Bloor street, always busy, even in the seventies.
As a bright graduate student, just beginning on a new degree, in a new place, the assignment of such a room to me, or any student, was a recipe for failure. I’m sure no administrator ever tried sleeping there or guessed how totally unfit it was for human habitation, with the noise and heat. With simple air conditioning and double-pane windows they could have repaired the problem and the grades and success of many of their graduate students would have gone up astronomically. It baffles me that those who rise to positions of power and run things turn out to be the stupidest mortals, blind to obvious mistakes. Then again, it doesn’t baffle me. The traits that most often advance a person to the top are charisma, looks and a desire to rise, which have little to do with intelligence. Those who decided to room graduate students in that building, built on that noisy intersection made a very foolish choice. It takes sleep to think and sleep was impossible there.
Universities are supposed to be quiet and shady places with lawns and trees, brooks and benches to sit on and read, fostering meditation. Berkeley is like that. Even U.C.L.A. has many a quiet spot on its campus. From what I’ve read of Oxford I imagine the same abundance of greenery, brooks, trees and benches. But not at U.C. Toronto. It was too downtown. I should have picked Cornell. I’ve visited there. It’s rural, spacious and lovely.
I’ve tried to keep this journal mostly a record of my private life, the course of my interests, my education, my friendships and loves as they grew or came and went. These are internal things I can describe with a calm partiality, like a scenic, rolling movie, pleasant for others to view because it involves only me, and asks nothing of others beyond whatever emotions they chose to feel or withhold, (what one would call in the eighteenth century ‘a Persian tale’).
But it does take place in the present world, which I have to include and describe at times as it affected me. Whenever I mention my settings a social criticism necessarily follows with it which involves us all, because it’s a communal life we all share. I often criticize society harshly, sometimes an institution, or (when I get carried away) ‘in toto’ for those perceived shortcomings that affected me and steered the course of my life in a different direction. In such commentary I know I raise the ire of others, as I demean their same world. If they strongly disagree with my assessments it becomes to them a personal insult. But so be it. This is the life of educated rebel, a deep student of history. Modern society, (many aspects of it) comes in for a spanking, as I see its many flaws and affronts to human dignity, compared to other times, (not without faults, but different ones) and utopias, and I can list the many references, produce bibliographies supporting my claims. So I don’t come unarmed to my assertions. But if any reader really thinks the modern world doesn’t have serious flaws, just turn on the news.
The University of Toronto to me was a bad experience. The fact that I left it after six months, (fled over three thousand miles away) pretty much highlights this strong opinion. I won’t omit the good things or times I found there, or the fact that my own shortcomings might have made it so, but I made no friends there, found few courses that pleased me, had mostly disastrous lodgings and that sums it up.
That summer I took a course in beginning German and another in Italian, which I quit after two weeks, not liking the teacher. I spent most of my days in the tall, ugly library a block away. The reading room on my floor overlooked the city. So I sat and read or napped or gazed out the huge windows, wondering why I was there, never disturbed by another soul.
The book collection next to it was old and venerable, and fairly extensive for the Classics, much to my taste. Many of the acquisitions were from the nineteenth century, in beautiful covers and bindings, when books were at their peak of perfection in layout and design, in columned notes, dates in margins, every aid to understanding an author carefully considered and typography at its best, a student’s dream. But each book was stamped in the back with the last date it had been checked out. And I found, to my dismay, that the books I revered the most, the best Latin editions of Tacitus or Seneca for example, had not been checked out in over eighty or a hundred years. This put me in mind of freeing a few of the smaller volumes from this dungeon of neglect. All one had to do was tear out a metal strip rudely inserted in the binding. I did this twice. Both books had not been checked out in over a hundred years. That was my criterion. In my vest pocket, next to my beating heart they were carried across the continent, lovingly handled and read and always treasured. I’m sure those authors, looking down from their hallowed spots in heaven, would have approved the theft or blotted the sin with a tear, as the angels in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy erased an objectionable oath from that white judgement book.
Summer passed swiftly. I did well in my German course, but after reading a dozen pages of Nietzsche in the original on my own that Fall I discontinued the practice and my little stock of knowledge in it evanesced, just like my short-lived Hebrew.
I decided before my Fall courses began that I had to quit my free spot in the Graduate residence hall. I went to the bursary and discovered I could change that privilege to a monthly stipend, enough to afford me a private room in a house and doom some other cursed or extremely unlucky new student to my old room. I found a room on a quiet street on the other side of Bloor, just six blocks away, but in a blissfully quiet neighborhood, and a world away.
It was a large, three-story house owned by a Hungarian couple, late middle-aged and recently arrived in Canada judging from there heavy accents. The third floor had a private stairway and consisted of three bedrooms, a bathroom at one end and a kitchenette at the other with a hallway combining all. This kitchen was too small for a table, just a fridge, sink and stove. At its far end was a small access door leading to a cubby hole, a storage space, maybe eight feet long and four feet deep, with the ceiling sloping sharply down at one end with the roof. It was empty. I describe this because it was the cause of my departure from a university career, or at least a major accessory to that departure, which would have happened sooner or later, as it was no life for me. But without it I might have wasted years before seeing the obvious. So I should call that little cubby-hole my Rubicon.
I rented the middle room. The room towards the kitchen was occupied by a pretty blond, going to school like me, talkative and friendly when we met in the hall. I forget her name and major as I wasn’t there long enough to strike up an acquaintance. On the other side, toward the bathroom was another girl, dark haired, older than us and a real recluse. She would peek out her door to see if either of us was in the kitchen or bathroom and close it quickly if we were, to avoid all contact. She never said a word, sneaking swiftly down the stairs the few times we even caught a glimpse of her. Her appearance reminded me of the girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone in the first ‘Rocky’ movie, which had just come out that summer and which I saw on a date with my cousin, my single and solitary date in Toronto.
