The Plastic Age quotes

When an American sets out to found a college, he hunts first for a hill.

John Harvard was an Englishman and indifferent to high places. The result is that Harvard has become a university of vast proportions and no color. Yale flounders about among the New Haven shops, trying to rise above them. The Harkness Memorial tower is successful;

The result is that Harvard has become a university of vast proportions and no color. Yale flounders about among the New Haven shops, trying to rise above them. The Harkness Memorial tower is successful; otherwise the university smells of trade.

If Yale had been built on a hill, it would probably be far less important and much more interesting.

Hezekiah Sanford was wise; he found first his hill and then founded his college, believing probably that anyone ambitious enough to climb the hill was a man fit to wrestle with learning and, if need be, with Satan himself.

Satan was ever before Hezekiah, and he fought him valiantly, exorcising him every morning in chapel and every evening at prayers.

The first students of Sanford College learned Latin and Greek and to fear the devil. There are some who declare that their successors learn less.

Hezekiah built Sanford Hall, a fine Georgian building, performed the duties of trustees, president, dean, and faculty for thirty years, and then passed to his reward, leaving three thousand acres, his library of five hundred books, mostly sermons, Sanford Hall, and a charter that opened …

He had visited the college once with his father and knew his way about. Eager as he was to reach Surrey Hall, he paused to admire the pseudo-Gothic chapel. He felt a little thrill of pride as he stared in awe at the magnificent building.

It had been willed to the college by an alumnus who had made millions selling rotten pork.

Hugh skirted two of the factory laboratories, hurried between the Doric temple and Byzantine mosque, paused five times to direct confused classmates, passed a dull red colonial building, and finally stood before Surrey Hall, a large brick dormitory half covered by ivy.

“Hell!” he exclaimed. “I ought to have guessed that.” He held out his hand.

“I’m Carl Peters, the guy you’ve got to room with⁠—and God help you.”

Hugh dropped his suitcases and shook hands. “Guess I can stand it,” he said with a quick laugh to hide his embarrassment. “Maybe you’ll need a little of God’s help yourself.” Diffident and unsure, he smiled—and Peters liked him on the spot.

… Say, I’ll tell you how we fix this dump.” He jumped up, led Hugh on a tour of the rooms, discussed the disposal of the various pieces of furniture with enormous gusto, and finally pointed to the photographs.

“Hope you don’t mind my harem,” he said, making a poor attempt to hide his pride.

“It’s some harem,” replied Hugh in honest awe.

Then they had to attend lectures given by various members of the faculty about college customs, college manners, college honor, college everything. After the sixth of them, Hugh, thoroughly weary and utterly confused, asked Carl if he now had any idea of what college was.

“Yes,” replied Carl; “it’s a young ladies’ school for very nice boys.”

“Well,” Hugh said desperately, “if I have to listen to about two more awfully noble lectures, I’m going to get drunk. I have a hunch that college isn’t anything like what these old birds say it is. I hope not, anyway.”

Then there was a battle of wits, and if the freshman too successfully defeated his opponents, he was dropped into a watering-trough that had stood on the campus for more than a century.

Of justice there was none, but of sport there was a great plenty.

The worst scared of the freshmen really enjoyed the experience. By a strange sort of inverted logic, he felt that he was something of a hero; at least, for a brief time he had occupied the public eye. He had been initiated;

Every afternoon and evening its big tables were filled with serious-faced lads earnestly bending over books, making notes, running their fingers through their hair, occasionally looking up with dazed eyes, or twisting about miserably.

The tension grew greater and greater.

The upper-classmen were quiet and businesslike, but most of the freshmen were frankly terrified. A few of them packed their trunks and slunk away, and a few more openly scorned the examinations and their frightened classmates; but they were the exceptions.

The others were conscientious, more or less competent, but there was little enthusiasm in their teaching, nothing to make a freshman eager either to attend their classes or to study the lessons they assigned.

They did not make the acquiring of knowledge a thrilling experience; they made it a duty⁠—and Hugh found that duty exceedingly irksome.

He attended neither the fraternity dance nor the Prom. He had looked forward enthusiastically to the “house dance,” but after he had, along with the other men in his delegation, cleaned the house from garret to basement, he suddenly took to his bed with grippe.

It was Keith Nutter talking, a sophomore notorious for his dissipations. “Hell, I’m out with bags all the time, as you damn well know. My sex instincts don’t need sublimating, or whatever you call it, and I talk smut as much as anybody—more than some.”

