Unit Six

TEXT I

Preparing for College

I. Paraphrase the parts underlined in the following:

[1]The year 1884 - 1985 was a period of great adventure for me. When I came up to Berke1ey for the entrance examinations at the University of California I failed in Greek, Latin, and enough other subjects to be put off for a year. My father was alarmed. I was eighteen years old, and he thought, I think, that my failure was his fault; he had chosen the wrong school for me. He had, but the right school for me and my kind did not exist. There were schools that put boys into the colleges, east and west, and at a younger age than mine. I came to know those boys well. They are the boys (and they become the men) that the schools, colleges, and the world are made for. Often I have envied them; more often I have been glad that I was not of them.

[2]The elect were, ¹for the most part, boys who had been brought up to do their duty. They memorized whatever their teachers told them to learn. Whether they wanted to know it , whether they understood it or no, they could remember and recite it. ²Their own driving motives were, so far as I could make out, not curiosity; they rarely talked about our studies, and if I spoke of the implications of something we had read or heard, they looked ³dazed or indifferent. Their own motives were ⁴foreign to me: to beat the other fellows, stand high, represent the honor of the school.

[3]My parents did not bring me up. They sent me to school, they gave me teachers of music, drawing; they offered me every opportunity in their reach. But also they gave me liberty and the tools of quite another life: horses, guns, dogs, and the range of an open country. As I have shown, the people, the businesses, and the dreams of this life interested me, and I learned well whatever interested me. School subjects which happened to bear on my outside interests I studied in school and out; I read more than I was required, and I read for keeps, too. I know these subjects ⁵to this day , just as I remember and love still the men and women, the boys and girls, who let me be friends with them then and so revealed to me some of the depths and the limitations of human nature. On the other hand I can remember few of my teachers and little of the subjects which seemed to me irrelevant to my life.

[4]These other subjects are interesting, and they might have been made interesting to me. No one tried to interest me in them; they were put before me as things that I had to have to get into college. The teachers of them did not ⁶appeal to my curious, active mind. The result was that I did not really work at them and so got only what stuck by dent of repetition: the ⁷barest rudiments of a school education. When I knocked at the college gates, I was prepared for a college education in some branches; my mind was hungry enough for the answers to some profound questions to have made me work and develop myself, especially on lines which I know now had no ready answers, only more and ever more questions: science, ⁸metaphysics , etc. I was not in the least curious about Greek, Latin, mathematics, and the other “knowledge” required by the standardization of that day.

[5]My father discovered and put me into the best private school in San Francisco as a special student to ⁹be crammed for Berkeley---and he retained one of the teachers there, Mr. Evelyn Nixon, to tutor me on the side. Characteristical1y, too, my father gave me liberty: a room to sleep and work in, with no one to watch over and care for me. I could go and come as I pleased. And I came and went. I went exploring and dreaming alone around that city as I had the country around Sacramento, and the place I liked best was the ocean shore; there I ¹⁰lived over the lives of the Greek heroes and the Roman generals and all the poets of all the ages, sometimes with ecstasy, but never, as in my boyhood, with myself as the hero. A change had come over me.

[6]Evelyn Nixon formed it. He was the first teacher I ever had who interested me in what I had to learn — not in myself, but in the world outside, the world of conscious culture. He was a fanatic of poetry, especially of the classic poets. When he read or recited Greek verse the Greeks came to life; romance and language sang songs to me, and I was inspired to be, like him, not a hero nor even a poet but a Greek scholar, and thus an instrument on which beautiful words might play. Life filled with meaning, and purpose, and joy. It was too great and too various for me to ¹¹personify with my boyish limitations and heroism. I wrote verses, but only to learn the technique and so feel poetry more perfectly. I wanted to read, not to write; I wanted to know, not to do and be, great things--- Nixon expressed it.

[7]“I'm nobody,” he used to say. “I'm nothing but one of the unknown beings Homer and Dante, Shakespeare, Caesar, and the popes and the generals and statesmen have sung and fought and worked for. I'm the appreciator of all good words and deeds.”

