Word: shelleys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dutch Cleanser, Jane (Carole Shelley), who treats dust spots as germs. Her husband Sidney (Larry Blyden) is a shopkeeper who seems destined for smaller things. Their guests arrive. Ronald (Richard Kiley) is an upper-class banker of such genteel indifference that he reads a washing-machine manual while Sidney smarmily courts...
...WONDER what would happen if Percy Bysshe Shelley attended Harvard. Would he, as he did at Oxford, send to all professors copies of a pamphlet he wrote entitled "The Necessity of Atheism?" Would he begin the task, as he did in Ireland, of world reformation by organizing a "society of peace and love?" Would he distribute, as he did in Wales, a "Declaration of Rights" by sending up balloons and by enclosing it in bottles he cast into...
More likely, Shelley would have majored in Government and gone on to law school, and, instead of writing "Ode to the West Wind" would have spent most of his time poring over a casebook of contract law. And, doubtless, Widener Library has become the nest of many would-be-Shelleys, who, in earlier days, while not rhapsodizing necessarily on skylarks or writing odes to clouds, might have been less intent on getting accepted to med or business school...
...preprofessional current runs deeper than the increasing numbers flocking on to institutions of higher training. As the quiescence of the seventies has replaced the flourish of the sixties, so has a grim realism become prevalent where previously experimentation and romanticism ruled the day. I can still picture Shelley, at least, in the middle of a Socratic dialogue with an obstreperous law professor, standing on his seat and singing La Marseillaise, or histrionically reciting a soliloquy from Shakespeare. Today, however, such romantic elan seems completely incongruous, and, in those rare instances when someone calls up an outlandish dream or invokes...
...movie house stands as one of the few refuges of the romantic spirit at Harvard. The inroads made by the realism of preprofessionalism fortunately cannot penetrate this archive of a disappearing Harvard tradition. Perhaps one day the spirit will re-emerge, and, like Shelley's Prometheus, refuse to go to law school...