by Ann Marie Plane, Branford College, '85
plane@humanitas.ucsb.edu
My memories of Yale are precise, discrete. The problem is not to determine what was most memorable, most meaningful about my years at Yale, but rather to separate out what it meant to me then, from what it means to me now, and all the variations of that I’ve experienced along the way. But how to start?
When we get to the top, the view spreads out before us-- expansive, amazing. We don’t dwell on the cars filled with couples or the few small children playing in the pathetic grass edging the parking lot. We look over the trash and graffiti to see the entire city laid out before us--the broad streets of capacious houses that we went past on our way out; the towers of Science Hill, Sterling Library, and my college, Branford, with its sturdy carillon. Up here, New Haven takes on the aspect of a mythical kingdom--a modern-day Camelot. No grime, no people, no worries.
I always had that same sense of cloistered security about Yale, even from the very first admissions tour. As a girl from upstate New York, cities both fascinated and frightened me. I crossed Brown University off my list because I thought the cars and the noise of Thayer Street pervaded the campus too much. But in New Haven, I was impressed as our guide led us from Old Campus across the street to the bottom of the carillon tower. Stepping inside Branford’s thick stone walls, the noise disappeared, and the magical green of the courtyard stretched out in front of me. At the far end stood an enormous tree, with one of those old-fashioned swings attached. Everything about this place conjured up images of peaceful contemplation, an unbroken connection with the minds and traditions of the past. Looking back from 1998, I know that there are dreams that have come after mine, adding to those of the generations before. I will never know all of what was lived out inside these protective walls, mullioned windows, locked gates.
That first year I am in awe of being at this university. There are traditions to learn, friends to make, niches to find. I spend a long, dreary November in the overheated basement of Sterling Library. I’m the only one there, reading books of State Department dispatches about rising tensions in Kashmir, 1948 for a paper in American Foreign Policy (Prof. Gaddis Smith, 8:00 am., M-W-F, Fall semester, 1981). He glides across the stage. He’s been up for hours already--a real Yalie--suave, urbane, and wry, even first thing in the morning.
Desperate to explore the farthest reaches of the mind, now that I am here, now that I’m at YALE, I sought out a class in Sanskrit. It’s a language of which I’ve never even heard, part of a great Indo-European cultural heritage; older than Greek or Latin, with more genders than French, more cases than Latin. Memorize, memorize, or Prof. Insler will turn his wry smile towards you, and, in front of the other 4 students in the class (three of them graduate students in linguistics, the fourth a freshman from Bengal, with what I consider to be an unfair advantage), he will do the worst possible thing--he will find your ignorance amusing. There is no malice there, not for me. But I am terrified, so I study, study--at the end of the semester I write a three-hour exam. I do very well. In class the next term he is just the same; I cannot tell what he thinks of me.
Last month (1998), idly thumbing through my alumni magazine, there is an article on the Linguistics Department. The page opens, and there he is again, a picture of this professor who I would do anything rather than disappoint. He has the same smile on his face. His hair has gone grayer than I remember, but he’s exactly the same. Only I have changed, or so it seems. I carefully tear the picture out, wondering what I will do with it, but not wanting to throw away this precious evidence of my eighteenth year. It sits on the kitchen counter, until it finally gets swept up in a mound of catalogs, junk mail, and children’s detritus and is thrown away.
The intellectual bounty of Yale exceeds my dreams. I remember professors’ names or faces or both; the precise contents of certain reading assignments; the hard wooden seats, bolted to the floor of classrooms, as each new semester’s class takes the place of the last; water collecting in huge puddles on the slate walkways, making the trip between classes a giant game of hopscotch.
My father clasps my shoulder at some cocktail party during spring break. “This is the daughter who goes to Yale,” he says with pride. “There’s another one too. She’s at Harvard!” He sleeps comfortably in the knowledge that all that money is buying my future--the best future he can give me; the future he had to make for himself, all by himself, without the help of an Ivy League education. It’s all wrapped up, a gift, from him to me. We are newcomers to this world--he the first to go to college from his family; I, a young woman, in a place that still sometimes feels like all the important traditions are reserved for men only.
But those exclusions seem relatively unimportant compared to the worlds that Yale opens up to me. French, English, Sanskrit, and Greek poetry; Chinese cave paintings, American silver, urban legends, Charlie Parker; Calculus (which I drop after three weeks, thinking, why do I need this? A wonderful moment of independence!); Computer Science (my programs never work); a paper on the conservation of Long Island sound for a class where we sailed New Haven harbor, pulling up worms and muck from the bottom of the sea, carefully measuring lifelessness in the area around the power plant; computerized experiments in a nearby linguistics lab; a whole summer spent sketching dinosaur bones and greenhouse jungles; and, treasures stored against my career as a historian: the Erie Canal, the piracy of Francis Drake, the Declaration of Sentiments, Victorian sexuality, the birth of Zionism, Periclean Athens, the Italians’ expeditions in Ethiopia.
