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Except, at the Kappa house, the room was costing me much more.
The price of happiness. Such happiness you crave.
When the first bill for dues came to me from Kappa Gamma Pi, I was puzzled by "social fees" and other surcharges in addition to the monthly dues. Then to my horror I began to accumulate fines: because of my jobs, I had to miss business meetings, committee meetings, a "required" mixer with Kappa's brother fraternity Phi Omega. These were fines of $21 in October, $28 in November. I pleaded with the Kappa treasurer to excuse me: I had to work, had no choice but to work, what could I do? The girl, a junior with a pixie cut and wide-set imperturbable eyes, smiled with her mouth and suggested that I cut back on my academic courses and reschedule my work hours so that I'd have more time for the sorority-"Kappa Gamma Pi is your first obligation, don't forget."
Late that night in the basement study room of the house (to which I'd become habituated to retreating, not wanting to quarrel with my gregarious roommate, Deedee, unable to endure the pounding repetitive beat of calypso music from the room next door, or the shrieks and cries of laughter generally through the upstairs) sometime after 3:00 A.M. drifting into a deranged sleep as my vise-clenched head sank slowly to the paperback Ethics "whose pages swam in my vision as if undersea. Happy! the voice of Spinoza taunted. The happiness you deserve.
My grandmother spoke English with a heavy German accent that seemed to mock the very language, as the tics and grimaces of her raddled face mocked her smiles. " 'Made your bed, now lay in it'-that's what they say, ja?" She laughed, though without mirth. She was a guardian of the most banal and self-evident truths; one of those old, sour, but unfailingly energetic fairies in Grimms' tales who oversee disasater out of personal spite; her response to the assiduously argued, painstakingly structured metaphysical system of Baruch Spinoza, that martyr for truth excommunicated from the Jewish community in Holland, in 1656, would have been to take his collected works and fling them into her wood-burning stove-"There!"
I did not call her from Syracuse, ever. I did not call her to beg her forgiveness. I did not call her to say I am in despair, I am lost to myself, what can I do?
The study of philosophy is the study of the human mind. Though philosophers claim they are studying "reality"-"the world"-"the universe"-"God." Yet to study the human mind up close, to probe into one's own mind, one's own motives, is to be baffled utterly.
My first year at Syracuse, I'd been indifferent to the campus presence of the Greeks, as they pretentiously called themselves. I was immersed in my studies-and in my part-time jobs-and in the vast, intimidating adventure of books, books, books. Never in Strykersville had I imagined a true library: a library like the university library in whose stacks I might wander mesmerized for years. The brightest of students in my high school, yet I saw myself at Syracuse as alone and beleaguered and fighting for my life; I loved the excitement of it, even the anxiety; I was in a perpetual state of agitation; I returned from the library staggering with books; if one of my professors assigned X, I would read, and reread, not only X, but commentary on X; I was writing, parable-like little prose poems; I had little interest in other girls in my residence, and often skipped meals; I had not the slightest interest in joining a sorority, in the time-squandering activities called "rush"-"pledge week"-"initiation." Yet even in my indifference I wasn't unaware (I "would have to confess!) of the sobering fact that the majority of freshman girls, including girls I admired and would have wished to consider friends, the most attractive, the most popular, in many cases the most intelligent, scholarship students like myself, had pledged sororities. These girls would seem to have been plucked by supernatural intervention out of the university residences and would be living, begi
Which only underscored, as some said, the Greek truism: survival of the fittest.
Oh, the Greeks were contemptible, their self-aggrandizement comical, but who could laugh?
Then somehow it happened, remarkable at the time, wholly unexpected and flattering, that a girl in my residence hall began to seek me out. Her name was Dawn; I'd scarcely noticed her in one of my lecture classes; in my fever of concentration upon my work, I scarcely noticed others my own age; my attention was fixed upon professors, whom I admired and feared as minor deities. But there was Dawn entering my life in one might open a door and step inside, uninvited. She was a striking young woman; not pretty, nor even attractive, but glamorous like a film star of the Thirties with a perfect moon face, sleepy hooded eyes, heavily lipsticked lips, and a perpetual cigarette burning in her fingers; smiling at me, squinting through a veil of smoke; one of those compelling young females of whom there were several in my high school, prematurely adult and sexually alluring however young. Her hair was bleached and teased; she wore tight sweaters and painted her fingernails. Her fur-trimmed black cloth coat, her handsome leather boots and other items of apparel suggested that her family was well-to-do, and indulged her. Dawn whose very name came quickly to captivate me: DAWN I'd find myself writing in my notebook or in the margin of a textbook or tracing with my fingernails in the gritty film of ice on the window of my room. DAWN DAWN. She playfully chided me for studying too hard- "You'll have a nervous breakdown! Really. It can happen." At the same time, she was childlike in her appeal for help in writing papers. "If you could just glance through it? Just to tell me is it good enough to hand in." Of course, I would end up doing much more, for I enjoyed such challenges; by sixth grade I was helping friends of mine with their schoolwork, as much for the pleasure of solving another's problems as for helping a friend in distress. When Dawn received high grades on these assignments, she was elated and grateful, and invited me to meet her friends, freshman Kappa pledges who were girls like herself, not-intellectual, not-brainy, but brimming with energy, clever and fu