Word: seriousness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...having a good time on that date. Delighted with himself, he had gone back to his room and had plopped into the armchair, all set to fantasize endlessly about this new girl. Susan. There was no doubt about it: she was tough. Short, slender, pretty, and so serious she was funny. Yeah, and probably popular too. Martin wondered if she had dated a lot. Probably. No reason why not. Hmn, probably some upperclassmen too, damn them--that biology lecture was filled with nothing but juniors and seniors...
...Susan seemed so sober and serious and responsible--she'd never do anything underhanded like what Jean did. But, hell, Jean did it, and she seemed to be a really fine girl herself! Damn, could they all be bitches? What if Susan didn't like the way he talked, or what he said, or what he wore, or what he looked like? What if he did something stupid? She'd pull the same damn trick!...noh, probably not, she was too sober to have developed that kind of thing to the art that Jean had--she'd probably come...
...weeks ago, University Hall was filled with people who took on various combinations of these reasons. They were all of them serious people, those who were there for the power and those who were there for the aesthetic alike were serious. Romanticism is serious business...
...might argue that it must be serious, since it is forbidden. But I would prefer merely to say that it is serious because it is the major commitment of the best undergraduates at Harvard. No one can pretend to have a clear vision of what happened two weeks ago if he fails to realize that the brightest and most creative people at Harvard were in University Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday morning...
Anything else is self-indulgence, which is difficult to glorify in any case and particularly difficult to justify when the hero's grievances are temporary and external to the university. Society needs places for sensitization and places for serious academic study. But they can be separate places...