Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Bring the second in a series of interview questions for old collegiate co-conspirator and amateur historian Shaw.

What were the students like? Not one was like the next; each was a busted stereotype in and of himself. Find commonnality between the ruralmaine carpenter down the hall, his classically trained homosexual roommate, my quiet ex-Deadhead athelete of a roommate and the RA huddled next door studying the TV Dinner culture of the american fifties? Typifying them is night impossible, Shaw; even on the smallest scale, your second question is a null set.

True, the small group I drifted towards were primarily older students, back at school again after a few semesters and a few more soulsearching. If we were all anything, it was that we were more defined than eighteen year olds, and perhaps that was why, in the end, I find them a pack of remembered individuals, rather than a group to explain.

As underclassmen, however, we were framed together by our similar status. We lived as classmates and co-explorers more than anything else -- strange bedfellows, all, sharing co-ed bathrooms and party basements thick with smoke and life. The upperclassmen were half invisible, barely present. Even those who did not live off campus were wraithlike in the social world, focused on plan and higher order questions.

By the time we became those upperclassmen, of course, what had once felt defined was now just overfocused. The reason upper classmen were invisible was that they spent much of their time in solo pursuit of The Plan, a solitary and anticommunity activity of the mind.

When we met in those last years it was more to talk crosspurposes at each other, using each other as objects and soundboards for our own necessarily one-track minds, trains passing in the night, and I appreciated how bright, how different we were then, because is validated our own unique pursuits while simultaneously offering of and in each other the one totally new perspective, however off track, that we would have in a month of single-question thought. If we started as individuals in type, we ended up individuals in mind.

Comments:

Oddly enough, I can't get past the fact that you had a "classically trained homosexual" on your hall? Who did he study with? Elton John? Rock Hudson? Cole Porter?

I'm sorry, it just read funny. I am really enjoying reading about your time at Marlboro.

My husband is a student at the GC now and I think about how different it is now from when we were there. In fact, i know several people, husband included, who are just taking classes and aren't in a program

# posted by

Anonymous : 8:37 PM, December 02, 2006