 
                         20060509.02

     It all comes back to me now, how much I was at loose
ends that spring of 1949, when I graduated from college just
three weeks shy of turning nineteen. I wanted to go to learn
French, but Prof. Andre Morize denied me the Fulbright to
France, because I couldn't speak the language.  To me that
had seemed the best possible reason to go.

     Elliot Perkins, the master of Lowell House where I had
lived for two years, thought my existence too intellectual,
too spiritual, - and urged me to spend some time "working
with ... (my) hands".  That advice comes back to me, every
time I install a toilet or a sink.  Elliot Perkins,
benevolent soothsayer that he was, predicted that though
"going up like a rocket", I would "come down like a stick."
The prediction did not come true.

     At the time of my initial enrollment, my freshman
adviser, a physicist whose last name was Hyde, - his first
name I can't recall, informed me that the administration
would like me to take a psychology test. I don't know what,
other than my youth, (I had just turned 16) alerted the
officials who reigned in University Hall to my possible
mental instability. Mr. Hyde said the examination was
voluntary, but that he recommended it; and who was I to
object.  I don't remember where the examination was given. I
would guess in some improvised basement office in one of the
buildings in the Yard. I was seated in a cubicle, given
pencil and paper and an instruction booklet. I remember the
inkblots, it was the first and the last time I ever
interpreted them; then a series of pictures of which there is
one that I have never forgotten, on which I made comments
that must have struck the examiners as lying outside the
normal. It was a picture, as I remember it now, of a scantily
clad woman in a seductive pose; my comment, straight from
 scripture was:

     28  but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman
     to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already
     in his heart.      (Matthew 5)

I have always thought that answer, though to my mind still
eminently appropriate, must have been interpreted by
those amateur Freudians as a sign of mental instability, if not
of mental illness. Perhaps it was. I am no longer frightened by
the issue. I suspect virtual adultery is harmless and may even
have some immunizing value against the real thing.

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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
