Miraculously Builded In Our Hearts

Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

LAST WEEK I RECEIVED A LETTER from a Dartmouth classmate I hadn't seen or heard from since my wedding day 33 years ago. I didn't even know he'd become a judge on a state supreme court. He had just seen me on television in my role as almanac editor "dishing out," as he put it, "your well-remembered line of bullshit about how the squirrels smell their nuts and how cows burp so many units of methane. If only those about you knew of your hideous past!" He went on to recall my swallowing an earthworm in front of the Nugget Theater "in sight of a ticket taker who, on the spur of the moment, relieved herself of the contents of her stomach into the ticket machine.Shame. If only they knew."

Actually, I don't remember doing that. But, yes, I recall, as he did, my "purple smash hat" and trips with him to Bennington College in his 1941 Cadillac hearse. I think we eventually abandoned it one night on the west side of Pico Peak.

His letter made me laugh aloud and then, with his final paragraph, made me misty. "We had such good times, so many laughs," he wrote. "I wish we could relive everything we did. Jud, I truly miss you. Life has a way of parting friends; how sad...God bless you; stay the way you are in my thoughts, and good wishes to your family."

Stay the way you are in my thoughts. The line has drifted about in my mind ever since. It's what we alumni ask of Dartmouth. We ask it while at the same time realizing, at least from an intellectual point of view, that it's an impossible request. And therein lies the pain of nostalgia. The asking is emotional, heartfelt, a yearning to once again experience days of long ago, when we were free of physical aches and our lives lay before us; the pain is our ever-present knowledge that it cannot be. Not ever again.

Of course, Dartmouth does precious little to assuage our pain. Its message to alumni, year in and year out, incorporates the tower of Baker Library in a gentle snow storm; Dartmouth Row, sunlit after a heavy late-afternoon rain; bright, eager, young figures hurrying across the Green to classes, as we used to do many long years ago; Hopkins Center glowing in the moonlight; snow statues, bonfires; the hills of Hanover in glorious fall colors...

"This is what a college ought to look like," said President Eisenhower when he arrived for an honorary degree in 1953. Really. No wonder we choke up when we hear the Glee Club sing "Dartmouth Undying." I mean, who of us, no matter how hard we try, can ever "forget her soft September sunsets" or "her sharp and misty mornings." Good heavens. And then they have to sing about "those hours that passed like dreams." Oh, the pain. Actually, I'm not sure that song is even fair. I'm told that if it's performed correctly,evenalumnus in the audience inwardly pledges to give everything he or she owns to the College right away. Some devise ways to borrow money in order to give more.

Well, after all, Dartmouth was darn near perfect back in our day. Strange to say, it seems anything but perfect now. It's difficult to truly comprehend that the imperfect "now" will, in the years to come, inevitably become the darn near perfect "then." How could anyone actually yearn for the days when the national media reported how Dartmouth dealt with cases of sexual harassment or "Animal House" drinking traditions? Or to the troubled times when, over the anguished cries from us alumni, the trustees, supported by students and faculty, decided human beings would no longer serve as mascots? (Incidentally, history will have long since forgiven Dartmouth alumni on this point after all, most of us older ones were already suffering from advanced stages of acute nostalgia.) Or to the puzzling era when prominent Americans who had no connection with Dartmouth whatsoever would do nate huge wads of money to an effort that threatened to bring Dartmouth down to the level of other institutions of higher learning? Why, some thought at the time, didn't they go after their own colleges? Like, well, Yale, for instance. (Now there's a school that might well come down a peg or two!)

Such troubling times. And yet members of today's classes will someday yearn and ache for them. Realities will float in among their dreams until they can barely tell die difference. It's inevitable. Many of us oldsters are now looking back fondly to those wonderful, simple, halcyon days of World War II!

So relax and indulge yourself in the sweet, painful nostalgia of this issue of our Alumni Magazine. For a few moments, Dartmouth is the way it is in our thoughts. Remember "the splendor and the fullness of her days." Picture her "sparkling moons, the crowding into Commons, her long white afternoons, her twilight glow." Can you stand it? And then, worst of all, know it's all still true. Absolutely true in everyway. Yes, yes those "gleaming, dreaming walls of Dartmouth miraculously builded in our hearts" will remain there, strong, vital, as it always was, forever and ever.

Now that's nostalgia the good old-fashioned way it used to be.

"Stay the way you are in my thoughts," says Fudson Hale. "It's what we alumni ask of Dartmouth."

Many actually yearn for good old World War II.

judson D.Hale, editor of Yankee Magazine,graduated in 1955. Dartmouth College has gonedownhill ever since.

The asking isa yearning toexperiencedays of longago, whenour lives laybefore us; thepain is ourknowledgethat it cannothe. Not everagain.