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toWarD a unifieD fielD tHeory
language laboratory sessions. Finally, I played squash (the four-wall variety, of course) to satisfy my weekly gym requirement, which con- sisted of three hours.
For those of you who are keeping score, I have just chalked up twenty-five or twenty-six hours of required classroom and laboratory time, and here I do not include the time required for squash racquets, which was, I admit, good fun. When I was taking the Six Majors program at Midwood, I had only about twenty-one hours of class time (and that included gym, which—you guessed it—was not fun, consisting, as it did, not of games but of highly regimented and difficult Olympic-style exercises, exercises at which the less academic students excelled). And you can be sure that I had far less homework in Midwood than I had at Amherst. In the second semester of freshman year, the required aca- demic hours would be reduced by the elimination of French, and, mercifully, there would be no Saturday classes. Having met the lan- guage requirement, I replaced French with my first elective course, Philosophy 1, for which no one had invented a laboratory. Descartes, Kant, and Hume, et al., were challenging and stimulating, but nowhere near as challenging and stimulating as the two key freshman courses, English 1 and 2 and Science 1 and 2. English and Science 1 and 2 were— and even though they were, sad to say, eliminated when the college dropped the New Curriculum, they remain—legendary.
My Composition professor was G. Armour Craig, one of the inven- tors of the course, who was a good friend of Robert Frost’s. Frost had taught at Amherst in years prior and would return and dine with Craig, among others. In one of my most mystical experiences at Amherst, I was walking past the Lord Jeffery Inn on a snowy night during fresh- man year when I looked up and, through the light cast by the street lamp, I saw Frost’s lined face looking up and contemplating the flakes as they swirled in the gentle evening breeze—at least I was pretty sure that I did.
Professor Craig handed out two essential documents in our first classes. The first, handed out on day one, described the course in terms that would be more mechanical than substantive. We would be turning
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