Word: gately
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...couple of days ago, two men appeared at the Lamont gate, hawking little green bibles. "Would you like a bible?" they asked me. "It's free." My sister once told me that such distributors have to stand on the street until they're rid of their merchandise, so I took a free bible. "See," one man said to the other. "People want them." And, in fact, this bible could prove useful. An index on pages five and six instructs searchers "WHERE TO FIND HELP, When," among other mishaps, "Friends Fail," "Lonely" or "Trouble, In." But the men were gone...
...MBTA's fiery chariot cruised down Mass. Ave., leaving clouds of dusty diesel exhaust in it's nearly Olympian wake, a panic seized me. There was no end to Harvard. Johnston Gate turned into the Littauer Building, which blurred phantasmigorically and diabolically into the law school. I couldn't get out! The Center for Ukrainian Studies weighed like a 1,000-pound brick on my mind as the bus idled waiting for a traffic light to become green. North Hall, home to future jurists mocked my efforts at the next red, but, as the bus pulled off from the curb...
...would then be faced with an equally realistic outlook on the Harvard experience. In this revised view, we come into Harvard because we are commanded to do so. "Enter," we are told by our guidance counselors, our families, our internal social barometer. Once the gate is open to us, it is barely possible to do otherwise. But if it was not our choice to come in, is the burden foisted upon us when we leave then especially unfair? Hardly. We did not ask for our intelligence or our privileges, but we did not refuse them, either...
Nonetheless, thinking of Enter as a command may cut into our stress level as we attempt to live up to the Harvard name. Whatever burdens come with the Harvard education are ours to bear. Just as we were pushed through Dexter Gate by those around us, so are we pulled...
...inscription can be read to say that just as "to grow in wisdom" gave us a reason to enter, "to better serve thy country and thy kind" can give us a reason to leave. As much as we may want to stay in the Ivory Tower, the gate can give us the motivation to say farewell to Harvard and to move on to the next stage in life...