From a Student's Memoirs

I did not sleep that night, thinking of my first day at the college. By the time eight o'clock drew near and the hour of the first assembly came, four hours had passed since my rising, in which I had never ceased moving from one place to another and from one question to the next, until I felt my strength had failed me from the very start of the day. So I thanked God for the interval of quiet we had been promised, and climbed the stairs heavily to where I found the girls had preceded me to their seats.

The hall is spacious, almost bare of furniture, except for the piano and the picture of the Gioconda on the wall facing the entrance, and drooping curtains that fall over the great glass front and soften the sharpness of the sun's rays, while casting upon the walls shadows of their bright orange color.

I felt the pleasure of warmth in an elegant atmosphere — for all its simplicity — and when the directress stood up to give her talk, a delicate smile upon her lips, I saw that she was a part of this place which unites simplicity and elegance. I fell to contemplating her poised stance, her bare arms, her trim dress, and to wondering how this woman, given over to learning and teaching, had remained withal a woman who attends to her outward appearance and preserves its grace. Absorbed in my own thoughts, I did not listen to what she was saying, until my ear was struck, in the course of her talk, by a remark that roused my attention: "When one of you coats her face with powder, let her choose the suitable shade... let her apply it with sound taste, a light dusting that does not take away the freshness of the face. And let her hold her mirror to the light, so that she may see the color of her face at close range, and see the powder distributed evenly over her face and her neck..."

I left the hall stumbling over the trains of disappointment, as though I had committed a fault by listening to a talk in which mirror and powders were mentioned. And when I spoke to Nada — she was a year ahead of me on the ladder of university study — of what was running through my mind, she raised her eyebrows and said, laughing: "And what crime is there in that? Do we not talk of these matters among ourselves? Why then should we not discuss them openly, in a talk intended for guidance? You are here to rid yourself of your old traditions, which deny frankness and prefer secretiveness and circumlocution. It is as if you believed that addresses can treat only of ideal, fanciful subjects with grand titles, and may not condescend to discuss the reality we live in, which is worthier of study than fancy."

In the evening we gathered for a party of merriment and acquaintance, which made us forget for a while what we had heard the whole day long of information about how we should study, how we should use the library, how we must conduct ourselves, and how to choose the subject of our specialization.

And when my companion and I entered the bedroom of modern dimensions, we had nothing to talk of but that historic evening, in which we had come in touch with girl students from different circles and races, gathered under one roof by the pursuit of learning.

Loris — the third of us in the room — began to describe the students she had come to know, and to compare the representatives of certain neighboring countries in bearing and in accent. As for Nada, she had been drawn to the Western elements in the company of students: that Turkish girl with the flowing hair and the musical voice, and those newly come from Germany and Russia, carrying to the East strange opinions on the philosophy of living. As for me, I declared that I had been occupied with comparing the girls who represent different regions of our small homeland, which we know only by means of maps crowded with lines and short on clarity. And I launched into a description of my impressions, claiming that the daughters of the North are marked by heads held high as their mountains; they speak in a stately accent abounding in full, raised vowels, and in their speech is force and stubbornness — the stubbornness, no doubt, of the rocks from which they descend. Quite opposite are the daughters of the South, low of voice and of glance, like the hills in which the western range comes to its end. As for the daughters of the middle regions, their temper stands midway between North and South...

I wanted to go on with the description when Nada cut me short, saying: "There you are, back in your fanciful world that I warned you against this morning.

Where did you get this social philosophy? Is it the child of your imagination, or the fruit of your stray readings? But..." she said, raising her finger in challenge: "I would have you be frank enough to deliver these views to them face to face... Do you think you have advanced that far?"

The sayings of Nada and her like worked upon me, and the mania of the scientific method overtook me. I saw myself borne along by the current, taken by the magic of the atmosphere — the atmosphere of science, which alone held sway, monopolizing the attention of the girl students as it monopolized the attention of their fellow students at the university close by.

Formerly I made no distinction between science and literature; now I began to see the wide gulf that divides them. And my passion for science grew when I became certain that I should never be able to specialize in one of its branches, because my earlier preparation had been literary, weak of foundation, above all on the side of mathematics and the sciences. So I resolved to study what sciences I could within the narrow scope that lay open before me.

And I promised myself that if scientific specialization escaped me, the acquiring of the scientific spirit and contact with the secrets of the scientific method should not... I merged with a number of the science students, and it pleased us to form for ourselves what we called a scientific stamp.

Our speech must be measured, with precision and verification in it. Every statement we hear must be measured by the laboratory's measure and tested with its instruments. Every book we read must be scientific, or else it deserves to be thrown into the wastebasket.

We took to disdaining literature when we set it beside science. And we disdained above all the literature of sentiment and loftiness, and the gaudy oratorical literature with which our books, old and new, and our newspapers and magazines were teeming.

And idols we used to worship collapsed before us — the idol of sentiment, and the idol of imagination, and the idols of delicacy, femininity, and coyness: all the idols of the Middle Ages.

Our writing had been imitative, parrot-like; it became personal. It had been oratorical and fervid, or soft and musical; it became calm, dry, concise. We used to employ abstract, vague words; we came to choose the words of science and the laboratory, distinguished by precision and clarity. And we took to pausing at every word we wrote or spoke, and our pen grew perplexed, hesitant, wanting inspiration.

Each of us, if asked her subject of specialization, would say it was medicine, or biology, or physics, or chemistry. Specialization in literature and its kind was met with astonishment and wonder, and its owner would try to find excuses for her foolish choice.

But the circles of debate did not lack one girl, come from western Europe — from the dawning-place of light — who showed her contempt for the theories of modern science and scorned to make a god of it, for she was specializing in politics and history, and hated mathematics with an earnest hatred.

And an Eastern colleague would oppose her — a student of chemistry — striking the table with her hand, with the earnestness of one assured, as she said: "I am drawn by facts, not by fancies. I want to study real things, that can be touched with the hand. As for literature, I find no practical use whatever in studying it."

I felt some change in my position when the students' magazine appeared, containing a droll little story which I learned, after some pains, to contain a veiled satire of certain scientific theories — and its author was our girl specializing in politics, come from beyond the seas.

And in the same issue appeared verse of skillful composition, without a signature, which we discovered afterward to be the work of the physics teacher, who was accomplished in the art of acting and in ever so many of the arts of the hand, besides poetry and physics. At last... here was one of the pillars of modern science who did not disown art nor disdain poetry.

Then I resolved to bring out a counter-magazine, and in composition class I proposed that the subject of the next debate be: which is the stronger token of civilization, the flourishing of science or the flourishing of literature?

I took the side of literature, and delivered my defense with fervor and in a literary style elegant of phrase but limited in ideas.

My opponent did the opposite. She came with a long list of proofs and evidences — I know not where she gathered them — proofs showing the merit of science and its glorious feats: how, by the scientific method, it commands all the faces of knowledge, and, by invention and discovery, all the conveniences of modern life. And she closed by saying, after the manner of the people of the nineteenth century, that it is the magic power that will turn our earth into a heaven.

And although each of us strayed from her subject and misunderstood and mispresented it, I saw all those present give their votes to my opponent. The defeat pained me... and perhaps from that time on I have remained perplexed between science and literature, and have settled upon neither.