Word: signs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Dorms are discouraging places for boys to visit. They have to be stared at by 100 girls to get to see one. All the apparatus of bells, pink slips, tags, and signing in for parietals makes it a Special Occasion every time a boy comes, when everyone would be happier if it could be Just Dropping By. Girls are supposed to yell "Man on" when they bring their visitors upstairs and put a sign on the door after they have evacuated their roommate. The leering suppositions underlying these procedures put the focus on just what the authorities are presumably trying...
What happens is that the conditions of the dorm limit people's ability to make their own choices. The individual is subordinated to the rules, to the pressures of friends, to the harrassment of the crowd. The worrying about work is a sign that the individual can't find out, much less fulfill, her potentialities. Instead, she adopts the common standard and resorts to comparisons to measure her own worth. Her initiative is cut off. She needs friends to an artifically-heightened degree, and the reliance on friends promotes conformity and excessive hunting for security. The groups of friends that...
...even the freedom one does have, for it is hard to realize it is there. The noise of the dorm fills up the spaces and presses in on the people living there, sounds, words, commands-the voice of the public consciousness. The constricted space of plural living is a sign or sorrow. Free, open space is needed for the fortuitous and the unforeseen to occur, for the emotionally neutral and the amplitude of life everyone has a right to expect...
...Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim to decide what kind of C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up, we decide: C-, (Harvard being Harvard, one does not give D's. Consider C-a failure.) Why? Not because they are a sign the student doesn't know the material, or hasn't thought carefully or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." "The whole thing boils down to human rights." Now I ask you, I have 92 bluebooks to read this week...
...some pocket. The pain had been worse than this, a lot worse." Julian is on his way to see his mistress-and that fact is another kind of bad joke. She is a simple, lost, physical girl still in her teens, with no past herself and, so far, little sign of a future. Julian has a wife, not a bad woman or a good one, but disease has pared away his talent for complication; he can no longer thread through the subtle caterings and cozenings of marriage. So, when death comes, it seems to strike a just and dreary balance...