Nostalgia If It's Cold and Snowy and Miserable Out There, It Must Be Reading Period

IN CONCLUSION: this is the very last winter reading period of my life. Wherever I may be next January, it won't be here, and if this doesn't strike you as important, I'm afraid for your soul. Not-being-in-Cambridge takes on more and more significance as the year wears on; not-being becomes the relevant state of being. So what else is new?

No one, of course, is hiring Harvard graduates. So says my roommate, now lying cooing and gurgling on the floor. No one is hiring Harvard graduates because we're too obnoxious. That may well be. No one is hiring my roommate because she is lying cooing and gurgling on the floor. The candle is grape.

The candle is grape: a wax grape soda with straw, to be precise, but a candle nonetheless. It was a gift from my sister. My sister is only seventeen and therefore not a Harvard graduate, but nonetheless insane.

Remember reading period of freshman year? Living at Radcliffe and walking through the snow every single freezing day for Nat Sci 9? There lectures and two sections a week, and I kept going, and every single day I fell on the ice. I would tell myself not to cry until I got safely back to Barnard Hall. Remember reading period of freshman year? It was so incredibly cold, and I had four exams and four long papers, papers I actually wrote. And when I fell apart before the last one, and flew home to New York, and nerved myself to call the sectionman for an extension, he said, "Why not? Everyone else in the class has got one." My mother typed that paper for me.

Now I'm writing a thesis. On the uselessness of writing anything. On the futility of language. On the inherent dishonesty of words. My thesis will be forty pages of nearly typed and carefully selected words.

How can words be useless? They get us through the day. What else could so regularly entice us out of bed?

REMEMBER reading period of freshman year? I couldn't understand why all those girls in singles on the fourth floor of Barnard (we thought then of ourselves as girls: now we have learned to think Women) ran screaming madly up and down the halls. Now, of course, I understand.

Now, I understand, but I am no better able to cope. Better able, perhaps, to laugh it off, or to find a friend to scream with me, but little more, despite the shrink, the women's group, the Promising Future in Journalism. It's still winter reading period in Cambridge.

When I described my thesis topic to the History and Lit people, I said that there was nothing left but the dead plastic horse at the bottom of the swimming pool. The dead plastic horse comes from Nathanael West, but the History and Lit people didn't like the image. For one thing, it seemed frivolous. And dead and plastic are, after all redundant. Where will you be next Locust Day?

Remember the winter of freshman year? One girl in Barnard did exercises every night, just after milk-and-cookies. One wandered from room to room, talking, always talking. One washed and dusted and vacuumed, and kept her margins even. And we all stood screaming in the corridors. Now one of those girls is married, one in a mental hospital, one working in New York; I swear to God I don't know which is which.

But seriously, he said, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN YOU GROW UP? How can a senior, he said, possibly communicate that empty question, that secret fear, the experience of negation and the negation of experience, to one-who-is-not-a-senior? How can I senior dare to remember what it meant to be a freshman? What if, when all is said and done, when we have all lived life to the fullest and realized our potentials, there will still be nothing there? (And what if all this is relevant only to me: another twenty arrogant inches in the CRIMSON relevant only to me?)

The Meaning of Life is worth 2 1/4 inches in the Most Authoritative Desk Dictionary Ever Published. The goddamn Authoritative Dictionary just fell on the grape candle, knocking it over. An inch is equal to seven lines on the front page of the CRIMSON. The candle did not break.

REMEMBER, remember, winter reading period of freshman year? It took me 15 hours to type a 10-page paper. My room in Barnard was slightly larger than my bathroom in Adams House, and I twisted felt flowers around the exposed pipes. Tried to hide the chipping ceiling with an enormous yellow sunflower. Disguised the radiator with Marimekko cloth. And by reading period none of it mattered; all was covered with papers and clothing and dust. And the dust was impossibly threatening ....

Now Radcliffe is a long walk, and one I make rarely. The only one screaming in my room is me. (My roommate just gurgles.) Our room is on eye-level with the Lampoon's Ibis: overlooking Mt. Auburn St., spring riots, winter snow. And last year even tear gas seeping in, and Barnard Hall seems ever more remote. Yet sometimes I remember.

This is the very last winter reading period of my life. That's all I know. I want to say something more, but this is all I know; it's the very last reading period (winter) of my life. I may be even colder, but I won't be cold in Cambridge; and if someday I'm cold in Cambridge, it still won't be reading period. Not for me. I'm glad I'm not a freshman any more.

I wish I were.