I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself. She wrote, “I’ve never truly loved anyone the way I love D. and it’s never been so total and complete, yet so unpossessing and pure, and sometimes I want to drink him in like golden water.” You try to concentrate on your Milton midterm after reading that about yourself.
Sometimes, wearing her bathrobe, she’d knock on my door in order to return a book or get my reaction to a paragraph she’d written or read. She’d wish me good night, turn away, and begin walking back to her room. I’d call to her, and we’d embrace—first in the hallway outside our doors, then soon enough in my room, her room, on our beds. I hadn’t kissed anyone since I was twelve (horrific acne throughout high school), so I tried to make up for lost time by swallowing Rebecca alive: biting her lips until they bled, licking her face, chewing on her ears, holding her up in the air and squeezing her until she screamed.
In her journal, she wrote that she’d never been kissed like this in her life and that she inevitably had trouble going to sleep after seeing me. I’d yank the belt to her bathrobe and urge her under the covers, but she refused. She actually said she was afraid she’d go blind when I entered her. Where did she learn these lines, anyway?
Shortly before the weather turned permanently cold, we went hiking in the mountains. The first night, she put her backpack at the foot of her sleeping bag—we kissed softly for a few minutes, then she fell asleep—but on the second night she put her backpack under her head as a pillow. Staring into the blankly black sky, I dug my fingers into the dirt behind Rebecca’s head and, the first time and the second time and the third time and the fourth time and probably the fourteenth time, came nearly immediately.
From then on, I couldn’t bring myself to read what she’d written. I’d read the results of a survey in which 40 percent of Italian women acknowledged that they usually faked orgasms. Rebecca wasn’t Italian—she was that interesting anomaly, a Southern Jew—but she thrashed around a lot and moaned and screamed, and if she was pretending I didn’t want to know about it. She often said it had never been like this before.
Every night she’d wrap her legs around me and scream something that I thought was German until I realized she was saying, “Oh, my son.” My son? She had her own issues, too, I suppose. We turned up the Jupiter Symphony all the way and attempted to pace ourselves so we’d correspond to the crashing crescendo. I was sitting on top of her and in her mouth, staring at her blue wall, and I thought, My whole body is turning electric blue. She was on top of me, rotating her hips and crying, and she said, “Stop.” I said, “Stop?” and stopped. She grabbed the back of my hair and said, “Stop? Are you kidding? Don’t stop.”
At the end of the semester, packing to fly home to San Francisco to spend the Christmas vacation with my family, I suddenly started to feel guilty about having read Rebecca’s journal. Every time I kissed her, I closed my eyes and saw myself sitting at her desk, turning pages. I regretted having done it and yet I couldn’t tell her about it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I’ll miss you,” I said. “I don’t want to leave.”
On the plane I wrote her a long letter in which I told her everything I couldn’t bring myself to tell her in person: I’d read her journal; I was very sorry; I thought our love was still pure and we could still be together, but I’d understand if she went back to Gordon and never spoke to me again.
She wrote back that I should never have depended on her journal to give me strength, she’d throw it away and never write in it again, and she wanted to absolve me, but she wasn’t God, although she loved me better than God could. Anything I said she would believe because she knew I’d never lie to her again. Our love, in her view, transcended time and place.
Well, sad to say, it didn’t. The night I returned from San Francisco, she left a note on my door that said only, “Come to me,” and we tried to imitate the wild abandon of the fall semester, but what a couple of weeks before had been utterly instinctive was now excruciatingly self-conscious, and the relationship quickly cooled. She even went back to Gordon for a while, though that second act didn’t last very long, either.
It was, I see now, exceedingly odd behavior on my part. After ruining things for myself by reading her journal, I made sure I ruined things for both of us by telling her that I had read her journal. Why couldn’t I just live with the knowledge and let the shame dissipate over time? What was—what is—the matter with me? Do I just have a bigger self-destruct button, and like to push it harder and more incessantly, than everyone else? Perhaps, but also the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca. This is what is known as a tragic flaw.
ACADEMIC LIFE
As much as we sometimes roll our eyes at the ivory-tower isolation of universities, they continue to serve as remarkable engines of innovation.
—Steven Johnson (’90)
The semiotics program articulated instincts I already had, that film was not some unencumbered mode of expression, but has a direct relationship to social ideas and meanings and institutions.
—Todd Haynes (’85)
No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. . . . As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered . . . I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I’ve ever wanted before.
—Leon in Understand by Ted Chiang (’89)
Higher Learning
MARILYNNE ROBINSON
I was not very good at youth, as that word is generally understood. I came to college rather grudgingly aware that I might encounter high-spirited pranks and bonhomie, that I would witness the formation of lifelong friendships, and stand at the margins, at least, of moments that would stir nostalgia for decades to come. No doubt these things did go on around me. I found shelter from them all in the cocoon of mild anxiety better called my studies.
