gone away: to what extent are koans simply "secret knowledge" no different from very similar gnostic riddles? In that case, guys, let's just drop all the stuff about breaking free of conventional reality. We're still in Kansas, Toto, wondering "just what does that TA want??"

I will say that the process of trying to answer koans combined with several hours per day of formal meditation in a meditation hall did bear some fruit in mental discipline. The best analogy I can draw is to a standard piece of Japanese kitsch, the sculpture or drawing of an old fisherman walking with a fish dangling from a pole he carries over his shoulder. There's a part of the mind that doesn't like sitting still for long periods at all, and that part of the mind is much like a slippery fish. At a certain point, to stay with the program, you have to grab the slippery-fish part of the mind and tell it to sit still, or actually, sort of whack it with a mental hammer. It also helped, I found, to drink the best part of a bottle of wine before going into the meditation hall.

I remember specifically doing the whack-the-fish-with-a-hammer thing, and some days thereafter I saw one of the little kitschy fisherman statues (this is LA, after all), and I suddenly understood the point of the fish at the end of the pole. And I noticed a definite lessening of mental background noise. But no satori.

In fact, I don't think the experience I had was even unique to Zen: it brought to mind one of my first graduate school courses, in esthetics and criticism, and reading Kant. I felt I'd actually learned something both times (interestingly, I never had that experience at Dartmouth, Officially, Unofficially, or Semi-officially). But no satori, or if that was satori, we're back to the question of whether it's like what other mystical experiences are supposed to be or not. If satori is simply the feeling that you've actually learned something, I'll grant that's what it was -- but as one writer said, "Aaaaaaah" is the computer programmer's national anthem. We would all be Zen masters at that rate.

But I'm not aware of any textbook or other discussion of Zen that even mentions the little kitschy fisherman. It's all very generalized stuff about mental precipices and transcending conventional reality.

The Dartmouth Conundrum -- XII

The sophisticated issue with Hartmut Schlatter and Mircea Eliade actually isn't much more difficult. I think I began to ask this question when I was taking one of Schlatter's courses, and even thought about broaching the topic for a term paper. Good idea I didn't, in hindsight. The topic I considered was, how do we actually know that samadhi, the classically Vedanta Hindu name for the mystical experience, nirvana, the Buddhist version, and satori, the Zen Buddhist version, are the same experience?

It seems to me that anyone who's had a few courses in philosophy ought to be able to say, with some confidence, that there's simply no way we can prove they are or aren't the same experience. A basic premise in academic discussions of such classically defined mystical experiences is that they are beyond the senses. If they're beyond the senses, there's no way we can say that each one has a purple border, you hear a certain kind of music, they taste like honey, they last for 18 minutes, or whatever else.

Instead, all we get from those who claim to have experienced them is poetic, vague, or contradictory statements that aren't of much use in making comparisons. If you try to say well, at least the statements about them are all poetic, vague, or contradictory, so they must all be similar on that basis, I'll reply that it doesn't follow. Things can be described poetically, vaguely, or in contradictory terms and still not be the same. In fact, if I were to try to write such a paper now, my intuition is that careful scrutiny of relevant texts, canonical or not, would show surprising inconsistency in material areas, and that's one direction I'd explore.

The next question is, why does it matter? Based on what I thought I was supposed to be doing as a student, the topic I mooted would be worthwhile. I think a prof who was teaching a course that covered material on mystical religion with no other axe to grind would probably approve that paper topic enthusiastically, though understanding that a college sophomore or junior could only skirt the borders of a topic that might make an excellent dissertation. A sophomore or junior who can come up with a topic like that, it seems to me, is a kid who shows promise. He's asking questions that will take him into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, for instance. It might be both a challenge and a pleasure to meet with the kid a couple of times as he writes the paper and give him some suggestions. Nah, don't go there -- but here, check this book out.

The problem is that what I would have been getting into with Schlatter if I'd broached that topic for a paper would have been that I'd be questioning a major unexpressed and unexamined assumption of the Myth and Ritual school: it is necessary for their purposes that samadhi, nirvana, and satori all be the same experience. And as a boy sure of his dinner, I'd be coming down on the wrong side of the question: it would be hard, assuming I'm just a bright kid with no axe to grind, to avoid concluding that there's simply not enough evidence to say they're the same. There's no way we can prove it, and one lesson many people eventually learn from life is it's dangerous simply to assume things. Schlatter mostly just gave me B-minuses. I would have gotten a lot worse than B-minus, though, if I'd tried to write that particular paper -- my experience is that profs can be very nasty if you question their implicit but unexpressed assumptions, even if you aren't intending to.

