Chatham College - Cornerstone Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

Page 30 text:

Poised on the crest of a ski slope, it hap- pens: an idea comes, one that will crystal- lize the thesis of her whole tutorial, force the massive welter of her information into a coherent pattern. Fourteen sitzmarks and five minutes later, the senior is scribbling frantically on the back of her lift ticket. Thus spake Zarathrustra! Or it might hap- pen on a Fifth Avenue streetcar, on the tennis courts, half-asleep in Mellon at 3 a.m., in a Benedum bathtub ... or not at all. Usually, intense involvement in anything from Sartre to the Berlin Wall to the intri- cacies of Urdu sentence construction pre- cedes a sudden irrational revolt against the whole system , a lapse back into a limbo of cigarette-smoke gloom and a loss of the perspective that four years have brought. Unexpectedly, the ability to laugh at her- self returns, and the whole cycle begins over again. And somewhere between the autumn round of Community Government meet- ings, traying on Chapel Hill, grad record exams, between Song Contest, a new Pre- sident and a surprise bouquet of yellow roses . . . and April ' s deadline, the pattern slowly emerges. After four years of spora- dic intellectual excitement and bourbon, community spirit and private tears, 1964 ' s Senior manages a balance of introspection and a spirited commitment to the challenge of a chaotic world, the vagaries of human nature, and an almost deliberately stubborn tutorial topic. 26