Perhaps to you the atmosphere of Cambridge is neither dark nor sinister. Perhaps you were never there except in May. You never saw anything but the thin Spring sun half veiled in the mists and blossoms of the gardens along the Backs, smiling on the lavender bricks and stones of Trinity and St. John’s, or my own college, Clare.
I am even willing to admit that some people might live there for three years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them—the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise that fills those ancient buildings. But for me, with my blind appetites, it was impossible that I should not rush in and take a huge bite of this rotten fruit. The bitter taste is still with me after not a few years.
My freshman year went by very fast. It was a dizzy business that began in the dark, brief afternoons of the English autumn and ended after a short series of long summer evenings on the river. All those days and nights were without romance, horrible. They could not help being everything that I did not want them to be.
I was breaking my neck trying to get everything out of life that you think you can get out of it when you are eighteen. And I ran with a pack of hearties who wore multicolored scarves around their necks and who would have barked all night long in the echoing shadows of the Petty Cury if they had not been forced to go home to bed at a certain time.
At first it was confusing. It took me a month or two to find my level in this cloudy semi-liquid medium in whose dregs I was ultimately destined to settle. There were my friends from Oakham. At first we clung together for protection, and used to spend much time in one another’s rooms, although Andrew’s digs were far away in the wilds beyond Addenbrooke’s hospital. To get there I cycled through a mysterious world of new buildings dedicated to chemistry, and at the end of the journey drank tea and played St. Louis Blues on the piano. Dickens was much nearer. He was around the corner from my lodgings. You traveled through two or three courts of St. John’s College and crossed the river. He was in the so-called New Building. His room directly overlooked the river and he and I and Andrew would eat breakfast there and throw bits of toast to the ducks while he told us all about Pavlov and conditioned reflexes.
As the year went on I drifted apart from them, especially from Andrew who ended up as the leading man in the Footlights show that year. He was something of a singer. My crowd had no interest in singing and a certain amount of contempt, indeed, for the Footlights and all that it represented. I remember that I almost made friends with one or two serious and somewhat complicated young men who were reading modern languages with me and belonged to my own college, but their reticences bored me. And they, in their turn, were rather shocked by the two-handed heartiness with which I was grabbing at life.
In the room underneath mine, in my lodgings, was a round red-faced Yorkshireman who was a pacifist. He too was full of reticences. But on Armistice Day he got into some kind of a demonstration and all the rugger players and oarsmen threw eggs at him. I knew nothing about it until I saw the pictures in the evening paper.
I would not have been interested in making friends with him either—he was too tame and shy. But in any case the landlord took to coming into my room and calumniating the poor man while I listened patiently, knowing of no way to shut him up. Before the end of the year the landlord was much more disgusted with me than with any lodger he had ever had before or, probably, since.
I think it was after Armistice Day, when I had finally become acquainted with some two hundred different people, that I drifted into the crowd that had been gravitating around the nether pole of Cambridge life.
We were the ones who made all the noise when there was a “bump supper.” We lived in the Lion Inn. We fought our way in and out of the “Red Cow.”
I've been teaching rooms full of college Mertons for over 25 years. What Merton describes here isn't unique. In fact, I would say it's pretty typical for 18- and 19- and 20-somethings. They don't know who they are, what they are, sometimes where they are. They are told on a daily basis that they're adults and need to behave as such. Yet, their prefrontal cortexes are still in that weird state of adolescent playdough, being shaped and reshaped, over and over, by their experiences. In the morning they wake up as bowls and then--WHAMMO!--they're flattened into plates by afternoon.
Of course, that happens to adults, as well. You wake up, get dressed, go to the office where you've worked for the last 20 years, and--WHAMMO!--your entire department is being outsourced. Or, you wake up happily married, go to work, and when you get back home--WHAMMO!--your spouse is gone. There are no guarantees for stability or happiness in life. Benjamin Franklin's little nugget of wisdom still applies: ". . . in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." One of my many therapists with whom I've worked once told me, "Change is inevitable." She was right.
I'm sure everyone reading this post will agree that 2020 has been a WHAMMO! year. So much that I took for granted has vanished. Going to a movie theater. Walking into a classroom. Eating out at a restaurant. The simplest acts of living in 2019 have been transformed into occasions of possible deadly exposure in 2020. Two words that will probably be used, over and over, in history books about this time are "isolation" and "distance." People have been forced to become islands by the pandemic.
I have never been a fan of WHAMMO! In fact, I would say that I've spent a good portion of my life running from WHAMMO! I'm a creature of habit. I've said so many times in this blog. As a writer, this character trait helps me. Having a writing routine makes it easier for me to slip deeper and quicker into the place where poetry lives.
Some people might accuse me of wanting a boring life. That's not true. I want a life where the people I cherish most are happy and healthy and safe. I want a life where love and trust aren't distant stars, but twin suns in my orbit. I want my daughter to realize that she astounds me constantly with her boundless compassion. I want my son to understand that this world is a better place because he's in it. I want my wife to know that I've given her my best self, every day, since we've been together. No WHAMMO! can take any of those things away.
So, yes, Mr. Franklin, death and taxes are certainties. But I also know I can count on my daughter to hug me every night before she goes to bed. That my son can't fall asleep until I sit on the edge of his mattress and pray with him. And that, in the dark tonight, before I close my eyes, I will look at my wife's sleeping face and remember the first time I kissed her.
For all those certain miracles, Saint Marty gives thanks.
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