Two things are true simultaneously—that my years at Brown provided me with a core of learning and a model for thought that have been endlessly fruitful for me, and that those years seemed at the time to have been an unbroken trance of undifferentiated receptivity. To pass is better than to fail: therefore the requirements of a course are to be satisfied. This may not sound especially lofty or aspiring, but it reflected in part a great trust in the institution, in Brown itself. I thought its expectations must be wise and worthy. In retrospect, it seems to me that my youthful credulity on this point was itself a kind of wisdom. It has taken years for my education to fall into place, for me to realize what part of it is still full of value and suggestion and what part is to be criticized and rejected. The interior conversations that have come from this need to appraise have also had great value for me.
The winnowing really began when I was an undergraduate, obliged by my American philosophy professor to read, of all things, Jonathan Edwards’s essay “The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended.” As it happened, I was then and had been for some time silently and deeply morose on account of the determinism I was absorbing in my psychology class. In those days, still early in what was called the paperback revolution, a nineteenth-century edition of Edwards’s works was on reserve for the course in the John Hay Library. I
went off dutifully to what I expected to be a truly crepuscular reading experience. I found, in a long footnote on moonlight, a conception of being that implied a free play of possibility. For Edwards the freedom is God’s altogether, of course. But to find this leavening of being with what in effect is indeterminacy was an immediate and memorable relief. It was no doubt very young of me to stagger under the burden of one idea and to feel truly rescued by another, but it was a lesson in the importance of ideas that I have never forgotten. It was also a lesson in the potency of metaphor and in the endless contemporaneity of good thought.
* * *
My brother David was a senior at Brown during my first year. He was writing an honors thesis with weighty philosophic themes, and he and I walked and walked through the Providence rain and the Providence snow while he thought through his thesis out loud. I had no way in the world to understand anything about its content, but I certainly admired its scale. I had applied to Brown because my brother liked it there. He had been bookish from childhood, and he led me along from a very early age into what might be called the life of the mind. If I had any aspiration, it was to be as smart as he was. I can explain my own course of life in terms of his influence. He, however, eludes explanation. Be that as it may, there he was to continue my initiation into the high seriousness of the world of ideas. Again, it was all very young, quite naïve. On my part, it was another feat of indiscriminate receptivity. But it evoked a very grand cosmos for me to furnish and populate at my leisure.
David had decided years before that I should be a poet. I put some effort into living up to his hopes, then recognized, thank goodness, that my poetry was thoroughly mediocre. My attempts at fiction were also mediocre, and I might have been stalemated altogether if my freshman roommate had not told me that I somehow managed to consider myself a writer though I lacked the courage even to take John Hawkes’s fiction workshop. This was true, I did lack the courage, and if she had put the matter another way I might have excused myself from this experience. She was quite right to point out that I would have to justify my claims or else drop them. She was clearly prepared to consider me ridiculous otherwise. So I signed up for the workshop, which is among the best decisions I have ever made, even if the decision was not quite mine. John Hawkes was a wonderful teacher, contemptuous of chaff and deeply pleased by anything he found in the way of wheat. He directed me firmly toward what was best in my own writing. I have tried over the years to do as much for my students. Questions are mooted often about the effectiveness of writing workshops, which I have taught for many years. No doubt they vary in their usefulness, but I can certainly testify to the importance to me of the criticism and encouragement I received from him.
The moral of my life is that there is no way of anticipating the importance any learning might assume. The same philosophy course that brought me to Jonathan Edwards also introduced me, passingly, to Charles Sanders Peirce. On the basis of this very slight acquaintance I found myself sitting on the bank of the Iowa River reading his Monist essays while I was writing my novel Gilead. I had not thought about Peirce in decades, but I remembered a quality in his voice that seemed to me to refine the voice of my narrator, John Ames. Brown did well by me in giving me this resource to exploit under circumstances that were, at the time I received it, hardly to be imagined. I would never have thought I could be taking away from the usual small emergencies of assignments, papers, and exams a particular affable and gentlemanly voice—not Josiah Royce, not William James, but exactly C. S. Peirce.
This is a rather odd instance of an ongoing phenomenon, the emergence of some seemingly forgotten detail of my education that becomes a nucleus of associations, precipitating other thinking. I am persuaded that the institutions of learning arose out of profound intuitions about the nature of the mind, specifically that the mind creates relevance out of whatever stores of learning are available to it, if they are generous and of good quality. There is, or was, a particular romance in the encounter between the young and the venerable. For a long time the colleges all seemed to try to look older than they were, Gothic, if possible. Their bell towers and gates and quadrangles were the monuments of unaging intellect, even though these enclaves were meant to be the country of the young par excellence. That they were indeed for the young seems to me to have been truer when they were slightly anomalous survivals of Renaissance civilization than now, when they are coerced into responding to the hypothetical or momentary demands of our seismic global economy.
