Summer Reading

This, as I'm sure you're well aware, is how it all starts. If you're unfamiliar with this particular mental disorder, be patient--the recollections of a neurotic mind are always more obsessively fascinating to the afflicted than to the sane. And, as any decent Harvard student will tell you of this travail, be forewarned.

The time: late May, With an epic and overweening sense of ceremony, I pen the last word on the last page of the last blue book of the last test of my second-to-last year of college. Life, I sense, is drawing to a close. Adulthood looms. Barely bothering to hand in the exam, I head screaming with glee into my Last Summer, running straight from the Science Center to Newbury Street to kick off three months of self-discipline.

This, after all, is my final shot at becoming a true-blue. Harvard literati. (I just won't get another chance to name-drop Joseph Andrews and Walker Evans without someone throwing a brick at my head, will I? And most frighteningly of all, somewhere in the back of my mind, the thesis clock has started to tick--freedom will soon come crashing to an end, and long nights of genuine scholarship await. Sometime between now and unemployment, I've got to squeeze in some education.

That fateful afternoon, at a bookstore on Newbury, I pick up two things: Kerouac's On the Road--an easy read--and a CD. I've listened to the CD all summer. The book--well, that's another story.

This thin, user-friendly book has developed into an unwelcome monument to the summer of 1993. It sits at my endtable sometimes; most days, it's buried in the clothesheap on the floor. The bookmark is stuck in page 187, and it's been that way for months.

I had imagined that this book which celebrated youth and America and wanderlust would be the kickoff to the summer's most exciting reading list ever. And why not? Like most finals-takers, I had been reading a book or two a day. If I could read Moby Dick in three days, I could surely read a Kerouac book in an afternoon, with time to spare for the entire Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Crimson for desert.

My hopes you might have guessed, have been dashed. And like everyone in these dogdays of August, I'm starting to wonder where all that time has gone. These past two months have been a window into my post-Harvard life, and it doesn't look pretty. Why? Because Harvard just doesn't stop doing its crazy thing.

The events of the past couple of months are summer translations of the same anxieties and paralysis all true Harvard students endure. After three months of this self-induced, Puritan angst, a recognizable patern has emerged.

First, you head straight into denial. This summer, you say, will be different. This summer you'll spend every Monday night reading for your thesis. This summer you'll write for fun. This summer you'll write for The Crimson every week. And so on.

Second, reality hits, and it goes a little something like this. June I: You don't want to read Samuel Se sewall's diary; you want to go to the beach. You go to work. June 2: Sewall sits on the shelf, the beach is a bike-ride away, and you go to work. The cycle continues.

Soon it's August, and the third, crucial stage kicks in: angst. Only one month left to read everything in the Norton Anthology for generals. One month left to read that book you'd promised that professor you'd read for you thesis.

And most importantly, like a glaze poured over a carefully-prepared entree, someone in this world is doing just that. In fact, somewhere in this city, there's a colony of Harvard students who've already finished 10 pages of their theses, and have already published them in The New Yorker and The Nation and People. And for the disbeliever, this shocker: this isn't a neurotic nightmare--here at Harvard, we lazies have met the enemy, and it is the overachieve. When we return to school and read that they've already won the Hoopes, the rest of us will sink back in despair.

Or relaxation. Just as I turn away from thesis research and writing for fun to experience things like real life and other people this summer, I'll do the same in the fall. While the constant anxiety may reach a fever pitch during senior year, outsiders should never underestimate the Harvard student's ability to stave off that guilt with a healthy dose of denial. All over the planet, we live out our lives in the same pattern, and for some reason, after driving us crazy for four years, it works.

Most days, the book is buried in my clothesheap on the floor. The bookmark is stuck in page 167, and it's been that way for months.

These are the summer translations of the anxieties and paralysis all true Harvard students endure.