Spring Revisited

As usual, Spring came with a wet chilly wind off the Atlantic. It came as the last snowfall dissolved, turning roads and grassplots alike into wide stretches of mud. The fact that two Pennsylvania groundhogs have spotted their shadows or that the Weather Bureau predicts a colder month ahead is immaterial. The only evidence required to prove Spring's arrival is the line of undergraduates waiting outside Memorial Hall to scribble their names a dozen times on sheets of orange cardboard.

On the surface, the opening of a new term will change nothing. Classrooms will continue to swallow up and disgorge swarms of students every hour on the hour. Perspiring athletes will continue to rush hither and yon within the confines of some squared-off area, with only the shift from the IAB to Soldiers Field to mark the transition from one season to another. Drama groups, debaters, and musicians will go on filling the air with their specialties. The Student Council will keep sending carefully prepared reports to University Hall, and University Hall will keep sending unyielding rejections back to the Student Council. Routine has no season.

However, the daily rounds are about as accurate a guide to seasons as the groundhogs. Routine may go on forever, but Spring brings a change in emphasis--difficult to see, yet definite. This is the season when learned books, jittery newspaper headlines, wars and floods are ignored, and the small, tangible pleasures of college life take their place.

Graduation, for instance, assumes new importance, while the specter of General Hershey, once seen lurking behind every diploma, is forgotten. Alternate routes to New York and the relative merits of Ford convertibles occupy the time and thought formerly allotted bloody ridges and cabinet crises. Politics are lost in a profusion of baseball scoresheets, and the frantic maneuverings of vote-seekers eclipsed by candidates for the Hall of Fame.

There is not much time to enjoy this shift in emphasis. Before long, the term will end on the discordant note of exams, and soon after, all the things which have been forgotten will reassert themselves. But while it lasts, Springs is the time to enjoy yourself; it should be played to the hilt.