As a freshman, I could never have bicycled to the top of East Rock. I was bookish, shy, sure in the knowledge that I was not athletic. Yale changed that for me--a chance encounter with the women’s crew coach on Old Campus in the first few weeks of school, an invitation to come along and just learn how to row, she liked how tall I was. An amazing world opened up to me--jogging through New Haven streets in the rain, learning how to bench press, going for “spring training” in Florida. There was the thrill of winning our heat at the championships, and a new sort of pain--a bitter disappointment--in arriving one second too late at the final finish line. The judges put silver medals around our necks and told us not to cry, that we had done really well. But a few of the oarswomen sobbed openly as we pulled away from the judges’ stand, rowing disconsolately back across Lake Waramaug.
Standing at the top of East Rock, with my future husband at my side, I could see that Yale was only a very small part of the world that stretched out before me. This I had known, and this knowledge I had carefully nurtured during my years there. My freshman year I had joined the Episcopal fellowship. Eating a rare dinner at the chaplain’s home in Hamden, I suddenly remembered that there was a bigger world out there, the world that those gray stone walls could not quite lock out. Over the years I embraced that world in many ways and made friends from outside the university--from the local bartender I dated who was most decidedly NOT a Yalie, to volunteering each week at the Jewish Home for the Aged. The old ladies chatted about me in Yiddish, and I could only guess what they were saying about this goyische college student who was neither a granddaughter nor a nurse. Just an outsider, come in for a few hours each week to hear their stories, to help the arts therapist, to hold the hand of a woman who could no longer acknowledge that she felt your touch. There was one man who let me take him into the recreation room where we sat together. Some days he banged his head against the wall; it was the only part of his body that he could still move at will. I remember feeling helpless and afraid in the face of his pain.
Was this world also a part of Yale? I think I perceived it then as emphatically Not-Yale, as far from Yale as I could get, having traveled only a few short blocks, but a welcome relief from the endless stream of papers and worries and competition. It put things into their proper perspective, and it met needs in me that I could not fill in the classes, on the river, or with my roommates. Now, I look back and I think, yes, it was a part of Yale for me, perhaps the most important part. Yale is not the money, nor the camaraderie, nor even the hoary oaken traditions. Yale is not a single stream, to which each student must mold him- or herself. Yale is remade, not only in each generation, but in each student. I learned this again from a member of the class of 1920, who, on meeting me during my junior year, spent a wonderful half-hour sharing stories of Mory’s and Sterling Library and the colleges, all the while reminding me that he thought they’d made a grave mistake in admitting women. We might both have Yale in common, he implied, but I could never be a real Yalie.
Yet each generation makes its own meaning out of this place; each generation forms its own community--a community of “real” Yalies, even if not traditional ones.
I remember a story I heard from Willie Ruff, the professor in a class about African-American musical traditions. He had organized some sort of conference or workshop on African drumming techniques, to be held on the Yale campus. A faculty fellow in residence at Branford College, Ruff arranged for some West African drummers to climb the carillon tower and demonstrate the sound of “drum-talking”--a form of communication in traditional rhythms that had the power to join villages together over long distances, as drummers in one spot would begin the message, and those within ear-shot would repeat it, sending a radiating arc of sound and communication across a vast area, intelligible only to those who knew the code. No sooner had these drummers begun their performance from the top of this neo-Gothic spire--a tower that might have come straight from a walled city in medieval Europe--than a stranger arrived, called by the drums. He had nothing to do with the conference, or with African musical traditions. He was a graduate student from a West African country, working on a doctoral dissertation in some field of the physical sciences. But he was called from Science Hill to the tower by the drums, and by his curiosity at hearing West African beats deep in the heart of the New Haven wilderness.
When, on top of East Rock, I looked out at the university and the city spreading before me, I don’t think I had any inkling of the many gifts that my time at Yale would hold for me. It is an ambivalent legacy, always, but one rich enough that I find myself going back to it, again and again, lifting out different experiences from my years there as my life shifts and changes, taking unexpected turns. It is a place of privilege, of great intellectual achievements, surely, but less often a place of wisdom, or of the type of learning that I most value now. And yet Yale is my place, as much as it belongs, in ways both similar and different, to those who came before and after me. As different as we all are, we share the experience of learning and growth in common. We can share the view from East Rock, as we saw it then, and how we remember it now.