For Harvard Only

AN OLD friend and classmate, an intuitive scholar speaking Mandarin and honored still for a mind like a flawless piece of jade, once explained to me in simple English that “A Buddha is what you do to it.” Since his death in 1960, these words have taken on a wider meaning every time I say them over. For example, who can fail to regret that a student at Harvard is not equally and always a student of Harvard, since Harvard, like the Buddha, is what you do to it? The Cambridge port of entry, if you ask me‚ is too wide. The freshman arrives, dragging his civilization with him — an instinctive act, no doubt, but nevertheless encumbering. Not so with a certain Oriental, as I have noticed him in the Square, his saffron robe accented by a pair of argyle socks. He walks like a rainbow, but he is more than that; he is perceptively a student of Harvard. He brought no baggage with him, and it is likely that he left no noticeable possessions at the Potala of his particular Lhasa, and he needs none here. He has known through centuries of prayer-wheel ritual that any Lhasa is what you do to it. His attitude is inherited. Ours, alas, is not. He has never heard of instant culture.

Yet some of us not in saffron robes have vaguely, perhaps quite perceptively, understood. The older we grow, the better we understand in retrospect. Thoreau lived to do more to Harvard — of which he feigned to disapprove — than Harvard did to him. His extension courses have included such differing pupils as E. B. White of Manhattan, H. M. Tomlinson of London River, and Mahatma Gandhi of the world, none of them familiar with the Yard except by inference. To Thoreau the Yard was still a clearing in the wilderness, and with that he could deal, as any Walden reader is aware. He would be pleased if we told him that in recent years a pair of raccoons had invaded the Yard (as they did) and that a shrike was once discovered in President Conant’s hedge. There was, moreover, plenty of the Oriental in Henry’s hardwood philosophy: “Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

These words are almost meaningless today. Yet who would say that Harvard does not remain a clearing in the wilderness — a wilderness far wilder than in Mather’s time or in Henry’s “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century,” to which he alluded so specifically in 1854? Could I control the keeper of unwritten maxims, I would have it out in writing: enter Harvard as Lois Crisler entered northern Alaska under the Brooks Range “with your deep will, or [be indoors] in the nest of civilization even in wilderness.” Does anyone doubt on which side of the above comma there is an exit only?

Suspended somewhere between carbon 14 and strontium 90, we have now greater cause and less time to ponder the deep will. As I walk these familiar paths, diagonals most of them to sanctuaries beyond my layman’s reach of understanding, the mind goes back to the fervent days of the Tercentenary, when all was clear anatomy, and the visual image of inexplicable Harvard loomed out of the fog as an etching of joy or deviltry emerges for one unstable instant while we turn the pages of Finnegans Wake. To be a student of Harvard requires almost an abnegation of the temporal, a long walk late at night with accredited ghosts of the place, the stab of loneliness right through a multitude of doors. Even so, the revelation may not come; there is just that whisk of the occult about it.

I wait for the flash. I watch for intimate signs of that older wilderness now vanished, as the quote from Kipling may suggest. “It is not down in any map, true places never are,” said Melville. Yet once in a while it is. I think I became a lifelong student of Harvard that bright morning in my junior year when I stepped out of Jefferson and a class in advanced physics, looked up into the cloudless blue, and saw — as not many have the luck to look and see by day — the sudden sulfurous flameout of a meteor,

Not all the visiting professors in the world could relate my clearing in the wilderness to the clearing in my mind as did that moment, awesome and unexpected.

Life is the garment we continually alter but which never seems to fit, and we must make our adjustments as we go. I saw the white gulls gathered just this morning on a jigsaw floe downstream from the Anderson bridge, each one of them a weathercock as truly into the wind as the gilded vane on Memorial Church: a living sermon on whatever winds of doctrine youth (a symbol) might be testing in Sever or in Boylston as he boxed his classroom compass. And then I saw them rise in a cloud and beat their way by dozens into the updraft of a smokestack thermal, where they spread their wings and circled on long spirals of unending poise, as if some truth arrived at were sustained. Was there a memo of it? Perhaps the architects had this in mind when they built those enormous baskets — “In” and “Out” — on Leverett’s twin towers, high above the neighbors’ Georgian chimneys.

Some time ago a spate of unseasonable weather — all Cambridge weather is unseasonable — brought the welcome breath of spring into the Yard. The itinerant barred owl (Strix varia, presumably female) in the old pine tree east of University had weathered a bad gale and the cold spell, but now looked good for another semisemester in an intellectual climate. For breakfast and dinner she had one native pigeon, chosen at random, but attested by the scatter of hodden feathers on the ground below. She dined early and late, when the Yard was clear of traffic: unaware, we may suppose, that pigeons are what wrong examination answers are turned into. She became an attraction. A number of students found her composure disquieting; and one undergraduate went out and shied a book at her — a French grammar — to which she paid small attention. A group of Lampooners in evening dress, dangerously equipped with bows and arrows, are said to have set upon this owl, though happily to no purpose. Once or twice I stood under the tree and clapped my hands in the manner of an angry Strix caught snapping her beak, and the late incumbent would raise a wise old head and look down balefully. It is somewhat uncomfortable looking at an angry (presumable) female. And this one, well we knew, might be Alma Mater herself.

Thus, and all homage to him, John Hall Wheelock, 1908. So the clear injunction — for the mind, at any rate, if not for the stars and squirrels and birds and insects — is to keep the flyways and the runways open.

And the wallets and checkbooks, of course — of course.