Head Work at Harvard
Daniel Philpott
January 1, 1996
In Harvard Square, people have purposes-dissevered, mutually unnoticed purposes-and they dart around in lonely eccentricity. Coiffured men and women in suits whisk into tinted glass doors etched with the names of firms, motioning to shake clients' hands. At the newsstand, other hands exchange money for the New York Review of Books. Hands gesticulating, strolling together, are the English department chairman, wearing a tweed jacket and plaid tie, and a young assistant professor, whose deconstruction of Nathaniel Hawthorne positions her well for tenure. And waving a Bible in his hand, a street preacher roars repentance. The Square's coming and going, its ceaseless streaming in and out of taxis, restaurants, subway station, banks, and revolving doors-this is the movement of molecules under a microscope, oblivious, sometimes colliding. Which of these characters is the most eccentric? If asked this in a poll, I suspect most ordinary Americans-ones who would walk through the Square as commuters or shoppers, moving in their quotidian courses in and out of banks, stores, and firms-would select the academics. In this nation of John Dewey, William James, and Emerson, of pragmatism, of results and experience, we elevate the one who produces, invents, makes money, directs, builds, develops technology, meets needs, waits on somebody, or does someone's laundry-the hands that are productive. Ordinary Americans find reading on a Sunday afternoon unexceptional, but they find peculiar the pipes-the pipes running across the low ceiling of the basement of Harvard's Widener Library, D Section, where bare light bulbs dimly expose concrete floors. Or the dust-the dust of archives. Or the hours monitoring a test tube. Or the rereadings of Hegel. ...
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