greek system
I had the biggest laugh the other day, when I finally understood a conversation that happened 15 years ago.
It was 1995, and I was on my Grand Tour, celebrating my Master's Degree with a trip from Muenster to Frankfurt to Prague to Bayreuth to Zurich to Rome to Como to London to the Cotswolds to Salisbury and back to London. On the train from Salisbury to London I spotted the only other person roughly my age and temperament, an Oxonian named Emily. She too was getting a degree in literature. We immediately launched into a lengthy conversation about books and school and travel.
I was trying to tell her something involving Phi Kappa Chi, but was aware that fraternities and sororities are uniquely American. (In England the closest thing you get is maybe the "colleges" of a university, which are much more like a fraternity house than, say, the "College of Arts and Sciences" is at Baylor U, but even then it's more a scholastic association, of which dinners and brotherhood are byproducts.) I wasn't entirely sure that I knew the situation in England or that she knew the situation in America, and I always enjoy this kind of exchange of information, so I asked her if she knew much about the Greek system at American schools.
She said she didn't know much about it but had read a bit, and was somewhat acquainted with the whole thing because of the part it plays in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History. I exclaimed, because I'd just purchased the book about a year before, but had never gotten around to reading it. My former roommate Shawn Floyd had recommended it to me as highly enjoyable and insightful and perceptive (and also I think he had kind of a crush on Donna Tartt based on her insight and perception and back leaf photo — didn't we all). So we digressed for a moment about the book, which Emily also recommended enthusiastically. Then we went on briefly about whatever fraternity thing it was, and the conversation moved on as conversations do.
When I got back from the trip, some weeks later, I picked up the book and got a few pages into it before something distracted me, and I never picked it back up. But I caught that a main character, Bunny, whose actual name was Edmund, was killed and that this was the story of it. I thought that this would finally be a book that captured the quiddity of the fraternity experience, albeit with a dash of East Coast cliché: Bunny, really?
Years passed, and I always intended to read the dang thing, but never got around to it. Just a week or so ago, it was time. I got it off the shelf, remarked to myself that the innovative clear-plastic cover had probably seemed like a good idea in 1992 but the white lettering on the back now looked like Sanskrit and was coming off on my fingers, and began reading.
Partway through the book, I reached a phrase that reminded me of the conversation with Emily, and I laughed out loud on and off for hours. The book is about several posh students who are part of an elite Greek class, with a professor who insists that they drop all their other courses and take everything with him. The students learn Greek and Latin, and discuss philosophy and culture and the nature of beauty, as our main character, an outsider and the son of a gas-station attendant, tries like mad to fake it and fit in. Is this what she thought "the Greek system" was at American schools?
What I would give for a video of that conversation now, with me sharing some facet of my fraternity experience, and Emily nodding along — what on earth could she have been picturing in her head?
It was 1995, and I was on my Grand Tour, celebrating my Master's Degree with a trip from Muenster to Frankfurt to Prague to Bayreuth to Zurich to Rome to Como to London to the Cotswolds to Salisbury and back to London. On the train from Salisbury to London I spotted the only other person roughly my age and temperament, an Oxonian named Emily. She too was getting a degree in literature. We immediately launched into a lengthy conversation about books and school and travel.
I was trying to tell her something involving Phi Kappa Chi, but was aware that fraternities and sororities are uniquely American. (In England the closest thing you get is maybe the "colleges" of a university, which are much more like a fraternity house than, say, the "College of Arts and Sciences" is at Baylor U, but even then it's more a scholastic association, of which dinners and brotherhood are byproducts.) I wasn't entirely sure that I knew the situation in England or that she knew the situation in America, and I always enjoy this kind of exchange of information, so I asked her if she knew much about the Greek system at American schools.
She said she didn't know much about it but had read a bit, and was somewhat acquainted with the whole thing because of the part it plays in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History. I exclaimed, because I'd just purchased the book about a year before, but had never gotten around to reading it. My former roommate Shawn Floyd had recommended it to me as highly enjoyable and insightful and perceptive (and also I think he had kind of a crush on Donna Tartt based on her insight and perception and back leaf photo — didn't we all). So we digressed for a moment about the book, which Emily also recommended enthusiastically. Then we went on briefly about whatever fraternity thing it was, and the conversation moved on as conversations do.
When I got back from the trip, some weeks later, I picked up the book and got a few pages into it before something distracted me, and I never picked it back up. But I caught that a main character, Bunny, whose actual name was Edmund, was killed and that this was the story of it. I thought that this would finally be a book that captured the quiddity of the fraternity experience, albeit with a dash of East Coast cliché: Bunny, really?
Years passed, and I always intended to read the dang thing, but never got around to it. Just a week or so ago, it was time. I got it off the shelf, remarked to myself that the innovative clear-plastic cover had probably seemed like a good idea in 1992 but the white lettering on the back now looked like Sanskrit and was coming off on my fingers, and began reading.
Partway through the book, I reached a phrase that reminded me of the conversation with Emily, and I laughed out loud on and off for hours. The book is about several posh students who are part of an elite Greek class, with a professor who insists that they drop all their other courses and take everything with him. The students learn Greek and Latin, and discuss philosophy and culture and the nature of beauty, as our main character, an outsider and the son of a gas-station attendant, tries like mad to fake it and fit in. Is this what she thought "the Greek system" was at American schools?
What I would give for a video of that conversation now, with me sharing some facet of my fraternity experience, and Emily nodding along — what on earth could she have been picturing in her head?
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