Page 228 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
because the fact that the classes would be conducted substantially in French would, I anticipated, serve as a further obstacle to my ability to get by. The accent was, I thought, intractable. I was wrong, however. I had little or no trouble in understanding Professeur Joseph (accent on “seph”) and squeaked by. It was only after the semester ended that I dis- covered that Professeur Joseph had graduated from Brooklyn College! He therefore spoke a language that I understood. I wouldn’t say that le cours était une promenade dans le parc, but I would say that, compared with what I had expected, il est venu très près.
Humanities 1–2 was also a fairly traditional course. It started with Homer, moved to Virgil, and finished with Tolstoy in the second semes- ter. But, what a finish! War and Peace was the subject of the last two weeks of the second semester (or maybe it was only one week, because, more often than not, we were reading a book each week in both Humanities and History, but I’m not sure). At any rate, by the end of the second semester—and much earlier than that if I recall correctly—procrastina- tion was an art form that I had mastered.
Talking to friends, going to the snack bar, downing a “grinder” (in New York, a “hero”; in Philadelphia, a “hogie”) sold by the Beta sand- wich man at 10:00 p.m., writing a letter, reading Sports Illustrated, and various and sundry other obviously more important activities than studying combined to force me to be a reader or a writer only after mid- night, sometimes well after midnight. By second semester, the all-nighter seemed to be far more the rule than the exception. The all-nighter did, however, lead to some exceptional results for me, paper-wise and other- wise; one of the most important intellectual moments of my life came when, after struggling for hours to understand the derivation of the first part of the fundamental theorem of calculus, I came to a moment when I was sure, at 5:00 a.m., that everything was illuminated. I believed that I actually comprehended the theorem and its proof, and for perhaps sev- eral hours, I was Leibniz.
Thus it was that War and Peace, which covered a huge swath of his- tory, was ultimately compressed into an all-nighter. But worse: I did not read War and Peace when it was assigned in class. I reserved the night
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