Word: lefts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...then, asleep in Winthorp House. At two a.m., I had left those best and most creative people walked guilty down the stairs between their files of eyes, walked across that dark yard past the reasonable student government people who had stayed up to argue and to observe, walked more guiltily yet past the friendly University policeman on Quincy Street, walked home in the cold, past the House where slept the Great Uncommitted with whom I felt I had less in common than with those romantics, or even those radicals...
...need to tell you why I left the radicals--politics is always a consideration of marginal differences, of weighing gains and losses, of technicalities. At least, so I now say myself, having then determined not to act. Besides, radical politics on campus have been written to death...
Rather, we might imagine, to supplement the right-to-left line for political stances, a linearly independent vector for romanticism. Left-romantics want to change people because they despair that systems can be changed or because they believe that systems will change to fit the change of people's needs. Left-unromantics (pragmatists?) want to change the system to change the man (or perhaps for more abstract reasons, justice, etc.). George Orwell, in his essay on Charles Dickens, recognized the trends, saying, "They appeal to different individuals, and they probably have a tendency to alternate in terms of time...
...LEFT the romantics because they were happy...
...this, ultimately, is the reason I left my romantic comrades in University Hall. They were enjoying themselves too much. Had they been in pain, I might have been able to stay, as an existential being crying out against an oppressive world I did not really hope to change. And then I would have been justified in quoting Camus. True, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only while he experiences "boundless grief" which is "too heavy to bear...