Word: dorm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...then you have to dash from a section in Holyoke Center to a class in the Fogg. And how many people get into the Loeb crowd or on the Yearbook or the CRIMSON? Extracurricular activities--the few that there are--are out. And what else is there? Mixers? Ha. Dorm parties? You need a date, which means you already know someone. Nobody gets invited as a single. There are no open dorm parties at Harvard. What else is there? Nothing...
...Lehman Hall that was, but a real place where we can go and have something to eat, music to listen to, and people to meet informally, without any pressure. Where people will accept you as someone who didn't feel like studying that night or talking to the same dorm people, but as someone who wanted to meet some new people...
Girls themselves are under a splotlight when they got out or have visitors. In each dorm there is a cadre of people who hang around the bells desk, serving their own purposes but also observing all the comings and goings. Everyone knows who everyone else spends time with and talks about it in the interest of friendship. Some girls pick their dates for their friends rather than themselves. Girls who don't go out at all feel miserable and inferior. They are instantly typed...
What happens is that the conditions of the dorm limit people's ability to make their own choices. The individual is subordinated to the rules, to the pressure of friends, to the harrassment of the crowd. The worrying about work is a sign that the individual can't find out, much less fulfill, her potentialities. Instead, she adopts the common standard and resorts to comparisons to measure her own worth. Her initiative is cut off. She needs friends to an artificially-heightened degree, and the reliance on friends promotes conformity and excessive hunting for security. The groups of friends that...
Everyone is in the same predicament. It is hard to take responsibility for one's own existence without privacy and without time. It is hard to use even the freedom one does have, for it is hard to realize it is there. The noise of the dorm fills up the spaces and presses in on the people living there, sounds, words, commands--the voice of the public consciousness. The constricted space of plural living is a sign of sorrow. Free, open space is needed for the fortuitous and the unforeseen to occur, for the emotionally neutral and the amplitude...