Brown University - Liber Brunensis Yearbook (Providence, RI)

Page 8 text:

AYLES Hall is old, too. Those granite blocks sit heavily on our mental college hill. They packed us into Sayles for Freshman Week's orientating lectures. We stood and watched the blackrobed processions march down the aisle before the speech began. We didn't have to ask who each Dean was by the middle of freshman year. Many professors grew familiar too; we were taking distribution courses in a multitude of de- partments. The organ sounded good no matter what march reverberated off those cavernous walls. The choir had a nice tone, too; and some of us craned to see that girl standing at the balcony's rim. The speakers weren't always interesting, but the introductions invariably were. Most of the introductions and many of the speak- ers were funny. College humor tries to be witty. Some- times it's witty and sometimes it's just plain cynical; it's funniest when we're in a good mood before a big weekend. But Deans' humor is very special humor. It's a part of Sayles Hall, like those diversely-sized pictures along the walls. When a speaker was boring, we counted the piclures and wondered what each portrait had done. Some were light and reflected the glimmer from Sayles Hall's tall, august windows. Some were dark; and the shadows ran into the oaken beams which climb to the distant, sloping ceiling. That distant, oblique roof is part of Brown's mental canopy. The Providence weather is dismal, and clouds hung impassively over- head for most of the year. Most of the year we were hungry after convocations. The lines at the door shuf- fled impatiently for the race down to the refeciory.

Page 7 text:

ever vivid mixture of warmth and wonder. Most of us can never fathom that piquant union of growing pains and security, of solidity and change. Individually we ran an emotional gamut from despondency to reckless enthusiasm, and an intel- lectual wilderness from symbolic logic to modern art. We were all different when we started, and maybe we're even more different now. But each one of us remembers a lot of things. Each of us got a tinge of the same feeling no matter how we looked at Brown. We got the feeling at night with our eyes closed, or at home for vacations; and we got it in a multitude of little impressions of old man Brown's personal menagerie. We remember the big little things first. We took the rough with the smooth; Manning Hall's stucco surface has seen a lot of Brown since 1835. Oldness is inspirational; tradition and religion live together in Manning Chapel. Exams at Brown were tough, and that's inspirational too. Because we were wor- ried . . . or inspired . . . or grateful, we visited Man- ning Chapel on Sundays. Ministers preach pro- foundly here. Their chapel rests on a hallowed foundation; we took exams downstairs in Lower Manning. The best part of Manning is that you can go in two ways; front or back. Both front and back have broad steps. In warm weather we stood there and watched the campus stream by. Of course, we left the steps when the bell rang and the lecture in- side began. It took guts to go in the front when we arrived late; that rostrum oversees a lot of indus- trious note-takers. In front or in back, it was nice to know that Someone was upstairs. WE collectively remember Brown with an

Page 9 text:

Z T 2, TN