Word: dorm
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...things and people converge around her. Possessions flow from person to person getting broken and lost as they move, a letter comes from abroad and has its stamp ripped off before the addressee sees it, daily events like meals and the arrival of Gordon linen march blindly on, compulsory dorm meetings are held, toilets flushed, people talk. The individual girl has no control over events or time, can start or stop nothing, feels no responsiveness from her world. The stage has no exists...
Studying, the activity that this world wants her to want to do, might be a way of climbing out into some sort of fresh air and freedom. But the interruptions and the noise that make dorm life what it is make studying impossible. The constant noise creates a constant non-transcendant now and here. The roar of meals, the music other people use as futile anodynes for the same conditions, the telephones, the feet, the piano in the lower regions, the voices and the plumbing make the space she is sitting in come alive as a huge, swaying, indifferent body...
Instead of screaming there is eating. The typical freshman gains fifteen pounds in her first year of dorm life. Girls coming home after dates roam the kitchens looking for snacks. People eat ravenously at dinner as they discuss how fat they are getting and how bad the food is. By over-eating people repeat the vicious circle operating in all parts of dorm life: poor conditions cause strains which are temporarily relieved by aggravating the conditions...
Competitiveness and the making of comparisons are diseases of the imagination that come from being surrounded by people you see in bits and hear about in pieces. You can't look too long at anyone in a dorm; yuo have to keep circulating. You have to avoid real participation in the other people's lives; the way you do it is by talking. One would think that among all the talking going on in a Radcliffe dorm there must by the laws of probability be some of the stuff called intellectual conversation, though no one's really sure what that...
Girls themselves are under a spotlight when they go 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...