The Undergraduate Chair
"What Shall I Do to Contribute Most to the War Effort?" Becomes Perplexing Question for Every Student
THE SNOW RIGHT NOW is coming down the fastest and finest and quietest I've ever known. This is the first heavy snow of the year; outside it is warm and dark and the street lights and the strings of red-and-white lights on Main Street make boundaries in the dark. Tonight is Saturday night, December 13, 1941. So far in the first heavy, damp, thick snow of the year I have not seen one snowball thrown.
It is so quiet, so heavy-quiet, that a voice can be heard, up close to the speaker. But people don't say much now. At the first show at the Nugget tonight (this is a Saturday night) there was one-third the usual crowd, and the audience was quiet. Walking up Main Street and into College Hall there were the lights, and quiet voices where people, a few, stood together in Allen's Drug Store reading the Traveler's headlines, and in College Hall there was thick silence. And this is a Saturday night.
My roommate left Tuesday. He will be in Fort Devens Monday morning. He went to Boston and enlisted in the Regular Army with a friend. The two of them, Jerry Tallmer and Alex Fanelli, leave behind them on the campus a lot of people who are eating the words they once said about "Those guys on The Dartmouth who talk a lot about the war but don't carry guns." They leave their jobs as Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Chairman of The Dartmouth to those of us who haven't yet made the choice they made.
Their leaving, and the departure of some others on the campus, has been taken mostly as a matter of course, however. Mostly people are quiet. They are waiting —we are all waiting—for Thursday and going home and talking with parents and girls, and for physical exams and recruiting offices. Or else for the final decision to stay on at College, this time more honestly knowing why and what the College is about, if we can find out.
Now we know what the war is about. And we're trying to find out anew what the College is about in this war. Not many people, if they're honest, are going to spend much time waiting for the College to make sense if it doesn't already and hasn't all along. The kind of hell that Dartmouth College has been for most of us since last Sunday afternoon is not tolerable; it doesn't make much sense and the hell in it is the staying around thinking that perhaps it will make some kind of sense in time. Every class attended, with some ex ceptions, is an addition to the final knowledge of most students that there is no war in taking notes on "European Governments and Politics" or "Representative English Authors" or any course that doesn't live actively in a world at war.
The College can make sense, to some. It can and does and has made sense to those who have known all along, or have found out in the course of years in Dartmouth College, that there is war in everything that has life. And for those who know and feel and live the life of the College, who make real war of learning and know that real war in learning is real war in living, the College will make sense and a degree will make sense. I don't think there are many such; I wish there were more.
There are many who would like, all of a sudden, for the College to make sense, because they like the place and they perhaps don't want real war just yet. There are many who would like to have the College suddenly become real to them, and it is true, I am sure, that it hasn't been real to them all along, at least not very real. Just real enough to be pleasant and a good place to spend "four of the best years of life." And they are among the few who talk a good bit now, sometimes trying to be funny, and seeing and feeling their words and their wit fall flatter than a flounder. They aren't very many, I hope. And they are learning quicker and harder in these few long days than they've learned in most of their lives.
And there are the most of us, to whom the College has been real, and to whom it might still be real if it made more connection with a war and a life that doesn't live now in degrees, exams, books, papers, and classrooms. The lack of connection before was compromised; learning and living were only partly in the classrooms and lecture notes and blue books and grades, and mostly were in the unsystematic and organic life that Dartmouth College permitted.
The learning and living at Dartmouth College were in and still are in, and still will be in, relations with people and with knowledge in action. The life was in, is in, and will be in things like The Dartmouth and the Jack-o and extra-curriculars, if too many of us don't leave. It was in fighting all along against the institutionalizing of thought and action and life, against the inertia of stiffened sensibilities, against the lumpiness and complacency of the mutually accepted but non-comprehended values—values that were for convenience and comfort and security against action. If those fights can still be carried on really and honestly by the men of Dartmouth, the College will still live and fight in a world at war.
But we are all reduced to ourselves, in the silence and internal agony of deciding where our fight will be now, and from the many deciding selves will come the action and the fight. If it is to be at Dartmouth, the demand of the decision is for honesty and unrelenting determination and conviction that the fight at Dartmouth is real and must be fought.
