Word: enterances
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Enter to grow in wisdom / Depart to better serve thy country and thy kind...
Interestingly, the simplest interpretation seems based on inconsistent logic, and thus not so simple at all. On this reading, the inscription on the Mass Ave. side of the gate, "Enter to grow in wisdom," is read as a conditional statement. That is: "If you enter Harvard Yard, then you will grow in wisdom." It is as if Harvard is making us a promise: Come into my gate and you will learn...
...inscription as an imperative--as if Harvard is now imploring us to put the wisdom learned inside the Yard to practical effect. Put the two readings together, and you have a trap: Harvard beckons us in with the promise of learning and personal intellectual growth. We merely need to enter. But once inside, we find that there is a price to the privilege of intellectual growth: the responsibility to improve ourselves and society. We entered, or perhaps scaled, the Iv(or)y Tower for ourselves, or so we thought, but we are to leave for the purpose of helping others...
...trap--an offer on one side, an obligation on the other--is not necessarily a reflection of the kind of directional transformation that should go on at college and at Harvard in particular. But what would happen if we instead read the inscriptions more consistently--if we read the entering inscription as an imperative, thinking of "Enter" as a command, and read the departing inscription as an offer and not an imperative...
...York City as an actress-model. "I was clueless when I arrived," she recalls. "The cultural shock--even the toothpaste tasted different! My desire to go to the States was so vague, yet so strong. It's like going to heaven: you don't plan what happens after you enter." Chen quickly learned what Westerners expected of an Asian woman. On one of her first auditions, she says, "they told me I didn't look Chinese enough, and I was the only Chinese there. I was trying so hard to look like a white woman...