deep blazing fires whose presence I could
feel below there was something irritating to profs and disturbing to
those who paid them. These profs, I thought confusedly, had about as
much to do with life as had that little "hero of God" who had cut such a
pitiful figure when he came close to the harbor. And more pitiful still
were the "polers," the chaps who were working for high marks. They
thought of marks and little else. They thrived on crust, these fellows,
cramming themselves with words and rules, with facts, dates, theorems
and figures, in order to become professors themselves and teach the same
stuff to other "polers." There was a story of one of them who stayed in
his room and crammed all through the big football game of the season,
and at night when told we had won remarked blithely,

"Oh, that's splendid! I think I'll go out and have a pretzel!"

God, what a life, I thought to myself! None of that for me! And so I
left the "polers."

But now in my restless groping around for realities in life that would
thrill me, things that I could write about, I began trying to test
things out by talking about them with my friends. What did a fellow want
most in life--what to do, what to get and to be? What was there really
in business beside the making of money? In medicine, law and the other
professions, in art, in getting married, in this idea of God and a
heaven, or in the idea I vaguely felt now filtering through the nation,
that a man owed his life to his country in time of peace as in time of
war. The harbor with rough heavy jolts had long ago started me thinking
about questions of this kind. Now I tackled them again and tried to talk
about them.

And at once I found I was "queering" myself. For these genial companions
of mine had laid a most decided taboo upon all topics of this kind. They
did so because to discuss them meant to openly think and feel, and to
think or feel intensely, about anything but athletics and other things
prescribed by the crowd, was bad form to say the least.

Bad form to talk in any such fashion of what we were going to make of
our lives. Nobody cared to warm up on the subject. Many had nothing at
all in sight and put off the whole idea as a bore. Others were already
fixed, they had positions waiting in law and business offices, in
factories, mines, mills and banks, and they took these positions as
settled and sure.

"Why?" I would argue impatiently. "How do you know it's what you want