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Page 11 text:
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There is a way to survive, though. When the big questions — those of future, ambition, and sanity — become too great, you can always submit to the mesmerism of campus life. There is no novocain so complete, no numbness so sublime as the complex, non-crucial routine of subsisting on this campus. Among labs and library carrels, with erudite, unthinking re- search in beige-walled dorm rooms you can actually accom- plish the difficult task of losing yourself — from yourself. Surely, there must be some here who are either so well ad- justed or so unconscious to begin with that such a spiritual vacation at some time during four years is not necessary. But most of us, soon or late, become so suffocated that nerveless absorption with the task of learning is a welcome respite. It is like living by an outline, form without content, in which the spin! is an ob|ective and unconcerned spectator to the postur- ings of its body. It is very easy to fall into the habit of labeling that which we are too lazy to analyze or unable to define as intangible, and you have probably heard it said that Southern has such a quality, some pervading essence which draws and holds peo- ple to it. Southern does have an intangible, or at least an elusive, quality which sets it apart; but this feeling produces estrangement and affection, loyalty and distaste in relatively equal amounts. It is this quality which produces our need for occasional self isolation and which spawns the perennial talk of transfer to a more attractive, sophisticated campus. Paradoxically, the same aspect of life at Southern brings us back each year in spite of our protestations and creates in us a grudging, but tenacious, affection. If we cannot pinpoint what it is about this school that be- longs uniquely to it, at least it is not difficult to say when it operates most strongly; when this hill becomes a complete world for you, detached from outside ties of location and af- fection; when you feel like a tiny, sterilized bearing in a great, slow grinding gear, and there is a persistent heat behind your eyes that means you are torn between an absolute hate and repulsion for every person here and a staggering need to have |ust one person care if you now or ever walk down that cold hill in the early morning. The time when it really gets you is winter quarter.
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Page 12 text:
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December, January, and February as they are in Birming- ham are months which s houldn ' t happen to any yeatjany place. It ' s cold-a damp, garment penetrating cold that defies the fee- ble old paint-caked radiators, the kind you can lean against and get a streak of warmth up the back of each thigh and buttock while the rest of your body remains as chill as the rest of the room. Just the cold wouldn ' t really be so bad, but for the ram coming slow and steady for weeks on end until the quadrangle becomes spongy underfoot and crisscrossed with little dams of dead grass. Everyday in class you sit and feel the moisture slip through your shoes, quietly assured that some- one has walked off with the umbrella you left dripping in the hall. The final thing about winter here, thoughts the utter and total grayness that makes the buildings uglier even than they are and the people seem ashen and wilted. Too, over all is the industrial stench of Birmingham, which carries on the wet air and strikes you on the day ' s first door opening. For many, that smell of Birmingham on a cold, gray, 7 o ' clock morning before the sun burns the vapors away must be the enduring mental abbreviation for that pernicious depression that stalks us all in the winter.
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