The Brown Reader

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  I wanted to LIVE in all capitals. I was the one who would go to the Silver Top Diner or on an all-night drive to L.L. Bean at the drop of a hat, because acting on impulses was living out loud. Talking about sex, which was novel for me, was part of this experiment in a new identity.

  Maybe I was on the (in retrospect, annoying) continuum that starts at faux Bohemian and stretches to attention-seeking. (How Bohemian are you if your daily uniform includes a Lacoste shirt?) Nevertheless I was one of those people who had all the time in the world to talk (meaning to listen) to friends and acquaintances who needed to vent. I would justify this by thinking, Oh, I’ll remember the night I spent four hours listening to Mitchell talk about his bad relationship more than I’d remember studying for four hours. Looking back, I think I was addicted to empathy.

  Once a week all the facilitators and students, and Dick and Carla, would gather in an auditorium to listen to the scheduled speaker, who could be a transsexual, a cross-dresser, or a prostitute; a combination of those three; or someone even more advanced. Then we’d divide into our little couple-led groups to talk and talk and talk.

  Did one of the students in our “Topics” section have a problem in her relationship? I wanted to help. Did another one have an inkling he was homosexual? I wanted to help him come out and feel okay about it. In my awkward and gentle way, I wanted to help—or maybe I just wanted to be liked.

  In my little pocket of time in Providence, the thing that exclusive couples did was called “going out.” The word date was far too square, too hetero-normatively conventional. The mossy smell of pot was discernible many evenings in the quads. The 1970s were a time of sharing. (This was before that word became corrupted by the Internet.) People would turn their large stereo speakers toward their windows and blast their records outside so that others could enjoy the music. Headphones only existed in language labs. I think back to Friday afternoons, which were marked by so many—what can I say—warm and sharing impromptu window concerts to help us herald the weekend.

  The draft was over. The economy was healthy. Upon graduation one could absolutely get an “interesting” job—which was far more important than a well-paying one (in my crowd, anyway). You could break your heart or cause someone’s heart to ache, but you didn’t worry about STDs, drug overdoses, paying back loans that would cramp your life through middle age, whether there were peanuts or peanut oil in your food, or where you left your cell phone. In fact, now I marvel at the fact that we could lead full lives without the crutch of total round-the-clock connectivity. We didn’t have it. We didn’t need it. We probably talked to our parents about as much as today’s students, but since it was part comforting ritual and part checking in with one’s parole officer, it was generally a weekly scheduled event—more newsletter than fund-raiser. Our parents didn’t decorate our college rooms for us; we put them together (and didn’t use the word decorate). We were kind of on our own, a bit adrift, and absolutely fine.

  Did I tell my parents that I was a gender and sexuality facilitator? I doubt it. What would have been the point? My being a “Topics” counselor didn’t take away from my classwork, my main extracurricular activities, or my social life.

  During my tenure as a sex talker, I became involved with a guy who was the opposite of me: a Southern Christian athlete who once asked me if I owned a skirt. He wasn’t being sarcastic or Christian, he just wanted to see my legs. That was the year I mostly wore my taller brother’s hand-me-down Levi’s. I had neglected to pack a skirt, makeup, or jewelry when I came to campus. It had just never occurred to me that I might want those things. But, eager to please, I decided to surprise him and show up in a skirt. In the late 1970s, unless one wanted a floor-length Indian skirt-slash-bedspread, one could not purchase such a thing in Providence. A trip to Boston was called for. I was pleased to find the perfect skirt in the first store I went to. It was a burgundy fine-wale corduroy skirt in the semipopular midi length. It looked not unlike a pair of my brother’s jeans sewn together and hemmed at midcalf. I thought it was fetching.

  I mention this because I had my own ideas of what attractive and sexy were. They might not have been accepted as attractive or sexy by others, but I was in “Topics,” so yeah. I think I might have become more confident myself by offering counsel to students who were even less secure than I.

  I was delighted when one of the seniors in “Topics” sat down at my table one day in the Airport Lounge in Faunce House. At once, I felt helpful, feminine, empathic, and upperclass (as in—a junior). I didn’t know he knew who I was. We had a conversation about how fantastic “Topics” was and eventually, how great sex was—in an abstract, intellectual, S/NC kind of way, of course. Then he asked me which gadgets I preferred to use in the act. Oh God. Were we supposed to use electronics and handcuffs and things? Were we supposed to have sex with people and objects? What did the objects want? As being liked was very high on my agenda, if I became acquainted with these objects, I would need them to like me too.

  This was a test of my inner prude. I hadn’t been trained for this, and I was not half as experienced or curious as the senior. I was not only out of my depth, I was even turned off by the conversation. How could I help others talk about sex when I clearly didn’t know anything about it? To me, sex was about love, passion, and commitment between two people. I was not a recreational sex player. Needless to say, I brought nothing—no shred of knowledge—to the Southerner. What we had together never even became an actual relationship in the technical or S/NC sense; I was a Jewish woman with a corduroy skirt and he was a guy with a big cross and we were each killing time with someone new and different.

