The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [171]
I haven't thought about it.
Well, you ought to, you've got to go at it carefully.
His first self-assertion. To hell with it.
Well, now look, Hearn, we get along pretty well, so don't cream it for me, I mean a fellow's chances can be hurt by his roommate, so don't do anything excessive, you know what I mean.
For the first year Hearn has little chance to do anything excessive. The skids are not greased that smoothly. He bogs down, sees his roommate seldom, spends nearly all his afternoons in lab and his nights studying. He makes himself a schedule which charts everything down to the fifteen minutes he can allow himself to read the comic pages on Sunday morning, and the movie he can see on Saturday night. He drifts through the long afternoons, copying the changes on the thermometer in his flask, and marking beside it the variations in the hydrometer. There is a nerve in the head of the frog which he is always severing. On the fourth attempt he nibbles successfully with his scalpel at the desiccated preserved flesh of the frog head until the nerve glistens thinly, freed like a tenuous wire of spittle. In his triumph, he feels depressed. Do I really want to do this?
In the lecture rooms, despite himself, he drowses through class. The voice of the assistant professor with the steel-rimmed glasses and the bony scientist's face laps fuzzily at his ear. His eyes close.
Gentlemen, I would like you to consider the phenomenon of the kelp. Nereocystis lütkeana, macrocystis pyrifera, pelagophycus porra, he writes on the blackboard. They are a very distinctive form of marine life, consider this: they have no roots, no leaves, they receive no light from the sun. Under the water the giant kelp form veritable jungles of plant life where they live without movement, absorbing their nutrition from the ocean medium.
The bourgeois of the plant species, the student next to him murmurs, and Hearn is awake, startled by the chord of recognition, of excitement. He has almost phrased it himself.
It is only in storms, the professor says, that they are washed ashore; normally we must think of them as living in the dense tangle of marine jungles, stationary, absorbed in their own nutriment. These species had to remain behind when other aquatic plants moved onto land. Their brown color, which is an advantage in the murky under-seas jungles, would be fatal in the intense illumination of land. The professor holds up a withered brown frond with a ropelike stalk. Pass it around, men.
A student holds up his hand. Sir, what is their main use?
Oh, they have been used many ways. Essentially they are fertilizer. Potash deposits can be extracted.
But the moments like that come too seldom. He is empty and hungering for knowledge, the vessel that must be filled.
Slowly he gets around, meets a few people, starts going to places. In the spring of his freshman year he goes out of curiosity to a meeting of the Harvard Dramatic Club. The president is ambitious and the discussion of plans is elaborate.
It's completely absurd when you stop to think of it. It's absolutely ridiculous having us bat out these silly musical jangles, we've got to broaden our scope.
I know a Radcliffe girl who's studied Stanislavsky, someone drawls. If we had a decent program we could get her in, and have some decent training in the method. Oh, lovely, let's do Chekhov.
A slim youth with horn-rimmed glasses is on his feet, demanding