AN INTERPLAY OF OPINION

That solitude possesses an appeal has been a subject of poem and prose from classical times. The wide expanse of loneliness to be found in forests and mountains every year draws a throng form the cities. Even the narrow isolation for one's room is sometimes a welcome relief from the competitive chatter of fellow collegians. When melancholy descends upon the soul, whether caused by a surfeit of real suffering, an unlovely letter, or the failure of some finesse, retreat from neighborly jostling often heals the hurt quickly.

But that ghastly, premeditated solitude which is the fate of a man without a room-mate is an eventuality which few American college men care to consider. Always excepting the small minority who find endless resources with in themselves, college men would be at a loss without companions in their studies. A room-mate is always accessible when one wishes money, recreation, or that more subtle shade of human relationship which goes by the name of friendship.

Yet it is just this companionable institution which Mr. S. E. Morrison '08, who is possessed of the love of Oxford University, charges with contributing to the low place of scholarship in American colleges. Writing in the current Alumni Bulletin, he contrasts the Oxford man's unwillingness to share his room with the American horror of living alone.

That the desire for companionship has any considerable effect on the standards of scholarship would seem to be a hazardous contention. True, on a warm May evening, mutual restlessness often sends room-mates off to cyclonic or thunderbolting haunts.

Conversely, however, the inertia of a room-mate burdened with work keeps his companion at home. In any event, the mutual urging of men accustomed to one another's opinions never has the devastating effect which an alien offer to go to the movies can produce.

Indeed, it would appear to be a sorry form of culture which cannot prosper when the lives of two humans of the same plane of intelligence run close together. Such companionships cause an interchange of ideas, a breaking down of barriers, wholly healthy. Surely, the simple fact of closely paralleled lives can be given but a small share of responsibility for the glorification of gentle mediocrity.