Listen to the full piece here:
Cambridge, MA — I entered this enclave of learning over Anderson Memorial Bridge. A pillar on the far side stated in stately stone:
The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world.
– Wisdom of Solomon 6:24
Morning traffic moved slowly and I had a good look at the Charles river glimmering below in the summer light, Weld Boat House, the broad spread of red-brick buildings with their white petit-four towers climbing into the blue sky. As we rolled over the bridge I caught sight of a graffiti scrawled on some bricks:
World is a fuck
I chuckled at the chutzpah of this person who had dared to scrawl those words on the hallowed brick, offering their own vision — no doubt the product of many years of study and contemplation at Harvard — and daring the wise to contradict them. They had been in such a guilty rush that they had forgotten to prepend the “The” which would have given their world-changing wisdom the gramatically-balanced gravitas it deserved.
Big Bang-like, it all started with a fuck.
—
I stayed across from the Harvard campus at Irving House, formerly a place where students boarded but now a bed and breakfast. But it retained that rooming house feel our forebears would have known: no elevator and the rooms shared bathrooms down the hall. The walls were decorated with black and white photos from the Newport Folk Festival in the 1960s and Pride and Peace flags waved brightly from the front of the old wooden building.
Framed on the wall was a humorous map showing the world as a large central landmass of Cambridge with smaller surrounding territories of Manhattan, Berkeley, Los Angeles. The rest of the world was shown as oceans inhabited by fearsome sea monsters. It is of course the Cambridge-centric take on the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover showing Manhattan in fine detail and rest of the country as a wasteland until you reach the Pacific Ocean.
Because I came of age in Berkeley, California, I know this world intimately. These are the people who hung out in coffee shops with me, perused used bookstores and got arrested with me at protests. It is one of the worlds that formed me and though I moved on and it is no longer the center of my world, its values are deeply embedded in me.
But there are others too. My ancestors were a jumbled mix: there were doctors, an immigrant who became an industrialist, a journalist who migrated from the East Coast to California on bicycle, hard-working, long-suffering Irish stock that toiled in Nebraska and Kansas. There are high achievers, ne’er-do-wells and some outsiders like myself who took a more meandering path.
I am on the East Coast now for a reunion with my siblings. One thing I share with my sisters is that none of us were willing to stay in the place we were set upon this earth. We have all lived abroad and now we all live in different countries. And the life partners we chose were all born in other countries, people whose first language wasn’t English but Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese or Kiwi. We all sought something more, something different.
I love life as it is with all its attendant contradictions. It’s not hard for me to find the bright side. Life doesn’t have to be embellished to be beautiful. I don’t need to sugarcoat it. I like what’s lofty and what’s low.
I celebrate erudition, creativity, accomplishment. But wisdom is remembering that it all started with a fuck.
Subscribe to Little Epiphanies newsletter here: https://www.kevincarrelfooter.com/join/
Like this? Share it with a friend:
Leave a Reply