Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Free

beer, majored in chemistry, and felt out of place at first as a public-school kid. That was the sum of it. No nostalgic stories, no romantic reminiscences. He’d made a few friends at Princeton but rarely saw them, keeping in touch through occasional phone calls, and when mail came that bore the Princeton logo, it usually wound up, unopened, in the trash.
    Applying to Princeton was my idea alone. It came to me on a bike ride down Summit Avenue, just a few blocks from the Macalester campus, when I used a map from a professor to locate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s boyhood home. It wasn’t the mansion I’d expected. In fact, it looked like a house I might have lived in had my father not quarantined us on the farm. A few days later I got my nerve up and phoned the Princeton admissions office, from which I learned that the university took only twenty transfer students a year. This was a discouraging statistic, but I was used to being the exception: it was the only condition I’d ever known.
    To bolster my application, I looked around Macalester for a contest, any contest, that I might place first in, hitting at last on a poetry competition that seemed to be attracting few entries. I’d never written poetry before, but I knew something of how serious poems should look (ragged, chaotic, with uneven lines) thanks to a paperback volume of “free verse” loaned to me by a pothead high-school English teacher who’d once had ambitions as a writer but gave them up when he got his girlfriend pregnant.
    Here is what I wrote:
From an Uncolored Room
Morning is a confrontation with the visible
and the bold verdicts of utility .
The toothpaste tube on the sink like a beached fish ,
the face in the toilet water .
At breakfast I depress the toast ,
but turn away, determined not to notice
the hot bread swaying briefly in its slots
between the red wires .
It rains, and I am reminded
I have lost all respect for the weather ,
which allows itself to be predicted
and visits the city purely out of habit
but changes nothing
for men who can throw off gods and loved ones
like cats from their laps .
When my brother left on Tuesday
I pushed the beds together .
I sleep on the crack .
    When I won the contest, I wasn’t surprised. Hunger, I’d learned, could be a form of genius.
    Nor was I surprised a few months later when I found myself sitting in a Princeton lecture hall that was older than my hometown, writing down a new word: “post-structuralism.” I couldn’t define the term—no one could, it seemed, including much of the English Department faculty—but I knew more or less what it meant: I’d broken through. The student beside me bore a famous last name that I recognized from a history textbook (not Rockefeller, but close), and discovering that the name was still in use among living individuals—people whom I was expected to befriend now and make a life and career among, if possible—renewed in me a sense of dislocation that I’d been struggling with since I entered school.
    Three years later, high on speed and applying for the Rhodes, I’m feeling more disoriented than ever. Late last winter, about eight months ago, I simply ran out of thoughts. I ran out of the stuff that thoughts are made of. I became mute, aphasic. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t process human speech. A doctor I saw pronounced me deeply malnourished and prescribed a regimen of vitamins, but my depletion was spiritual, I sensed, and also—it seemed possible—permanent. I’d been fleeing upward since age five, learning just enough at every level to make it, barely, to the next one. I was the system’s pure product, sly and flexible, not so much educated as wised up, but suddenly I hit a wall.
    Adam passes me the water pipe, its bowl freshly packed with pulverized narcotics. He clicks the lighter. “It’s not like you’ll see the face of God,” he says, “but it does sort of turn your legs all warm and rubbery.”
    I fill my lungs and flash back to