Somehow—and I’m getting rather hard—I wanted to take off my hat as though I stood beside a coffin in which some close friend lay. Books, that’s all they were. Just books. They were orderly and uniform and quite overbearing like pompous generals who bellow and rant and never say anything.
This all, of course, stamps me as a rebel, but I care nothing for rubber stamps. There was one remaining link between cultural and regimented education which had survived American mass production and that link was yourself. And now the chain is broken and the campus might as well hum with looms and lathes for all the individual personality it has, with you gone.
Perhaps I should have been born an Englishman, in wanting something besides a Latin conjugation and a calculus formula from my school. Perhaps I expected more than I should have. Perhaps I had just grown up too soon. But I still wanted a university to be what it says in the name.
They told me, those other fellows (but you never did) that I was not doing my best, that I shirked and was lazy, that I had to get higher marks to match a machine-made intelligence test which made me out as brilliant merely because I had been over the world and back acquiring general knowledge since boyhood. They told me I would never amount to anything, that I was not a scholar. But you never did. You were quite willing to talk over all sorts of things and I appreciated it even though you have, most likely, forgotten.
Now, four years after leaving the place, I find that I was a scholar after all, that I am a student, that I have a keen and devouring interest for mathematics of all things, for history and economics and politics. I am studying because, for the first time in my life, I have been left alone. I have written several quality group (literary and artistic magazine) articles—which satisfy the mind but sadly not the stomach—on subjects for which credit hours are granted.
But I doubt in the extreme that I ever would have carried on had it not been for your very sane treatise on the world at large which you labeled “rhetoric” and which was nothing at all but culture, as alone and isolated upon a regimented horizon as a steamer’s plume of smoke against the horizon.
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