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 My undergraduate life at Rutgers was as variegated as most other periods, but the sense of novelty and invigorating pleasure is what I most recall, or would most like to recall—having so much time to spend with strange, new books, meeting (sometimes strange) new friends. Those years offered an intellectual and emotional context where curiosity could be indulged, ideas tested, attitudes explored. My instructors were a group of brilliant, often charming, and highly individualized men and women, and when I tally the roster now—Richard Poirier, David Kalstone, Marius Bewley, Tom Edwards, Paul Fussell, George Dardess, Dan Howard, Julian Moynahan, Jack Spector, Maurice Charney, John Huntington, Rene Webber, Katharine Jobes, Alicia Ostriker—I am grateful for how many wonderful critics, writers, and educators lectured to or chatted with my scruffy self. It was the sheer revisibility of perception that first impressed me about my studies, and since I was a neophyte, I was under no obligation to be cautious or coy about beguiling, half-baked ideas, or about antiquities that could be endlessly reanimated, debunked or reconfigured. A morning lecture on why Aristotle’s notions of plot were still powerful gave way to an afternoon seminar (with another instructor) about why Aristotle was tedious and irrelevant. And then would come other mornings and afternoons. I loved my English courses; art history and philosophy classes were special treats as well: campus architecture, New Brunswick sunsets, and the hamster-like scurrying of my mind took on unsuspected contours and tracings after a week studying Neoclassicism or Impressionism, Descartes or Kant.
Many of us could be disciplined (and probably should have been more so), but lingering over ideas, drifting and daydreaming, was no less essential. There were days when I drifted too far, and found myself in class having to survive by my wits; that has made me rather tolerant of those who sometimes do likewise. But these were also the 60s; pop culture and a fascination with paradox were everywhere—The Beatles, Jorge Luis Borges, Muhammad Ali, and Robert Crumb seemed to be adding new steps to everyone’s cultural choreography. “Serious play,” a slippery formulation used by some Renaissance humanists to describe mental work, was very much the order of the day for undergraduates and graduate students alike. My twin brother, with whom I was close and have over the years become even more so, was busy exploring his own version of the university landscape. My daily companions, discovered in classes, dormitory life, the campus literary magazine, student government, or just hanging around, were a diverse crew from different departments and of various temperaments—cynical, sentimental, idealistic, perversely ingenious—but all provoked delight and affection. I was also lucky to fall in with a group of English PhD students, and long evenings spent laughing over books, music, and mental games made continuing on to graduate school seem like a very attractive proposition.
I am, of course, excluding a great deal here—frustrations and misunderstandings both petty and important, fulfilling and failed friendships and affairs, cringe-provoking self-indulgences and the looming reality of more mature academic responsibility, and above all the grim social and political upheavals that surrounded, and at times reshaped, the experience of those years. But I dedicate these few hundred words to what I most want to recall: the complex pleasures and challenges that helped me find what mattered to me, a field of possibility that would not, like Little Nemo’s Slumberland, disappear in the morning light but which, however qualified, still remains as an underlying motivation for the scholarship and teaching I have enjoyed at other universities, and now again at Rutgers, ever since.
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Editor’s Note: Ron Levao graduated from Rutgers College in 1970 and began graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, that same year. He joined the faculty at Rutgers University in 1989.
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