The following is a creative prose piece, aimed in part at the first-year undergraduates with memories before Princeton, inspired in part by the politics and stylistic free-consciousness of the “Camera Eye” in John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, and written in part towards a recovery of the impressions which I encountered when I first arrived on campus when my leftism was growing and changing when I was most open and vulnerable to growth and change.
“you were scared
but now the dark was all black again the lamp in the train and the sky and everything had a blueblack shade on it and She was telling a story about
Longago Beforetheworldsfair Beforeyouwereborn”
-John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel
Longago my father drove me to Princeton in his old Chevrolet truck it had empty cans on the floor they were falling through the hole sunken by rust through which I watched those cans fall into the endless flow of asphalt smelling the wood and dirt and straw and metal which fed the campfire next to tents once draped over the aluminum tent poles in the back seat which rattled and clanged those ear-fought sounds most of the way while the rubber struck rut on 380 casting a drone behind the otherwise silence of the hours-long drive and it was either a silent car ride or a loud car ride with him: ways there, silence, ways back, words, my words solipsistic and leftist and circular, his pulled either from Thoreau or directly from his ass. Four years ago the highways of Upstate New York – Southern Tier – fled down to Flemington and to Amwell and to Hopewell, far beyond the likes of places like Scranton and Stroudsburg and Easton, Penna, 31, Backroads, parkways, mainstreets: always a quick right, always miss it except that first time Princeton Road it said, and then Rosedale and then Elm. The truck had a hard time getting up that hill, but only after it made it. My father and I we got lost in the deep green of Central New Jersey which is a deceiving green of Central New Jersey because in the center there is no sense of North or South, or East or West. The directions scribbled on the back of a CD sleeve were right and the big houses and long driveways and paved roads, the homestead farms and charter schools and pharmaceutical complexes seemed right too. It was the first Sotheby signpost I had ever seen. I remember the drive just fine and it is the same each time I make it. The campus I saw first was November and cold, a route 604 onto a Nassau with a Holder tower standing tall over the empty trees, a campus not mine of the same senior year I would graduate wearing a cap which represented such pride in such distance I had achieved from my classmates, a campus with a Basquiat in the art museum, a Cannon Green and brick red and stone grey of some other impressionist layered with the ecstasies and doldrums of a kid with shortsighted instinct and falsified determination, a campus of an altogether far and different place. But I looked at it with a critical leftist eye and I look at it now with a critical leftist eye, much in-between. Princeton is no big city with no big trainyard. It is a place that won’t drown you but will draw you towards impressions and the impressions of others, impressions which soon enough change and multiply, illusions which become lost over time, but in a place like this the camera eye sees, blending and fading and forgetting until the longago parallels ultimately align once again. In John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, Mac is just a kid when he leaves rural Connecticut for Chicago and I was just a kid when I left Upstate New York for Princeton. Princeton is no big city with no big trainyard like Chicago and Mac’s father might’ve lost his job in Connecticut because a strike and his Uncle Tim who was a job printer might’ve taught Mac a thing or two about Marx and Gene Debs and the system and he might’ve given him some pamphlets to hand out on the streets and a beer before he left. But he left and left again and I left and left again, Mac with pamphlets in his hand and Marx in his brains headed for Duluth on the road from Detroit with some learned doctor seeking Truth and in his pocket a thing or two from the people he’d met and loved and learned from, some goodness in his heart and care for others in his soul, some lust, some regret, but still Mac. You see, it was the impressions he picked up, lost, and regained, the impressions he gave, took, and circulated in kind; these impressions are the stories of The 42nd Parallel, the camera eye which looks forwards backwards and within. Princeton, that old misogynist miser of a doctor seeking Truth, sent me places I had never imagined of going when I was a kid made me leave made me come back and grew me up to taking wide looks through the camera eye and critical leftist eye, much in-between. You learn here. You meet people here. You give, take, and lose impressions here. You take notice of the age-old parallels forming and colliding and realigning once again. You leave here. Just don’t do it right.
Write with your clothes on backwards. Spread your leftist pamphlets at Princeton and everywhere. Read the other articles in this one.
Cole Diehl
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