  While I concentrated in Semiotics, I minored in Figuring Out Who I Was and Making My Own Decisions. When I think about my years at Brown it is with pleasure and surprise that life was ever so simple. Of course, at the time, I didn’t think my life was simple. I thought I’d never finish my papers on time, never pass my exams, and never be cool. I was scared that I wouldn’t be chosen as class speaker at commencement, then I was scared that I would be (I wasn’t). I was scared that I really didn’t know what semiotics was or were and that someone would ask me about it during a job interview. And all this was before I’d ever met a Republican.

  Jump Shots

  BILL REYNOLDS

  I remember the exact moment when I first realized that basketball was no longer the simple game I had played as a kid.

  It was February of 1968.

  We had just been annihilated by Princeton, then one of the country’s top college teams. The five-hour bus ride back to Providence seemed as bleak as nuclear winter. While the bus crept along through the dreary New Jersey meadows, I leaned against a window, feigning sleep. All around me in the darkened bus were teammates slumped in their seats. The air smelled like failure. If we had had any illusions about ourselves as a team, this drubbing had shattered them.

  As it had shattered any illusions I had about myself as an athlete. The game had been a defining moment, the night I first came face-to-face with my athletic mortality, the painful realization that I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be and never would be.

  What was I going to do with this realization?

  I didn’t have a clue.

  For I had been brought up to believe in the most American of convictions: that if you worked hard enough, desired something enough, sacrificed enough, your dreams could come true. I had grown up surrounded by inspirational clichés and simplistic slogans that began seducing me at an early age. These slogans were deeply embedded in the culture, forever hanging from locker room walls, essentially unquestioned, unchallenged.

  So I sat by the window, running the past through my mind as if it were some newsreel, my despair increasing with each passing mile. Eventually, as if I had crossed some emotional fault line, the despair turned to disgust.

  Basketball had always been more than just a game to me. It had been a way of life. It had determined who my friends were, where I went to school, what I studied once I g
ot there. For nearly a decade there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t think about it. Without it, I certainly wouldn’t have been at Brown. Without it, my life undoubtedly would have been very different. Now I suddenly wondered what it had all been for.

  I had arrived at Brown with no confidence in myself as a student, and for four years, I had consistently taken the easiest courses I could find. Now I was a college senior, two courses short of graduating with my class that spring, without any idea of what I wanted to do in the future. It was 1968, three-quarters of the way through one of the most turbulent decades in American history, when it often seemed as if the country was undergoing a national nervous breakdown. It also was a time of dizzying social change, of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the rise of the counterculture. Cultural tremors were shaking our society, growing into shock waves that would change it forever. Here it was—going on all around me—and I knew too little about it.

  Why?

  Why didn’t I know anything about politics or theater? About history, literature, or art? Why, in the past decade, had I only read a handful of books outside of school, when I had been a voracious reader as a kid? Why was my life so one-dimensional? Why was my life both defined and shaped by a childhood obsession with a game? My life was a mélange of empty gyms and taped ankles, pregame pep talks, echoes of muted cheers. My life revolved around whether my jump shot went in or not.

  Was there life after basketball?

  At twenty-two, on a cold night in the winter of 1968, sitting on that bus and watching the future unfold ahead of me, headlights illuminating patches of the darkened highway, I wasn’t sure.

  * * *

  Twelve years later, I often found myself on the third floor of the Rockefeller Library at Brown, always in a small carrel by a window that overlooked downtown Providence. I was trying to eke out a living as a freelance writer at the time, which—in the real world—was a euphemism for being unemployed.

  After returning from six months of active duty in the army, I had taught high school English for three years. I had quit the teaching job to write a novel about a teacher with nothing to say, in front of a class that didn’t want to hear anything anyway. But now that novel was in some drawer somewhere, right along with the rejection slips. My new project was a memoir about my basketball journey, which would eventually become the book Glory Days. It would begin with that night on the bus coming home from Princeton.

  Every morning I would sit in the library, wallowing in the irony of it. Could you make up the fact that I was now spending more time in the library than I ever did in my time as a Brown student?

  Did I wish I could go back and do my college years over, get up every morning with my notebooks and my sharpened pencils, then come back and study deep into the night, like a scene from some sepia-toned movie?

  No doubt.

  I was haunted by sketchy memories like this one: I was in a study group for a course I was taking—it was either “The Philosophy of Literature” or “The Literature of Philosophy,” but to this day I’m not sure which, because I rarely went. I was a senior at the time, and there was a peace rally on the green every Wednesday; my student deferment was about to run out, and everything was as up in the air as a long jump shot. So there I was, at a study session one night, trying to play catch-up before the next exam.

  I had listened to all the talk, trying to absorb it, until one guy said, “I guess that does it. It should be no sweat.”

  “Wait,” I said, flipping through my notebook. “There’s one more. It’s in my notes. Yeah, here it is. Doctor Zay-goon.”

  There was a silence.

  “It’s right here,” I said. “Doctor Zay-goon. Or something like that.”

  More silence.

  “You don’t mean Darkness at Noon, do you?” another kid asked.

  Oh.

