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toWarD a unifieD fielD tHeory
before my last final exam of my freshman year for this classic. Because I knew that War and Peace was bound to be the subject of an essay on the final, I did the prudent thing. I actually started to read the more-than- twelve-hundred-page work at 10:00 p.m. All right, I concede it. I was more skimming than reading, but what was I to do? Actually, I did come up with a plan. I skimmed the entire book over a period of six or seven hours, and, not entirely satisfied, I got hold of an abridged edition that contained only about five hundred pages and read/skimmed that as well.
I then walked into my 10:00 a.m. final to find that the exam had four essay questions, the last of which, sure enough, related to War and Peace. The best was yet to come. The question essentially asked the writer to show how the major themes of War and Peace are captured by the way in which Tolstoy treats Petya, who, the essay question itself allowed, was a “minor character.” Who, you might ask, was Petya? Good question. Well, now the jig was up. I would finally be punished for my study hab- its or, more to the point, the absence of them. I must have spent more than two very long minutes before I somehow retrieved from my uncon- scious—and I was in fact close to being unconscious at the time—that Petya was Natasha’s kid brother, who is barely mentioned in the novel until he joins the army and is killed by the French in the same battle in which the famous scene of the dream and death of Prince Andrei takes place. That recognition, coupled by what little I had retained about the sweep of the book, was sufficient to enable me to end my freshman year without the total flameout that I had by then expected. (I actually received a good grade in Humanities, as I did in every course except— quelle surprise!—French.)
There is only one other fact about the final examination week dur- ing the second semester that bears mentioning. Notwithstanding Joe Chassler’s influence, I was not a big reader before college or, for that matter, even during it. In the freshman year at Amherst, the reading load was gigantic. I had all I could do to keep pace, and as I’ve just illustrated, I sometimes failed to do just that. Nevertheless, for reasons that I can’t begin to explain, I chose exam week of my second semester to put aside studying for a while and read the first book that I had read on my own
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