The problem for the Myth and Ritual school, starting with Frazer and extending to his imitators, is that it regards the religious impulse as a monolithic, internally consistent entity about which we may make generalizations, across millennia and across cultures. Frazerians rely on a grand, pseudo-evolutionary scheme of religious development. Magical religion is a characteristic of primitive races. More civilized races have, at least theoretically, advanced beyond this stage.

However, a problem arises: Western culture, the most advanced civilization as Frazer saw it, is built in part on a Judaeo-Christian basis. The Judaeo-Christian scriptures, however, are a positively embarrassing, even scandalous collection of stories about rage, rebellion, murder, adultery, sodomy, bigotry, scheming, manipulation, lust, pride, lies, fraud, deceit, complacency, jealousy, idolatry, cowardice, drunkenness, despair, revenge, dreams, prophecy, plague, pestilence, famine, war, betrayal, massacre, hypocrisy, miracles, torture, resurrection, speaking in tongues, visions -- once you get into them, they're anything but polite, certainly not very civilized, and provide little actual justification for any idea that "we English" are more advanced than any Hottentots. Magic is the least of it.

What Eliade brings to the Frazerian party is the idea that the classical Eastern religions -- or actually, highly idealized, heavily redacted and sanitized versions of those religions -- are the actual "advanced" religions. This suits the inherently anti-Judaeo-Christian bias in the Frazerian position, and it provides a certain esthetic appeal: the human race has moved beyond primitive, magical, excessively complex religiosity to a simpler, more abstract, less anthropomorphic, more intellectualized version of the divine. No more need for praying, reciting creeds, confessing sins, depending on mercy for salvation, or for that matter engaging in that primitive, bloodthirsty, cannibalistic ritual of the eucharist. From Primitives to Zen, the title of one of Eliade's books, gives the general idea.

But if you see things this way, it has to follow that Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism are partial manifestations of this internally consistent, monolithic, universal religious impulse. They occupy the "advanced" end of that impulse, the cream that has floated to the top of the single bottle. If you start asking perfectly legitimate questions about whether the mystical experiences that you are supposed to have in each of those religions are the same or equivalent, you begin to undermine this nice, neat scheme. If samadhi isn't the same thing as nirvana, and neither is the same as satori, you lose the abililty to generalize, and they become just single data points scattered over a field, not the advanced truth at the high end of the continuum. Which one is the "ultimate knowledge", if they aren't all the same? In what way does one become less ultimate than another? How can we tell?

The view of "ultimate knowledge" that scholars represent as coming from the various classical mystical experiences also has the difficulty C.S.Lewis has discussed in this well-known passage in his essay "Miracles":

A girl I knew was brought up by 'higher thinking' parents to regard God as a perfect 'substance'; in later life she realized that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca). We may feel ourselves quite safe from this degree of absurdity, but we are mistaken. If a man watches his own mind, I believe he will find that what profess to be specially advanced or philosophic conceptions of God are, in his thinking, always accompanied by vague images which, if inspected, would turn out to be even more absurd than the man-like images aroused by Christian theology.

Lewis here raises the issue of vagueness in a slightly different way than I do, but I think his point is in general agreement with mine in that, if the picture of "ultimate knowledge" we get from mystical literature is so vague, it's impossible to tell if a Vedanta Hindu's experience is equivalent to a Zen Buddhist's -- all we can say is they're both vague. But we also face the question of why Eliade and his admirers should necessarily think that the notion of "ultimate knowledge" resembling vast, unrecognizable, ineffable, indescribable non-individuality is somehow more advanced than any other. We may find the idea attractive, but there's nothing that makes this truth better than another in the sense that a Ford Escort is superior to an AMC Gremlin. How good can it be, after all, when someone, having presumably seen it, decides the next thing he must do is complete his Ph.D.?

But this leaves aside the simple issue that Schlatter and Eliade simply don't describe Eastern religions with any accuracy.