[8]A new, a noble role, and Evelyn Nixon was a fine example of it: the receiver, not the giver, of beautiful inventions. He was an Englishman; he took a double first at Oxford, I heard, and came for his health to San Francisco. There was a group of such men, most of them with one story. They were athletes, as well as scholars at Oxford and Cambridge: they developed muscles and a lung capacity which they did not need and could not keep up in the sedentary occupations their scholarship put them into. Lung troubles exiled them.

[9]“Keep out of college athletics,” they advised. “ ¹²Don't work up any more brawn there than you can use every day afterward.”

[10]Nixon taught me Greek, Latin, and English at school, and at his house he opened up the beauty and the meaning of the other subjects I had to ¹³cram up for entrance. I worked for him; I worked more, much more, for myself. He saw this, he saw my craving for the answers to questions, and he laughed.

[11]“I will answer no questions of yours,” he shouted. “Men know no answers to the natural questions of a boy, of a child. We can only ¹⁴underline your questions, make you mad yourself to answer them, and ¹⁵add ours to whip, to lash you on to find out yours---one or two; and tell us! That is what youth is for: to answer the questions maturity can't answer.” And when I looked disappointed and ¹⁶balked , he would roar at me like a demon.

[12]“ ¹⁷Go to , boy. The world is yours. Nothing is done, nothing is known. The greatest poem isn't written, the best railroad isn't built yet, the perfect state hasn't been thought of. Everything remains to be done---right, everything.”

[13]This said, he said it again and again, and finally, to drive me, he set our private hour from seven till eight o'clock Saturday evenings, so that I could stay on into the night with his group of friends ¹⁸a maddening lot of cultivated, conflicting minds. There were from four to ten of them, all Englishmen, all Oxford and Cambridge men, all exiles and all interested in any and all subjects, which they discussed with knowledge, with the precise information of scholarship, but with no common opinions on anything apparently. There were Tories among them and liberals and one red: William Owen, a grandson, I think, certainly a descendant of Robert Owen, the first of the early English socialists. There was at least one Roman Catholic, who showed me so that I never forgot it the Christianity of that church; his favorite thesis was that the Protestant churches were Old Testament, ¹⁹righteous sects and knew nothing really of Christ's teachings of love and forgiveness. And there were Protestants there, all ²⁰schooled in church history, and when a debate came to a clinch, they could quote their authorities ²¹with a sureness which withstood reference to the books. I remember one hot dispute of the Catholic's reference to some certain papal bull. Challenged, he quoted it verbatim in the original Latin. What they knew was amazing to me, and how they knew it, but what they did not know struck me harder still. They could not among them agree on anything but a fact. With all their knowledge they knew no essential truth.

[14]It was conversation I was hearing, the free, passionate, ²²witty exchanges of ²³studied minds as polished as fine tools. They were always courteous; no two ever spoke together; there were no ²⁴asides ; they all talked to the question before the house, and while they were on the job of exposition anyone, regardless of his side, would contribute his quota of facts, or his ²⁵remembrance of some philosopher's opinion or some poet's perfect phrase for the ²⁶elucidation or the beautification of the theme. When the differences rose the urbanity persisted. They drank their Californian wine with a ²⁷relish , they smoke the room thick, and they pressed their views with vigor and sincerity and eloquence; but their good temper never failed them. It was conversation. I had never heard conversation heard before; I have heard conversation sometimes since, but rarely, and never like my remembrance of those wonderful Saturday nights in San Francisco — which were my preparation for college.

[15]For those conversations, so brilliant, so scholarly, and so consciously unknowing, seemed to me, silent in the background, to reveal the truth that even college graduates did not know anything, really. Evidences they had, all the ²⁸testimony of all the wise men in the historical world on everything, but no decisions. None. I must myself go to college to find out more, and I wanted to. It seemed as if I had to go soon. My head, busy with questions before, was filled with holes that were ²⁹aching voids as hungry, as painful , as an empty stomach. And my questions were explicit; it was as if I were not only hungry; I was hungry for certain foods. My curiosity was no longer vague.