Page 265 - WhyAsInY

Mass revival
again lived at Phi Gam), turn to the trick that I had accidentally learned from Geoff Kurland’s stash of “cold remedies,” and pound out a very serviceable first draft. That did not happen, not with respect to the room, and not with respect to the spansules, but somehow it did happen with respect to the draft. As I had come to learn early on, if you write a good enough introduction and let the reader know where you’re going, you might convince yourself that you have found your compass. I spent about one day on the introduction and the next few days on pounding out the body; I then got it proofed and to the typist, sighed a sigh, and got some sleep. (As I said earlier, Danny’s thesis was far better than mine, and I now hasten to add that that is not because I had hastened to write.)
The thesis was accepted (and received a magna grade), and the thesis defense was a non-event, except, perhaps, for a philosophy instructor’s need to display his knowledge of Euclid’s proof that there is an infinite number of primes (which struck me as not quite infinitely irrelevant to the task at hand, but which I believe that I responded to politely and satisfactorily anyway).
The real story for me concerns the last requirement that I had to meet in order to graduate with honors from the Religion Department: the requirement that I score well enough in responding to numerous essay questions that were referred to collectively as the Comprehen- sives, or, colloquially, the “Comps.” We were told the date upon which the Comps would be given, that the Comps would be structured to cover the entire ambit of the religion curriculum, and that we should expect to take about eight hours to complete them in the one day that would be devoted to the task.
Once I learned that the Comps were to deal with the entire menu of religion courses that the department offered, I was somewhat relieved. There was simply no way in the time remaining before the Comps that I could delve with any degree of depth into all of that material. Accord- ingly, superficiality, which I regarded as one of my strong suits, would have to suffice.
The Comps were not a notable event because I knew the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation; or between Theravada
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