Word: old
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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BACK AT THE ROOM, things went from bad to worse. Ellen had grown increasingly resentful of my large group of old cronies and had developed a habit of throwing the telephone at me and snarling, "It's for you." I wasn't getting any sleep because she plodded around so early in the morning. When I came in late, she would wake up and make me feel guilty. Ellen best expressed her hostility at the one and only party I threw, when, dressed in the orange pajamas, she sat outside our door glaring at everyone who entered...
After that, I stayed out of the room. I auditioned in vain for plays, trying to regain the cameraderie of my old theater group. But I got rejected again and again, and I finally took refuge in libraries, trying to study my way out of my depression and loneliness. In this morass, I clung to the one human and intellectual contact of that first semester: a freshman seminar on China taught by a man who honestly cared not only about our intellectual development, but also about our personal adjustments to Harvard...
...course required one mammoth research paper on an individual who shaped public opinion on China, and I threw myself into research. I chose a famous Harvard professor active in public policy and spent hours in the Yenching library, digging up old correspondence, reading everything my subject had written, interviewing him and his colleagues. I would return to my room after the libraries closed and prattle on about my newest theory or the latest letter I had discovered to anyone who would listen. I ignored all my unrelievedly boring coursework and wrote the paper for weeks, finishing just before Christmas vacation...
...this book had any other title--say, The Personal Views of a 23-Year-Old Student, or John LeBoutillier's America, or even the subtitle: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American--a private printing might have run off 20 copies: 10 for the author's parents and 10 for aunts and uncles in Orange County, California, or some other reactionary region. As it is, the book is prominently displayed in reputable bookstores and reviewed in reputable publications. That means others--including other reviewers--are forced to take account of drivel they could otherwise throw in the circular file with...
...When the old wolves know they are about to die, they sneak back into the woods and find their territory, the land that is especially theirs. To find my bed, I coped with an elevator wall, and the carpeted interior of my dormitory which made loud noises when I walked upon it. The walls of my room swirled around and around, dilating and breathing, their bright colors and strange poster faces lulling my consciousness--the face of Jim Morrison peered in on me from an album cover, still and refracted, inviting me to his morbid dance with a grim smile...