A beautiful campus.

The last course I took before getting kicked out of Berkeley was a graduate course in silver Latin prose.  My teacher, Mr. Murgia, didn’t care about my status and let me in.  About eight of us, (the others all graduate students) sat around a table and took turns reading Seneca and Pliny and Juvenal at a pretty fast clip.  We had no forewarning of what we might be translating that day.  It was all extemporary, and I was one of the best at it.  The other students were older than me and I liked them.  They treated me with great respect, as an equal.  So did the teacher.  He knew, they all knew, I was special.  Nobody ever had taken three intensive courses in three languages in so short a time span and aced them all.

I should never have left Berkeley, or its courses and teachers.  I’m sure something could have been worked out for me to stay there as a graduate student, as I had so many teachers who would have supported that plan.  But the common practice was to go to one undergraduate school, and another place for graduate study, to meet more people, different teachers and have a richer experience.  Well, in my case, I certainly did.  But it backfired.

My last two years at Berkeley could be described as an orgy of serious study, certainly immoderate, and turned me into a noticeably odd character, a constant dreamer, insouciant of my future, lost in the books I was constantly reading.  I wrote a few pages during these years, not in notebooks but on stray leaves of paper, a few of which survive, rare snapshots of me back then, curious fragments, most of them from a few weeks in March and early April of 1976.  Too bad I didn’t continue the practice, but here it is, a snapshot of me in those days:

Sept. 1st.1975:  I have been immoderate in my study but hope to continue so, if my strength endures, for nine more years.

Sat. March 27th, 1976:  Last night I spent in a most intemperate manner.  I had not got far in reviewing for my Homer final when Charles (Chuck P.) comes over in the evening.  I have not seen him since Christmas.  He never changes and we had our usual friendly but heated argument.  He seems to be progressing in his studies (Russian).  Such pessimism as he has long possessed is now supported by argument and knowledge.  Without that it’s a more pitiable condition.  He stayed not long.  I then went to the Med. and resumed studying for some minutes when in comes Brad H.  (when anyone came to my place and I wasn’t home, they knew where to find me) with some heavy affairs to discuss with me.  It seems there’s one girl between two friends.  The girl has long been with one but lately switched to the other and caused some turmoil…Then Brad left, I doubt in any better mood than when he came.  (Both had traveled across the Bay to see me, Chuck from S.F.U. and Brad from Belmont, an hour drive).  Brad told me he’d been doing crazy, dissolute things lately.  But so have I.  I drank more coffee, for instance, to the point where my stomach churned, my heart raced and my teeth chattered, while I read Homer till 3 A.M., then rolled around in bed till 8 then up to my final which amazingly, I think I did well on…

This afternoon I trifled around my room and slept some, expecting Chuck to come back but being disappointed I went to the Med. tonight and read some Latin lyrics and as I sat alone entranced in my book a girl from my Homer class called out to me suddenly, sitting at the table next to me with her boyfriend.  She probably had sat there without noticing me at first and I had not seen her come in.  But after saying ‘hello’ she did not continue so I went back to my reading.  She did not stay long with her friend.  I think the rather pitiful sight of me sitting alone on a Saturday night in an almost empty coffee shop must have bothered her.  This thought bothered me as I sat there.  Yet I always sit here, she just doesn’t know it.  As she left, she asked what I was reading.  She’s a nice girl yet she doesn’t know Latin.  This is a grave defect for any college student.  Yet perhaps she wishes to learn.  (This girl was the prettiest student in our whole Classics department.  She was a petite blond, in many of my classes and some of my dreams.  She once even made a pass at me asking me to help her with her homework in the library.  When we arrived, she pulled her chair up so close to mine our arms kept rubbing together as we looked over some pages in a book, head-to-head.  But I was too shy and stupid and pimply to reciprocate, so nothing developed.  I wish it had).  I came home feeling lonely and finished reading Marlowe’s play ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’.  This play is for the most part a translation of the Aeneid, books 1-4.  The poetry is good but the staging and action not developed.  He did include what Virgil should have, that is a love scene of Dido and Aeneas in the cave, but perhaps this isn’t the matter for an epic.

So here I am, finals week, taking very hard courses, (Plato, Horace, Homer and Beowulf that quarter) and in my spare time reading all sorts of Latin poems and old English plays on a Saturday night.  And, I might add, meeting the girl I was secretly in love with, in a chance encounter, and making no efforts to engage her, and when she leaves me walking home at midnight feeling very lonely, so I read another book.

Here’s one more brief quote from those few pages:

Tuesday March 30th, 1976:  I went and drank coffee at the café Renaissance and read more Nepos.  As I was sitting there reading the life of Themistocles a wonderful spirit descended upon me and I resolved then and there to study more history, especially Greek, and as Plutarch says: ‘leave this sick world behind’.  I went to Moe’s bookstore and bought an old, decrepit Herodotus with notes.  The spine was broken and I haggled the price down with Moe from ten to three dollars.  I like Moe.

I still have that book.  Its covers are gone, and the spine completely broken, making it two books.  I’ve spent many an hour over the last forty years reading those brown, spotted pages with delight.  Now that’s continuity.

It was the acne that gave me such a low estimation of myself with women.  I gave myself a zero chance of success with any one of them.  In my dorm year I sat next to a very plain girl in the cafeteria for a few days.  She wore thick, dark-rimmed glasses, pimply like me, shy, but I thought we might strike up a relationship on similarities.  She often sat alone so I sat beside her and nonchalantly tried to strike up some innocent conversation.  But the talk was so awkward I gave up trying after three days.  She said she was only interested in her studies.  (But she knew I was from the eighth floor of misfits and might have suspected some horrible prank in motion).  So with equal relief felt on both sides I carried my food tray back to my table of dorm-mates, who snickered at the whole, pathetic scene, some of them waving at her as if to say ‘sayonara’ for me.  I decided then and there to have no girlfriend at all and make no attempts to have one, until the day I’d find one that would impress me, and my friends.

By the fall of 1976, still continuing courses and studies as if they’d go on forever, I was one day prompted (or rather ‘flapped’, like the dreamers of Laputa in Gulliver’s travels) by one of my professors, to apply to graduate schools and continue on to higher degrees.  I asked why I couldn’t just keep on taking courses where I was.  He told me to talk to a counsellor about it, so I went.  The counsellor knew nothing about me, (they had no regular reviews of students in those days) but as I stepped into his office and he glanced at my transcripts of courses, he gaped at them in shock.  He told me I’d overstayed my allotted time there.  Students were allowed 195 course units to complete their B.A.  That was fifteen units over the required 180.  My records showed I already had 214 units, way over the limit.  He told me I had to leave, immediately.  But after some pleading on my part, he decided to let me finish off the last two weeks of that quarter before Christmas since it was so close to the end, adding even more units to my tally, perhaps a world record.

This ends my description of those college years, the most serene and blissful of my entire life, passed in the single pursuit of high knowledge, with monk-like abstinence from all else.

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