I came down on to the dock with a great feeling of confidence and possessiveness. “New York, you are mine! I love you!” It is the glad embrace she gives her lovers, the big, wild city: but I guess ultimately it is for their ruin. It certainly did not prove to be any good for me.
With my mind in the ferment in which it was, I thought for a moment of registering for courses at the New School for Social Research, in the shiny, black building on Twelfth Street, but I was easily persuaded that I had better finish out a regular university course and get a degree. And therefore I entered upon all the complicated preambles to admission to Columbia.
I came out of the subway at 116th Street. All around the campus were piles of dirty snow, and I smelled the wet, faintly exhilarating air of Morningside Heights in the winter time. The big, ugly buildings faced the world with a kind of unpretentious purposefulness, and people hurried in and out the glass doors with none of the fancy garments of the Cambridge undergraduate—no multicolored ties and blazers and scarfs, no tweeds and riding breeches, no affectations of any kind, but only the plain, drab overcoats of city masses. You got the impression that all these people were at once more earnest and more humble, poorer, smarter perhaps, certainly more diligent than those I had known at Cambridge.
Columbia was, for the most part, stripped of fancy academic ritual. The caps and gowns were reserved for occasions which, as a matter of fact, nobody really had to attend. I only got mixed up in one of them purely by accident, several months after I had acquired my degree, rolled up in a cardboard container, through one of the windows of the post-office-like registration bureau in University Hall.
Compared with Cambridge, this big sooty factory was full of light and fresh air. There was a kind of genuine intellectual vitality in the air—at least relatively speaking. Perhaps the reason was that most of the students had to work hard to pay for every classroom hour. Therefore they appreciated what they got, even when there was not much in it to appreciate. Then there was the big, bright, shiny, new library, with a complicated system of tickets and lights, at the main loan desk: and there I soon came out with a great armful of things, books which excited me more than I now can understand. I think it was not the books themselves but my own sense of energy and resolve that made me think everything was more interesting than it was.
What, for instance, did I find to enthrall me in a book about esthetics by a man called Yrjö Hirn? I cannot remember. And even in spite of my almost congenital dislike for Platonism, I was happy with the Enneads of Plotinus, in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation. The truth is that there is a considerable difference between Plato and Plotinus, but I am not enough of a philosopher to know what it is. Thank God I shall never again have to try and find out, either. But anyway, I dragged this huge volume into the subway and out on the Long Island railroad to the house in Douglaston, where I had a room with a big glass-enclosed bookcase full of Communist pamphlets and books on psychoanalysis, in which the little Vulgate I had once bought in Rome lay neglected and out of place ...
For some reason I became intensely interested in Daniel Defoe, and read his whole life and dipped into most of the strange journalistic jobs of writing which he did besides Robinson Crusoe. I made a hero for myself out of Jonathan Swift, because of his writing. Towards May of that year I remember going in to the Columbia Bookstore and selling them a copy of T. S. Eliot’s essays and a lot of other things which I was getting rid of in a conscious reaction against artiness—as if all that were too bourgeois for my serious and practical new-self.
Then, because of the wide general curriculum of an American university, which, instead of trying to teach you any one thing completely, strives to give its students a superficial knowledge of everything, I found myself mildly interested in things like geology and economics, and interiorly cursing a big, vague course in current events called “Contemporary Civilization,” which was imposed on all the sophomores whether they liked it or not.
Merton embarks on a new kind of education. An American kind, with all of its emphasis on creating a "well-rounded" person, with knowledge (sometimes in-depth, mostly cursory) of many subjects. When I was an undergraduate, that was called liberal studies, or a liberal arts degree. Now, in a United States adverse to anything with the word '"liberal" in it, it's called general education, or gen ed. Same thing, except proponents of gen ed curriculums tend to disparage courses in the humanities in favor of the "hard" sciences.
I am a liberal arts guy and proud of it. But I took my share of the hard sciences. I mean, I graduated with math and computer science minors. My right brain talks with my left brain all the time. A good portion of my life, I've worked in the healthcare industry. (Make no mistake, it IS an industry.) So, I've devoted over 25-plus years of my life to medicine. That's a long time. But, while I was doing this, I also taught writing and poetry and film and literature at a university. The former provided me health insurance and stability, the latter fed my soul.
I like being a well-rounded individual. Most truly successful people I know have knowledge in many different and varied subjects and professions. I am drawn to people like that, because I learn a lot from them. For example, one of my best friends in the world is a poet, but she also worked in the computer/IT field at a time when women weren't really accepted there. (Thank you, Ruth Bader Ginsburg for opening doors and putting men in their places.) My friend is brilliant and compassionate. One of the smartest people I know who has helped me through many difficult times in my life.
Another one of my best friends is an attorney who has an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. She has a mind for both law and free verse. (Again, thank you Ruth Bader Ginsburg for opening the doors for women in the legal profession.) My friend can hold discourse on marital law and confessional poetry. Plus, she's full of deep empathy and love.
My point here is that there is nothing wrong with liberal studies. I think that higher education has become politicized, with courses in humanities that teach students to question and interrogate the status quo becoming suspect. Instead, many colleges and universities are pushing toward single-mindedness, logical black-and-whiteness. A binary system of thinking. Either something is right or something is wrong. 2 + 2 = 4. The area of a square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares of the other two sides.
I prefer to live in a not quite so clearly defined universe, a place where there is room for God and Bigfoot and poetry. A place where mystery is just as important (if not more so) than science. To accept an existence of only clear and definitive answers would shut me off from most of the things I hold important, including love. Love is still one of the greatest mysteries out there. And I don't want to live a life bereft of love, passion, and compassion.
We are two days away from the celebration of Saint Marty's Day. I know all of you already have your Saint Marty's Day trees decorated, and you've all mailed your Saint Marty's Day cards. I myself just purchased some Saint Marty's Day tapioca (the traditional dessert of Saint Marty's Day). Saint Marty's Day, however, is also a time to embrace love and mystery and poetry. Being liberal in the best sense of the word--charitable, generous, empathetic, accepting, forgiving, and open.
So, in the midst of your final hours of Saint Marty's Day preparations, read a poem. Donate to a worthy charity, one that puts food into the mouths of people who are hungry, clothes on the backs of people who are naked. Step outside tonight and gaze into the night sky and remember that we are all made of stars.
Saint Marty wishes you all a miraculous day.
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