Looking Backwards

Vag yawned and laened back in the somewhat precarious copy-desk seat. The typewriter paper looked neat but naked with its little "ed 1" in the upper right hand corner. What could one say about Commencement? Where could one find thoughts weighty enough for that solemn occasion? Vag felt as empty of weighty thoughts as Joe Miller's Joke Book. He reached for the nearby copy of PM, seeking inspiration and guidance, only to find himself asked the embarrassing but inevitable question. Well, he wasn't going to do anything about it, and if Ralph Ingersoll didn't like it he could go write another editorial.

This was the time one was supposed to think back over the last four years, to sum them up, to sift the wheat from the chaff, to see everything in its proper proportion. Vag had a jumbled image of the Larz Anderson Bridge on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, of the workmen putting wooden treads on the Widener steps and driving stakes into the ground to guide the snow-plows, of Memorial Hall, with thin trickles of sunlight straining through the colored glasses, and rows of heads bent over tables, and of that first light green tinge the trees in the Yard take on about the time of the first Yard Concert.

Vag remembered the empty paint-mattress-mothballs smell of his Freshman room on the first day, the peculiarly strong wet-earth odor of the Yard after a heavy rain, the mustiness of Sever, and the faint atmosphere of crumbling newsprint that he'd stumbled on when he'd made his only pilgrimage to floor D in the Widener stacks.

He remembered the somewhat terrifying sound of the Memorial Chapel bell just outside his window on the first morning, and then the comfortingly regular quarter-hours ringing out from Saint Paul's, the clatter of plates mingling with the rumble of voices in the Union, and the regular splash-swish-creak of his oars in sculling.

He even began to remember the taste of Union food, but avoided that memory with a sharp recollection of his first really stiff drink.

Vag was roused out of his contemplative doze by the bell for Commencement chapel. He gave up. You couldn't possibly bring any order out of this chaos of impression, despite Ralph Ingersoll, and he wasn't sure he wanted to.