Before the war, I often perched on the fence of the cow pasture to watch the trains go by. That was well before I was unable to stand the sound of trains. I had nothing else to do besides throwing rocks in the muddled Risle and memorizing geometry and morality lessons until everything mingled irremediably in my head. My only friend was Adam, though sometimes his cousin Anne, who was a year younger than we were—but just as sharp if not more—would tag along with us when we went down by the outskirts of town to smoke cigarettes and kick a ball back and forth.
It was 9 a.m. Awakened, as I often am, by sunlight, I opened my door to go to the bathroom downstairs. Supine, to the side of my door, was a male form, blonde and muscular and naked. His hands were cupped over his genitals, his underwear crumpled by his head. His eyes were closed. I froze in surprise, but I had to pee, and out of some ingrained politeness didn’t want to disturb him. I stepped over him quietly and went downstairs.
As Princeton’s end-of-year-rituals bring to a close the first half of my time here, I’ve been thinking of milestones and the future and most of all about how much I’ll miss late meal.
Late one Friday night, buzzed and carrying packs of sour candy from the Wa, I wandered to a room in Whitman. As my host and I sat on her bed, alternating handfuls of Sour Patch and some other Technicolor monstrosity, her roommate decided to show me a video for “Beauty and a Beat,” performed and directed by everyone’s favorite cultural punching bag: Justin Bieber.
My father’s father flew free from the depths of the Russian Empire as an infant, for sticks and stones and angry Christians drove his family out. It was in 1916 or maybe 1917.
The following passage is adapted from the opening of Albert Camus’ The Plague, which is a description of Oran, a city in French Algeria, in the 1940s. I have translated it into English and into the setting of Princeton in 2013 (office jobs become classwork, going to the movies is replaced by the more common pastime of the Internet and so on), but those are the only changes I believe I have made.
Princeton students are special. We’ve been told this upon every rite of passage we have experienced. No one ever dares to contest that they have near-superhuman aptitudes for creativity and hard work, Renaissance men and women all, steeped in the finest principles of humanism. Yet there is one thing in which we cannot manage to surpass the national average.
But the more I thought about this movie, the more I realized it simply gives an illusion of depth. A movie filmed with somewhat unconventional techniques, or featuring naturalistic dialogue and little plot, is automatically assumed to be “artsy” and thus philosophical, by association with the style of the French New Wave.
When I googled the meaning of my last name, I felt the same way I felt while visiting the museum at Gettysburg when a docent urged me to search the database and see if my ancestors had been involved in the battle.
