Swarthmore College - Halcyon Yearbook (Swarthmore, PA)

Page 13 text:

Night vigil, The burnt-out ends of smoky days, ten o'cloek, twelve . . . two . . . four. . . . The sugar coating of the catalogues and pamphlets has long since dissolved, and now, every morning: Swarthmore, l've got you licked! And every night: O.k., Swarthmore, you win. But you go on studying, or writing . . . or dreaming. Five o'clock, six. And when all the world came baekf And the light crept up between the slzultersf And you heard the .spurrows in the gutters, maybe you were ready. Or maybe you weren't.

Page 12 text:

W -t 'W Z5 P NOW IT IS ALMOST OVER . . , Now we have almost reached the point where we can say, I have survived it. Perhaps it was not 'fthe most consistently happy four yearsl' of our lives, as one College notable once told us it would be. I11 fact, it was almost certainly not. In fact, it was probably not the most consistently ANYTHING of our livesa-except maybe the most consistently, constantly changing. And if our mood now is a relatively stationary one of mixed nostalgia and relief, we have to make a little effort to remember that there was nothing stationary, nothing enduring about the way we met and revisited, reacted and re- reacted to Swarthmore through these ycznss. At various times wc-'ve loved it and hated it, thrilled to it and become utterly fed up with it, extolled its virtues and condemned its faultsg we've hedged on it, and we've leaned into itg we've been hopelessly lost in it, and we've happily lost ourselves in itg we've found our place in it, and we've rebelled against the con- fines of pigeon-holesg we've hidden from it, and perhaps, for a few priceless, painful seconds we've looked it straight in the face.

Page 14 text:

i 10 But if you werenit ready, if you hadn't quite finished, you found yourself, for some strange reason, coddling yourself less and admiring Swarthmore all the more. And if we have all long since learned that Swarthmorels candy coating melts quickly, we have also more recently learned that its center affords considerable cerebral chewing. Somehow we have come to feel that the night vigil, the drafty room with the rattling pane, the understocked Libe and underequipped lab don't seein quite as bad as they used to, aren't quite as noticeable. For in the midst of all this, and in spite of an occasional dull lecture or tedious seminar, we've sensed the fascination of the free, quick play of ideas, the tangible flash of insight, and the pride of intellectual rigor.