Would you care for a blessed banana?

University, early 1970s. Alternative thinking was in the air. Most of us were too busy trying to learn things to join the protests, but they were there, everywhere you looked.

'This just in! Oranges cause cancer!' The guy hawking the Fair Witness 'underground' newspaper yelled this at Elektra as she passed by eating an orange. She grinned to show she appreciated the jest.

A strange group of both male and female students dressed in prison uniforms stood in front of the Cathedral of Learning. One outfitted as a guard barked orders at them. Curious passersby looked at them in alarm – but it was only the Drama Department, advertising their new play. The play was based on the Stanford Experiment, a horrific psychology project that went horribly wrong. We were used to being shown things like that.

Up on the fifth floor, an English Department blackboard frequently sprouted political sayings by an unknown hand.

The ship of state this evening sorely rocks,

The nation has a Dickie, but no Cox.

You had to be there.

On the way to the cafeteria, hungry students were offered a student-produced booklet with information on birth control. Useful stuff, medically correct, and including addresses and phone numbers of agencies.

In the dormitories, students passed around their favourite books, which were read and discussed informally. Some were previously banned works now available for the first time. Many a student examined Ulysses and discovered themselves in agreement with Judge Learned Hand, who had opined that if a 15-year-old boy could get anything out of that he was welcome to it. The Comp Lit (Comparative Literature) Department offered a course that included Fanny Hill. The general consensus was that it wasn't literature but was good for a laugh.

Theologically-minded students were sharing their latest discovery: a tetralogy of works involving a wizard and creatures with furry feet. I made it through The Hobbit but found the first volume of Lord of the Rings more soporific than my Organic Chemistry text. No, thank you, most of us replied. 'But it's so spiritual!' protested the Presbyterians. 'It's junk,' we replied, and went back to reading Kurt Vonnegut and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Everybody had a poster of Che Guevara on their walls. Or one with the text of Desiderata. Or else one with a big flower and the saying, 'War is Bad for Children and Other Living Things.' Folk music of a protesting nature blared from every stereo. Tom Lehrer albums circulated from room to room: we knew all the lyrics to 'We'll All Go Together When We Go.'

A person in an orange robe stopped me on Fifth Avenue. 'Peace, man,' he said, 'It's all the same God.' I said I wasn't sure about that.

In Heinz Chapel one night, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi sat cross-legged on the communion table and held forth. Among other pearls of wisdom dispensed was the startling claim that if you died while thinking about sex you'd be reincarnated as a goat. I suppressed laughter and refused, politely, the offer of a consecrated banana. Like the apostle Paul, I didn't have any scruples about food offered to idols. I just wasn't hungry.

Meanwhile, at the Student Union, a repurposed grand hotel building that had once hosted Gilded Age robber barons, young women listened to a lecture on 'The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm'. The ballroom was full of jeans-clad spectators of both genders laughing at Isaac Asimov's jokes. And back of the lounge, now a poolroom, I and a total stranger traded licks on a wreck of an upright piano. He was a hitchhiker, just passing through. I gave him a sweater and the $5 I could spare for his journey.

Sons and daughters of coal miners, the first generation to attend college. Veterans, back from the Asian war with revelations. Dewy-eyed kids from the suburbs. Refugees from Philadelphia who'd decided Pittsburgh was a safer campus than the neighbourhood around Temple. (They were right.) All agog at the mental feast on offer. All eager to lap up knowledge.

They didn't think they were rebelling, no matter what the newspapers said. They thought they were learning. They were right. We weren't 'joiners', we kids born in the early Fifties. If we rebelled against anything, it was the tendency of our parents to join: clubs, groups, causes. We weren't searching for identity. We were just. . . searching.

What we learned:

• There is more to heaven and earth than was dreamt of in the high school textbooks.
• Learn all you can. If you find something wrong, try to fix it.
• A solution isn't a solution unless it's good for everybody. Cast your net wide and include all humans (and other living things).
• Those claiming to have 'The Answer' are usually flim-flam men. Be suspicious.
• The universe is a wondrous place. But it isn't all about you. So don't get conceited.

Those loopy students didn't fix everything. They couldn't. Some of them probably stopped trying. Some of them didn't. But hey, it was what it was. You can still hear an echo or two, if you listen hard.

Create Challenge Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

26.02.24 Front Page

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