“Perhaps you’re just naturally dirty,” Burbank said, his voice edged with sarcasm.

He didn’t like Nutter. The boy seemed gross to him.

Then the Gipsy answers him. Gee, it hit me square in the eye, and I memorized it on the spot. I think I can say it. He says:

‘There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?’

I think that’s beautiful,” he added simply, “and I think it’s true, too.”

At least, he couldn’t answer the arguments presented in Fitzgerald’s beautiful quatrains. The poem both depressed and thrilled him. After reading it, he felt desperate—and ready for anything, convinced that the only wise course was to take the cash and let the credit go.

He was much too young to hear the rumble of the distant drum. Sometimes he was sure that there wasn’t a drum, anyway.

He was particularly blue one afternoon when Carl rushed into the room and urged him to go to Hastings, a town five miles from Haydensville.

He was altogether sentimental about the boy, entirely devoted to him. He had wanted to talk to Hugh more than Hugh had wanted to talk to him, but he had never felt that he had anything to offer that could possibly interest Hugh.

It was a strange situation; the hero had put the hero worshiper on a high, white marble pedestal.

He moved toward the door. “So long,” he said as casually as he could.

“

Wet! What currency that bit of slang has⁠—and what awful power.

It took me a long time to find out what the word meant, but after long research I think that I know. A man is wet if he isn’t a ‘regular guy’; he is wet if he isn’t ‘smooth’;

I know of any number of men in this college who read vast quantities of poetry, but always on the sly. Just think of that!

Men pay thousands of dollars and give four years of their lives supposedly to acquire culture and then have to sneak off into a corner to read poetry.

“Who are your college gods? The brilliant men who are thinking and learning, the men with ideals and aspirations? Not by a long shot. They are the athletes.

“You may belong to the intellectual aristocracy of the country, but I doubt it; you may lead the masses to a ‘bigger and better’ life, but I doubt it; you may be the cream of the earth, but I doubt it.

All I’ve got to say is this: if you’re the cream of the earth, God help the skimmed milk.

” He stepped down from the rostrum and briskly left the room.

Then he threw himself despairingly on a couch, face down. He wanted to cry; he had never wanted so much to cry—and he couldn’t. There were no tears—and he had lost something very precious.

He thought it was love; it was only his dreams.

Hugh felt better after that talk, and the end of the term brought him a surprise that wiped out his depression and his sense of failure. He found, too, that his pain was growing less; the wound was healing.

Perversely, he hated it for healing, and he poked it viciously to feel it throb.

Agony had become sweet. It made life more intense, less beautiful, perhaps, but more wonderful, more real.

Of course, men grow coarser while they are in college, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t grow coarser if they weren’t in college.

It isn’t college that coarsens a man and destroys his illusions; it is life.

Don’t think that you can grow to manhood and retain your pretty dreams. You have become disillusioned about college. In the next few years you will suffer further disillusionment. That is the price of living.”

“

Every intelligent man with ideals eventually becomes a cynic.

It is inevitable. He has standards, and, granted that he is intelligent, he cannot fail to see how far mankind falls below those standards. The result is cynicism, and if he is truly intelligent, the cynicism is kindly.

As a matter of fact, few undergraduates are truly happy. They are going through a period of storm and stress; they are torn by weltschmerz.

Show me a nineteen-year-old boy who is perfectly happy and you show me an idiot.

I rarely get a cheerful theme except from freshmen. Nine tenths of them are expressions of deep concern and distress.

… forget the hours of storm and stress, the classroom humiliations, the terror of examinations, the awful periods of doubt of God and man—we forget everything but athletic victories, long discussions with friends, campus sings, fraternity life, moonlight on the campus, and everything that is romantic.

The sting dies, and the beauty remains.

“Why do men give large sums of money to their colleges when asked? Because they want to help society? Not at all. The average man doesn’t even take that into consideration.

“No, we must not take the exceptional man as a standard; we’ve got to talk about the average.

The hand of the Potter shook badly when he made man.

It was at best a careless job. But He made some better than others, some a little less weak, a little more intelligent. All in all, those are the men that come to college.

I knew that I wouldn’t be able to think if I did—and I can’t; all I know is that I want to kiss you again.” He looked at her sitting across the little table from him, so slender and still—a different Cynthia but damnably desirable.

“Cynthia,” he added hoarsely, “if you took my hand, you could lead me to hell.”

She in turn looked at him. He was much older than he had been a year before. Then he had been a boy; now he seemed a man. He had not changed particularly;