Thursday, February 8, 2007

Conversation on a bus:

A middle-aged man came onto a crosstown bus at Fifth Avenue. His scarf was identical to mine, and when he sat catty-corner from me I said, "Merton." "Balliol." It was like getting the wrong password. In some consternation, we compared scarves and found the difference. He had done a second BA in English in the 1970s. Then he did a PhD at Yale. We found out that one of his classmates supervised my senior essay. His one regret, he said, was not having done the PhD at Oxford. "A friend of mine started a PhD at Yale after an MSt at Oxford, and then quit because he hated it so much," I said. "He made the right decision. I should have dropped out.… There were a lot of older genteel types — who were nasty. And then there were the younger deconstructionists — who were about to become nasty." me: ":D! That sounds just like Yale!" By then we were at Central Park West, and I had to get off.
I always feel a kinship with people who hate Yale — this summer, for example, two of my classmates were students at Yale (one graduate, one undergraduate), and they both hated it. "I'm in good company," I thought. It was quite wonderful to agree on the awfulness of Yale with a perfect stranger in the few minutes it takes to cross Central Park, and then to part ways.

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