Then it wasn’t.
Slowly I came to realize that I was spending my days typing and perfecting paragraphs and bullet points that no one would ever read, sentences that existed only to be filed away against the contingency that someday they would be of use. Enclosed please find [some stultifying legal document]. (And there was that silent desperate please . . .)
The job began to haunt me. I could live with being a paper pusher, and boredom wasn’t the issue, not really, since I could always daydream while working. It was all those words mummified in dusty cabinets, cabinets shunted into cluttered storerooms. One day, when I was twenty-seven, I was strolling down Westminster Street on my lunch break and heard something odd. I was talking to myself. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except I was practically yelling.
That’s one wretched character, I thought, as though observing myself from across the street. What’s her problem? I had no idea. I’d have had more luck seeing inside her head if she had been across the street.
At the time, when I wasn’t transcribing Dictabelts, I read constantly, sometimes two or three junk novels in a day. But occasionally I’d dip into something worthwhile. And so it came to pass that one evening I read “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
If you Google “life-changing books,” you’ll find no end of lists: Madame Bovary; The Confessions of St. Augustine; The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. My life was changed by a short story about a scrivener, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a legal secretary, who has been debilitated by years toiling in the dead letter room of a Washington post office. “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames?” He recovers from a nervous collapse, takes work for a master of chancery on Wall Street, shuts down entirely, and thereafter refuses to copy another word. He stares at the office wall and will not be moved, except, in the end, by the people who take him away. I read this story and understood it completely. I had to change my life.
This sounds histrionic, but it is true.
Until I read “Bartleby,” I had not even considered going back to college. Now, suddenly, I knew I had to. I can’t explain this intuitive leap: returning to school had nothing to do with career aspirations. This was 1976; workers weren’t forced to go back to school simply to remain employable. I’m not the sort of person to whom such things happen, but “Bartleby” spoke to me. It was just as Hector, that great teacher in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, describes:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you, and here it is, set down by someone else. A person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.
I just had to learn. If I didn’t, I’d be lost. There was suddenly so much to know.
Because I lived in Providence and was unwilling to move, I applied only to Brown. The RUE program was pretty new at that time. Had it not been for RUE, I doubt that I would have been admitted. For RUE students, admission didn’t depend on SAT scores (some of us had never taken the SAT). I don’t know if my ancient high school grades were factored in, and of course my college record was horrible. Perhaps there was an element of self-selection to it, as though the very act of applying showed we were suitably imaginative. And I have no idea if RUE admissions standards have changed since 1975. If they have—if it’s harder to get in now than it was back then—I must count myself doubly lucky, to be the age I am now, to have taken that leap when I did.
Resumed Undergraduate Education allows people to learn when they’re good and ready. Not all high school graduates are ready. I certainly wasn’t. And many more can’t afford the time or money or both; they’ve started families, joined the armed services, gone to work to support themselves. Studies show that older undergraduates acquit themselves well scholastically, on par with and sometimes exceeding the performance of younger students. Maybe it’s because we’re not distracted by social anxiety. Or maybe it’s because we’re so grateful to be there, at a full stop, learning.
I hope the RUE program continues to flourish. I’ve made more of my life than I would have, thanks to RUE and to Herman Melville.
Indirection
DONALD ANTRIM
I wasn’t a writer in college. I wasn’t much of a student. My father was a literature professor, but never mind about that. I acted in plays. This meant staying up late and, for me, a reduced attention to the family business of academics. I had romantic fantasies of an artistic life and getting laid, and I had financial aid and an afternoon job in the John Hay Library.
I didn’t much like going to work. Three days a week, I dragged myself up the Hay’s grand marble exterior stairs, through the big pocket front doors, and across the main hall to the reference desk. After checking in, I got right out of there. I might say, to whoever stood behind the desk that day, “Hey, why don’t I take care of some of these?” then roll a cart of books into the ancient elevator, press the button, and ascend toward higher realms of procrastination and avoidance, the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Plays. I remember the Harris Collection as low aisles of army-green shelves rising from a glass tile floor. You could reach up and touch the ceiling. Typically, the stacks were dark when the elevator door opened. The building’s windows were sealed over, as they are today, and you had to find the switch and turn the lights on. The switch made a loud click that could be heard up and down. The light was dim and glaring but bright enough to read by. I did some reshelving.
The Harris Collection is comprehensive and exhaustive; it rivals the Library of Congress collections in its field. Bound books, loose pamphlets, newspaper clippings, broadsides, posters, various letterpress chapbooks—I wandered the stacks and read Elizabeth Bishop and George Oppen, John Berryman, David Ignatow, Richard Hugo, Denise Levertov, L. E. Sissman. I liked David Godine books, and I developed a thing for Black Sparrow first editions, numbered in pencil and featuring silkscreens and watercolors tipped in at the front.
And there were the vanity books, they were everywhere, the self-published song cycles of retired admirals and widowed grandmothers and civic leaders with ambitions toward beauty. It was not good poetry, but, in being included, it somehow became important. Who knew that so much was written in America? Who knew how deeply poetry mattered?
