Haverford College - Record Yearbook (Haverford, PA)

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t - rage, luring- us on by hidden persuasion to a deadend aisle of satiety. The Comet was an oasis, intimate and agreeable by contrast, but reached only after much delay. How often we slipped into that veritable Slough of De- spond, Tenth Entry. Ah, Tenth! Here we wasted away many a night and days, darting from dark despair to infinite possibility, writing on the waters of our hopes a love-hate letter to the world. It was all so happy and so fu- tile. When we finally arrived at the gates of Bryn Mawr after that some- what jejune journey, even if the place wasn ' t all that it had been cracked up to be, our facile imaginations quickly made it so, and that last unsullied Page 11

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ample, as every junior college miss and Lower Merion coed knew, was not only a handy place to read but also an ideal place to pick up boys. In this subtle game between study and sex there were certain informal rules, all designed to insure the triumph of the latter. What you were reading, for instance, was extremely important. Obviously John Updike ' s latest was going to be a better come-on than George Eliot ' s earliest and stuffiest. But in either case the results remained pretty predictable in this coy version of an old and elemental. struggle. On the other side of the net, the game progressed in intensity, and the stakes grew higher and higher. It was inevitable that the contest should extend beyond the periphery of the campus. The pursuit of knowledge seemed to know no bounds. The search assumed the aspect of a biblical quest. The Genesis has been our culpa (fortunate or unfortunate, it did- n ' t seem to matter which), but Exodus was promises. Having dimly heard of another fortress of the intellect in the near distance, we set out con- fidently on a pilgrimage to Bryn Mawr, that promising land of milk and honey, the fertile crescent of beauty and brains. Along the way, however, the Main line demi-monde presented its own array of temptations to the weak-willed traveler. PennFruit was a Van- ity Fair whose artificial displays gleamed out of the wasteland like a mi- Page 10

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bastion of truth and beauty, imagined or otherwise, fell forever before our eyes. It was all too easy to get invited to Circe ' s Coffee Hour, The only problem, some of us found, was how to get out. And so we bought a ticket for a train headed nowhere in particular, per- haps back to Haverford or some nlace like it, perhaps to one of the places along the way. And as we stood on the platform, waiting for the train that would take us to our destination, wondering whether it had all been worthwhile, we suddenly realized that somehow it couldn ' t have hap- pened otherwise. Mysterious and inexorable forces outside and inside us — effected ultimately in those curiously feuding formal and easy elements of life — those forces had reacted together and shaped us. And in this pro- cess Haverford has acted as a kind of catalyst — causing and accelerating that reaction in us without being permanently affected itself. After we have gone, the spirit ' f the place will live on relentlessly as before. But having caught a part of that spirit, we came to realize dur- ing four short years not only our possibilities, but our limitations and ca- pacities — our place in the sun.