The Real World

Commencement is a bittersweet time a marker in one's experience that signifies new beginnings as well as the end of something. We hear that sort of talk a lot as graduation rolls around. This is because we are ritualistic creatures, we homo sapiens, locked routinely into the practice of marking the swift passage of time with anniversaries and birthdays, fairly well "into" the "Thank-God-it's-Friday" mentality, where the week is segmented into a series of symbolic phases. (Monday, the cartoonists inform us, is to be detested; Wednesday is "hump day," the point at which the weekend looms almost close enough to be tasted; and by midFriday, the Doppler effect is at work and before we have a chance to blink, the alarm clock announces another Monday morning.)

There's also a lot of banter around Commencement about those idyllic college days, and the other side of the coin euphemistically called the "real world." Dartmouth graduates are especially prone to this simplistic dichotomy because Main Street, Balch Hill, Moosilauke, and Union Village Dam lodge in the memory and have a way of lingering there. As George O'Connell noted in these pages last fall in "The Dartmouth Disease," one major factor in Big Greenerism is the place itself. Harold Bond '42 comes to a similar conclusion in his Class Day Oration (see pages 24-27 in this issue), closing with lyrical images from "Dartmouth Undying," the song which, for many of us, is the Dartmouth signature. (It may be heretical, but there's something more appealing to me about a College "miraculously builded" in our hearts than one somewhat awkwardly embraced for the granite in our muscles and our brains.)

It seems inescapable-memories of this place-especially when you're on your way out of Hanover for a spell-down to graduate school in Boston, New Haven, Palo Alto, or Charlottesville-into the corridors of Merrill Lynch, IBM, the SEC, in the Big Apple, or D.C.-often on roads less traveled by in out-of-the-way hamlets in Maine, Idaho, or Peru. But memory has a way of playing tricks on us; while we were there, the real world was Dartmouth. It was examinations, research papers and critical essays, class recitations and more formal presentations. It was the building of friend- ships in dormitories, fraternities, sororities, and clubs, friendships which changed as we grew into them. It was, in short, the world we lived. To reduce it to the way Dartmouth Row looks when a bonfire is flickering across its white bricks is one thing, but the suggestion that the "real world" begins after Dartmouth is to annihilate four very precious years of living.