Why I didn’t get a Magna at Harvard

 

Typically, I broke all the rules. Didn’t cite what other critics said, 
because they had no understanding, and I was going deeper than 
anyone else had gone. No footnotes. No plagiarism either. CLGS. 

What I learned from being an English major at Harvard. My two best 20th Century writers were Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wrote in my senior thesis about both of them, their two best books. I considered them absolutely equal in talent, beautiful, born brilliant.

I had detected a sex difference worth writing about. Not about gender hierarchy. About the relation between sex and time as a dimension. Women are all about now, this moment. Men are about the arc of time, the span of life. I loved both books lavishly, but I came down on the side of, uh, no one. Just the revelation that men and women are different.

My two graders were women. Not professors. PhD candidates. They kicked me apart for having no footnotes, no other authority beyond myself to legitimize my weird theory. I accepted their ruling. Didn’t much care at that point. Cum Laude General Studies. The Harvard stamp of disapproval. But I did share my senior thesis with a woman I knew, a hotshot Law School student dating a friend of mine, and I asked her to read what I’d submitted because I could trust her honest take on it.. Amazingly, she read it right away, at a party we were both attending. She came back to me after the read and said, “This is fucking brilliant.”

It’s always been this way. I don’t actually have my Harvard diploma anymore. With its shameful General Studies words. It’s somewhere in Vegas, with a onetime friend who promised to return it and never did. Why I also don’t own my Mercersburg diploma, Cum Laude Society certificate, or class rings from Mercersburg, Harvard, or Cornell. I just don’t belong. Anywhere.




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