More to the point, the generations that created them seem to have understood how powerfully an idea can live in a young mind, a perfect analogy being the special intensity with which such a mind might encounter a poem or a novel. I have come more and more to realize that the trust I placed in Brown was very graciously answered by the trust Brown placed in me. Learn so that you may continue learning, think until you are at home with thought.
Syllabus (Annotated)
RICK MOODY
The following motifs may be used as a syllabus for any such course offering as may be useful, or may be considered a record of classes past,1 or these motifs may serve as topics of conversation to be held with tax collectors or persons embarked on reconnaissance of haunted locations, or as conversation starters for shy persons required to give public lectures. Additionally, instructors into the arcane arts of mummery2 may apply here, only to retreat for further divinations into a cave.
Week One: Enmity of Bear and Ant3
Per the course description, during the first week of class, students will memorize constitutive literatures of cultures past, such as those of the Khazars, the Hottentots, the Anasazi. Students will wear bear pelts. The design specifications of pelts will be left to individual choice—this is a course of higher learning, not a babysitting agency! There are many things to say about Ursidae, besides simply dwelling upon the traditional enmity between these animals and ants. The tendency of bears to write upon the carcasses of their prey, the tendency of bears to be quarrelsome about phases of the moon, the tendency of bears to find other bears irritating, the tendency of bears to be humorous in an obscene way, even when to do so will be embarrassing and damaging to reputation. The instructor’s job is to efface the role of the instructor, to eliminate his role in the classroom dynamic; fighting among bear-pelted cubs in the classroom setting is encouraged, even rewarded.4
Week Two: Creature Changes Size at Will
Add to the following catalog: She had a female body . . . like an act of desperation. She had a female body . . . like the translation of a Russian novel. She had a female body . . . like the Sargasso Sea. She had a female body . . . like Icelandic volcanic eruption. She had a female body . . . like an egregious grammatical error. She had a female body . . .
Week Three: Devil Plays Fiddle at Wedding5
Since I was unable to procure the incendiary materials I wanted to use this week from the anarchist bookstore,6 owing to the fact that I was badly injured there when my pyrotechnical device was detonated by the triggering mechanism of another anarchist, a rather wealthy girl from a yachting family down the coast, we will have a makeup assignment. My fellow anarchist had been to hear some Portuguese music, she told me, in particular, the form called fado,7 mostly about lovers dying unfortunate deaths while narrators pine ceaselessly. Also present at the venue was a certain wedding party. The wedding party was intoxicated and rowdy and baiting the newlyweds into displays of amorous behavior, even erogenous display, and this young anarchist watched with horror as a certain accompanist of the fado singer, the musician playing the congas, was, while observing the proceedings, transformed into a peccary. What, the young woman wanted to know, as we stood chatting amiably on the step of the anarchist bookstore, were the internal conditions inhering in the life of a conga player that would make it not only possible but likely that he would suddenly be transformed into a peccary?8 Was his character, at that moment, like the alleged character of the peccary? Was he aggressive when cornered, homely, truculent? Funny you should a
sk, said I. And then the deafening crash as the window of the bookstore was reduced to shards, the stock of hardcovers and paperbacks incinerated, passersby thrown from their feet. What I ought to have said was: Is this a trick question?
Week Five: Heroes Dislike to Kill Sleeping Persons
A sleeping preparation has been administered. After last week’s quiz, some of you came to office hours complaining about your grades.9 I’ve never heard such a collection of whiners in all my years. I had just closed the door in order to have some few moments to myself, whereupon this malcontent burst through the door waving around a small-caliber handgun. The muzzle was short, and I instantly surmised that there would scarcely be audible report or muzzle flare. In short, it was a weapon made specifically for knocking off a professor who had perhaps given a pop quiz on the subject of the conquest of Troy. I did manage to distract this kid by droning on about a certain Persian kingdom, and the soothing qualities of my voice rendered him inert enough, in due course, for a struggle to ensue. I prevailed, made a timely citizen’s arrest, and upon causing the student to be incarcerated, I went to the pharmacy to procure, in bulk, a sleeping potion.
Week Seven: Dwarf Turns Gold into Lead10
Commonly, the dwarf turns the lead into the gold, not vice versa, and that is where the power in this week’s assignment comes from. The power comes from the inert qualities of lead, and from the refusal of the dwarf to behave as dwarves commonly do. In the traditional stories, the dwarf battles giants, or magically keeps ghosts from rising, or the dwarf is a cannibal, or appears in the form of vermin, or serves as a midwife, or the dwarf pastes animals’ eyes shut and pretends that hunters are at hand. There are a lot of dwarf stories, it’s true,11 but this is a completely different sort of dwarf story. Your assignment is to seek out stories with dwarves in them, and to find a way to repurpose these dwarves, by adding other elements, a faun, for example, or some poisonous flowers, or a magic net, or a seafaring marauder who kills and eats young girls. A couple of small children lost in the forest leaving a trail of bread crumbs could instead become a blind penitent whose fortunes are changed once and for all by a dwarf. With gold ingots.
The Brown Reader Page 9