  But I’ve come to realize that Brown taught me things I didn’t know I was learning. At the most obvious level, it put me around highly intelligent, motivated people, and they did what good teammates always do: they pushed me up, opened up my world in ways that would once have been unimaginable. Could any college student ask for more, regardless of his grade point average?

  Brown also taught me a certain confidence that I’d never had before. Never again would I be intimidated around academic people, never again would I be impressed with pretensions. That, in many ways, was Brown’s gift to me.

  It was not an insignificant one.

  * * *

  After I’d freelanced at the Providence Journal for seven years, they finally offered me a job as a reporter. At the time, I didn’t want to write about sports. It was the early eighties; I had evolved and was ready to accept the possibility that there was life after basketball. I was covering town council meetings that would make my eyes glaze over. Then one day a sportswriting job opened up at the paper.

  “Why would anyone give up being a reporter to be a sportswriter?” asked the top editor.

  “Because the worst game in the world is better than the best town council meeting that ever was,” I said.

  The editor shook his head in disgust and walked away.

  That was thirty years go.

  But even though I’ve been writing professionally for over thirty years now, and have written twelve books, I still consider myself a basketball player first and a writer second. Having played basketball at the level I played at is still the thing I take the most pride in. Shooting a basketball is still the thing I did the best.

  I know this is foolish.

  But it’s never changed.

  And there are still days when I find myself in some pickup basketball game somewhere, when reality gets distorted and I am still young and strong, off in my own world, oblivious to everything else around me. And on those rare occasions, which come like gifts from some benevolent god, the only thing I care about is my jump shot.

  Faith and Doubt at Brown

  KRISTA TIPPETT

  I came to Brown in the late 1970s from a small town in Oklahoma with an immersive religious universe. The spiritual patriarch of our family was my Southern Baptist, hellfire-and-brimstone preacher grandfather. He was able to make some peace with my crazy leap far away when he learned that Roger Williams had founded the first Baptist church in America in Providence. I’d grown up hearing that only Southern Baptists were going to heaven—but my grandfather seemed to grant Roger Williams a posthumous exception, if his lineage would keep me safe.

  As it turned out, I only entered that white church once or twice, and only with any reverence on graduation day. So simple. So reserved. Not at all what I was looking for on this whole new planet, this new beginning to my life. My only religiously observant friends at Brown were Jewish. I found their rituals exotic and lovely in equal measure to their disconnect from me.

  Was there a cathartic moment when I began to doubt the existence of God? I don’t think so. But in the exhilarating world of ideas and action opening up to me at Brown, I immediately doubted the relevance of religion.

  Still, I signed up for a philosophy seminar on Kierkegaard my freshman year. I thrilled to Kierkegaard’s lush imaginings. It felt nothing like piety to me when he took the biblical story of Abraham apart and retold it from every conceivable angle. I got an A on every paper I wrote in that class without understanding why. Meanwhile I was flailing in more secular subjects I thought I would love, like “Introduction to Psychology.” Pavlov didn’t move me like Kierkegaard’s fear and trembling, his angst, his tortured “purity of heart.”

  Politics and history did captivate me. These, after all, were supersized landscapes of fear and trembling, angst, and tortured purity of heart. The Cold War world carried its drama conveniently (in hindsight) inside borders, ideologies, and armies. Its political battles were overtly cast in grand moral terms of Good versus Evil, transposing the religious sensibility of my childhood into a geopolitical key. I threw myself at one of the most unlikely Brown accomplishments of the early 1980s—an unprecedented
exchange program with a university on the Baltic coast of Communist East Germany. I hadn’t studied any languages in high school or traveled to any foreign country, as we so quaintly said then, but now I learned German. I was in one of the early groups to spend a semester of my junior year at the Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität in Rostock. Martial law had just been declared in nearby Poland. It seemed unimaginable that the Berlin Wall was not the shape of many lifetimes. I spent half a year among people my age who were crippled not so much by material want as by a poverty of possibility.

  I now understood myself to be rich with choices and corresponding responsibility, and that gravity infused the political passions that drove my twenties. Eighteen months after leaving Rostock, I was back in Germany on a Fulbright and then on to divided Berlin as a journalist and diplomat until a year before the wall fell.

  But first, back at Brown for senior year, I took a theology course. The late, dear Giles Milhaven let me into a graduate seminar on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian ethicist turned would-be assassin of Hitler. I still have my copy of Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison from that class, marked up with Milhaven’s favorite passages and my own. Like this:

  I’m still discovering, right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith . . . By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.

  I was still thinking of this foray into theology as respectable because it had relevance in terms of politics and history. But it pointed at a new religious sensibility taking root in me, not yet ready to name itself. So did my concentration in History—a decision I’d taken at the last possible moment before deadline. I fell in love with the study of history because it asked such large, interesting questions. I’d grown up thinking of this discipline as a matter of timelines. Now I was assigned a paper on whether the French Revolution was inevitable, or how West German foreign policy toward East Germany was a dance with the human trauma of the division. I can still physically recall my sense of the thrill and honor of such assignments. These were thought experiments about deep realities—inquiries into not merely what happened, but what mattered.