I read for music, for rigor and perspective and form; and I rehearsed and directed plays and thought endlessly about dramatic narrative and comic speed and concrete blocking onstage, about acting and entertainment; and, at a certain point, I noticed that I always carried poetry with me into the theater. I read it sitting in the house during rehearsals and I read it backstage in the green room during shows. I didn’t become a poet in the end, but that’s neither here nor there. I got my education without looking for it.
A boy in a library, making his way into literature—it’s not an unusual story. Looking back, it seems to me that the story in this case is institutional as well as personal. It’s a Brown story. Brown’s adherence to the liberal, open, hippie curriculum expresses a philosophy of education that embraces agency and autonomy: You are among mentors and your peers, the university seems to be saying to its students, and you are nevertheless independent, singular, autodidacts in a way, and your lives will be made of everything you didn’t know you were looking for, what you couldn’t imagine you might find.
Bending the Letter
BRIAN CHRISTIAN
Coming from a tiny high school with a technical emphasis, I looked to college as a time of freedom—freedom to explore and experiment. My application essay took Frost and (via Emerson) raised the ante: “To take the path less traveled is not enough. Go where there is no path, and leave a trail.” There must have been something in that mandate that struck a chord, as every school that admitted me except for one offered me the ability to go against
their own rules: to waive core requirements, take classes pass/fail, and design my own major if I wanted. The other university, instead, made it clear that every student could do these things. And so my decision was made.
I soon found myself bending what few rules there were. In my second semester, I discovered that a computer science requirement conflicted with a music theory class I was desperate to take. My solution: register for both, by submitting a separate form for each and hoping no one noticed. No one did.
When my first-year advisor heard about my plans, he was furious. “I cannot condone this,” he said, suddenly brusque and intimidating, his Austrian accent heightening the effect. “I refuse to sign off on this.” When I explained that in fact he already had, he disowned me as his advisee. But the registrar never reversed my double booking, and through hijinks reminiscent of the restaurant scene in Mrs. Doubtfire, I managed to get As in both.
Much of the rest of my Brown trajectory was characterized by a similar combination of ambition, overoptimism, stubbornness, and wiles.
That year I also leapfrogged Fiction I (which was enrolled by a crapshoot lottery) and landed directly into Fiction II (which required a portfolio) when my Meiklejohn peer advisor told me the secret truth: every freshman assumed (as I had) that their work wasn’t good enough to get them into Fiction II, and so didn’t apply. Even as Fiction I turned students away in droves, Fiction II enrolled 100 percent of the students who applied, and still had empty seats.
The message stuck with me: Life isn’t linear. And competition is fiercest where everyone else is aiming. The result is that often, as Timothy Ferriss puts it, “Doing the unrealistic is easier than doing the realistic.” I never forgot that.
Third semester I wrote my heart out on an application to an upper-level nonfiction workshop and got one of the few spots traditionally reserved for seniors. Fourth semester I slipped into a poetry seminar and took a seat while the professor, who knew the head count was wrong, admonished, “Anyone not registered for this class, please leave.” I stayed. After my third week of clinging to the course like a barnacle, he signed me on as an overload.
I took it Satisfactory/No Credit and, unable to handle a fifth course atop four degree requirements, sheepishly offered two poems in lieu of a final paper. I barely passed. But the course was my gateway drug to poetry, and it bent the arc of my life. The deep irony, as I see it, is that virtually all of the life-defining academic experiences I had at Brown, and in particular the ones that led to my becoming a writer, were made possible by the anachronistically and almost embarrassingly old-school pencil-and-paper registration system that existed virtually unchanged from the 1960s into the ’00s, a system that no longer exists. Current undergraduates are spared the half-hour wait in University Hall to hand over their pink carbon paper. It’s important to note, though, what is lost.
In the digital Brown, Fiction II is only available to Literary Arts concentrators. Introduction to Creative Nonfiction has strict grade-level caps. Registering for two classes at the same hour is, of course, not possible, nor is registering for two sections of the same class (which I also did).
My very thesis represents an academic possibility now closed to current Brown undergraduates. The creative writing faculty was at the time a slightly secessionist part of the English department, and one of the ways that their separatism manifested itself was through a special initiative called the Capstone Program, through which anyone who applied and was accepted—not just English majors—could write their thesis with the creative writing faculty.
When the faculties finally separated in 2005, the plug was pulled on the Capstone Program, which was no longer needed (the argument went) as a stand-in for the “real” Literary Arts honors thesis that was now available in its own proper major. I was narrowly grandfathered in.
It was with a wry smile that I read a 2012 Brown Daily Herald article discussing the archaic predigital registration system, a system so discombobulated that “students could register for classes that met at the same time.” A wry smile, and a sincere concern.
I can’t help wondering if the Brown of 2013 into which current high school seniors will matriculate is as perfect a fit for students like me as the Brown of 2002 was. “The old system did not enforce enrollment restrictions such as concentrations or pre-requisites,” the article continued. In many ways the things most characteristic of my Brown education are now impossible, relics of an earlier and looser age. The trappings of twentieth-century Brown hung on just long enough into the twenty-first for me to get away with what I did.
