Page 263 - WhyAsInY
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Mass revival
appears to be gazing approvingly at Sue, or is it my imagination? Sue was so likeable that even though my mother opposed my dating her because she (Sue, that is) was not Jewish, after my mother met her, she (my mother) read up on Sue’s Unitarianism and concluded that Sue was in fact a “Jewnitarian,” and, therefore, most acceptable. When I was in law school, I boarded an airplane for the first time to visit her in California and to interview (unsuccessfully) for a summer job with a Los Angeles law firm. In 1968, the relationship, which had had its ups and downs, finally ended, much as Eliot’s world did in his poem “The Hollow Men.”
Comprehensive Coverage
Senior year was a year of completing things and living with one foot in college and one foot in what we conceived of as the real world.
Having always taken five academic courses in all but one of my prior semesters, and having thereby garnered far more credits than the minimum required, when the senior year rolled around, I did my best to limit my course load to permit myself the opportunity to have as much fun as possible. I recall only a seminar with Professor of Philosophy Joseph Epstein, who was brilliant (and later a professor of Danny’s), and the seminar in religion at Smith that I referred to earlier. I justified tak- ing that course by convincing the Religion Department that there was nothing comparable available at Amherst and that I wanted to take it to round out my studies in the field. But I obviously took the course so that I could spend more time in Northampton. Two things stand out in the course: Miguel de Unamuno and knitting. Miguel de Unamuno, a Span- ish philosopher, stands out, not because of his writings, which I don’t believe I even began to read, but because of his name, which is really fun to say. Knitting stands out even more, and not because A Tale of Two Cit- ies was part of the syllabus. It seems that knitting must have been the rage at Smith in those days, because at the seminar everyone, other than the male professor who led it and me, who hardly followed, was con- stantly clicking away. Not to put too fine a point on it, I must say that it
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