And again, and this time I am surer than ever, it is a matter for the individual, for the individual decision, for individual honesty. No one is going to decide anything for anyone else right now; no one can. And everyone is finding that out if he hasn't known it before, or rediscovering it in much more explicit and exciting terms than ever before. The silence on the campus shows it, the few words spoken show it, the quiet, swift walking of students to places where they know they're going on the campus shows it.
"The 'Paradise of the C-minus Man,' the'business as usual' island, will be broken upas much as possible by the world that won'tlet it alone and by the part of DartmouthCollege that won't let itself be let alone;it must be broken up and rebuilt by themen in it, if it is to be anything more thana symbol of decay and ostrichism.
"Specifically, if you don't want to enlist because you don't think you're needed, if you don't think that it's important what you do, if you think you might just as well hang around here until your number is up —it's time to get wise. Your number is up."
Those words in the editorial column of The Dartmouth on Friday the Mth said what everyone here knows now or is learning, It hasn't been easy. It has been hell. It will be hell until everyone knows, completely and actively in what he is doing, that it is himself and what he does that counts, singly, among the millions of other selves, and with those millions of other selves. And from that hell of deciding and learning for certain will come the army and the strength and honesty that will win this war and keep fighting against deadness in the world for the years to come.
It will come in silence, silence like tonight's, the unpeaceful silence of fast-falling snow in a world at war. There is nothing now to break that silence; everyone is reduced to himself, and will be reduced to himself until he has broken with what is unreal and half-true. The nation and the College have been finding, we are told and I think rightly, a new unity in this war; it is the unity of individuals breaking with indecision and deciding for themselves the ways in which they count. It comes quietly.
Upstairs in the Little Theater the Players have just given their third and last performance of The Importance of BeingEarnest, Wilde's satire which is, according to the reviewer in Friday's Dartmouth, "a play written in as many words as possible." Down in the gym the basketball team is playing against St. John's College. On Main Street this afternoon, where the Christmas lights and spruce boughs tied on posts the length of the street display the mercantile imminence of Christmas, everyone could hear Christmas carols played over a public address system from one of the stores.
None of it makes much impression; it is good and new and sometimes exciting. And then, after half an hour, it is forgotten if it hasn't made a real connection with what is going on in the individual mind all along.
It's like classes now; most of those who attend them do it as a routine matter that has little or nothing to do with what they are actually thinking, and forget about what they've taken notes on or heard unless it makes a real connection with what they're going to do about the war. The professors are conscious of this, many of them.
"Don't lose your heads; wait until you get definite word about whether you are needed before you go walking out on college. This is the time to dig in and really work,"- many of them say at the beginning of the classes. Then they go on with the course as outlined and if it hasn't made sense before it makes less sense now.
What will make sense to a lot of us will be home at Christmas time. There is some talk about that. There is talk about the things that Dartmouth men in their separate homes all over the country have lived with and loved all their lives. Going home now means getting back to something that has reality, a reality with continuity behind it—the continuity of childhood and growing up. The big split between College and home is now part of the hell of not knowing what to do; it's hard to know where you're worth the most when the part of you that lives at home has to be integrated all over again with the part of you that's at school.
And so we're going home to start all over again; to find out all over again the value of a part of our lives that gets cut off by miles of railroad tracks and concrete highways. And that's a big part in the decision of where we'll be during the rest of the year. When there is talk of enlistment, it is almost always enlistment at home.
After home and the holidays, in January, while this is being read, the College and the men who have made it up will be changed. Right now there is no way of telling how many there will be in Dartmouth College for the rest of the year. There won't be any who haven't had to start all over again in their own thinking about the place and their relation to it. Those who do stay on at Dartmouth will have one of the hardest jobs—that of living up to themselves and keeping a very important home front actively in the war, keeping the College alive and as much at war as the rest of the world.
ADDITION TO TEACHING STAFF, DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS Daniel Marx. Jr. '29 worked for eight years in investment banking and shipping. For thepast four.years he has taught and studied at the University of California. He returned toHanover this fall as instructor in Economics.