The other day I was talking with an old classmate, now in law school. “If there were a button that you could press to make all of the law currently on the books perfectly and completely enforced, any lawyer will tell you that pressing that button would destroy society,” he said. The problem is that computerizing any process, unless done with great care, is the equivalent of pushing that button. Computers are tyrannical, Orwellian in precisely this way by design; any programmer will tell you that “exceptions” are what computers make when they crash.
But many of the great things in life come by way of exceptions. Junior year, my friend Maggie and I went around campus with chalk and a copy of Neruda’s Book of Questions. “DOES SMOKE TALK WITH THE CLOUDS?” we wrote on Caswell dormitory. (Some anonymous chalker later replied: “NO.”) An admitted student by the name of Andrew happened to be visiting campus that day and photographed the chalkings, which delighted him. The school seemed to be literally overflowing with creativity, he thought, and decided to matriculate that fall. He and I became close friends, long before either of us discovered our chalk connection.
Maggie and I were inscribing—I remember the line—“WOULDN’T IT BE BEST TO OUTLAW INTERPLANETARY KISSES?” on the MacMillan patio when we were accosted by a campus security guard.
“What are you guys up to?” he demanded.
“It’s Pablo Neruda!” we exclaimed, showing him the book.
“Okay, well . . . If it’s poetry . . .”
We seemed to know what we were doing. For poetry, he made an exception.
That was part of the promise that Brown offered me. I hope it will continue to make that promise: That incoming students will continue to find ways to bend the letter of Brown’s law to more perfectly uphold its spirit. And that Brown will continue to make exceptions for them to do so.
There is one thing—in particular—that gives me hope.
In memoriam, we will leave the laws you’ve broken broken.
—Ben Lerner (AB ’01, MFA ’03)
The day of my Campus Dance, the final huzzah before I was to be booted into the allegedly “real” world I’d heard so much about, with thousands of alumni pouring into campus from all corners of the globe, Andrew, our friend Blair, and I grabbed a copy of another book of poems: A Thousand Devils by K. Silem Mohammad, a weird, manic, mischievous book.
We passed the book around as we strolled the campus. “DO THE WORDS ‘MERCANTILE CORNFROG’ MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?” I chalked on the mathematics department, posing for a picture.
“I’M MAJORLY MAC LOW, SO YOU’RE IN GOOD SUSPENDERS,” Andrew wrote on the Watson Institute, the corner of Charlesfield and Thayer.
We scoured the book first for delight, and then gradually for resonance. “THE CHALKBOARD IS WOBBLING IN A NEW WAY,” wrote Blair on one of the wings of Hegeman.
I found one that seemed a perfect disciplinary fit for the Medical Research Laboratory and, hoisted up onto Andrew’s shoulders, strained to inscribe it across the top of the building’s “Whispering Arch”: “RED ALERT! A PHYLUM IS COLLAPSING—”
On the stairs to the theater: “WHAT I KNOW IS SHORT-CIRCUITED SEEMING // BUSTED IN LIGHT OF UP-TO-DATE SILENCE.” Something in that seemed about right for a commencement. Last, the Neruda again—“DOES SMOKE TALK WITH THE CLOUDS?”—this time on the steps to my first-year room in Hope.
Within minutes our work was being undone. As we walked back across campus we spotted Brow
n security officers glumly, lethargically sponging “MERCANTILE CORNFROG” from the bricks. It was okay. We hadn’t expected our work to last long on the campus’s day of highest visibility. (I thought about a group of Zen monks I had seen that semester, constructing an incredibly elaborate sand mandala in the Watson Institute lobby, slowly and with utmost care carrying it outside, and then, with equal care, tilting their intricate design into the Providence River.) Anything writ water-soluble may as well be writ in water itself.
We dressed up for the dance. Night fell, the festoons of light glowed, and the throngs convened. Our work was gone. Brown was back to its pristine self. And then we spotted it:
“RED ALERT! A PHYLUM IS COLLAPSING—”
Perhaps no one had noticed it above the Whispering Arch. Perhaps its message was just relevant enough for its host building. Perhaps it was simply too high to reach.
I stayed in Providence into the summer, sending my creative writing prize money to an old flame’s parents as sublet rent, and spending the oppressive, humid summer weeks estivating and mourning and bringing iced coffee from Bagel Gourmet down the hill to translate poems in the air-conditioned nooks of the Athenaeum. Curiously, the chalking remained through the first of the summer thundershowers, then the second, protected by its archway. Clearly it had been seen by security and faculty and staff by this point; somehow it had survived them too. But it was fading and I knew the elements would have at it soon enough. I drove west in August of ’06 to Seattle to start my MFA.
I visited Brown in March of ’07. It was still there. Andrew phoned me when he returned for class that September. Not only was it still there: it was sharper than when any of us had last seen it. It had been rewritten.
The Brown Reader Page 4