Library. “Standing in front of it on the path or gazing at it from the library, it looks pretty lumpy,” he would say to incoming freshmen. “A bunch of massive golden shapes, quite attractive, but meaningless, and mostly good for photographing small children in. But go out of the gate onto Quincy Street and turn left, and look back through the thirty-fourth gap in the second set of railings. Suddenly you will see a splendid and voluptuous work.”
He’d ask the students, “What’s the moral?” His answer: If you don’t understand something, the reason may be that you are simply standing in the wrong place. “So if you don’t understand a theorem in physics or a passage from
Ulysses
or a Schoenberg trio or your roommate’s politics, remember Henry Moore,” he’d say, “and try a new perspective.”
My move from the South Side to Milton had given me some insight into Dean Knowles’s point. Though less jarring, so had the transition from Milton to Harvard. I had learned how culture explains why people sometimes draw different conclusions from the same information, and I continued to be fascinated by the complexities of what unites us and what divides us. I’ve always tried to be a student of humanity, which required a much broader horizon, an unpredictable canvas, an exposure to disparate environments, ideas, and perspectives. I decided I needed more practice at understanding and transcending differences, and I needed it before launching a career.
I was also not quite sure exactly what career I wanted. That was not unusual for college graduates in 1978, but less so for Harvard graduates. My classmates were driven and focused, with careers and, in many cases, pathways through life that already seemed set in stone. They were on their way to medical school or graduate school or jobs in finance, industry, or the arts. I was more flexible. Business school seemed like a good option because I liked management,but I was really not strong enough in math to be a compelling candidate. Nor was I ready to commit to law school, which one friend described as “the great sloth bin of the undecided.” I considered a calling in the clergy and even filled out an application for Union Seminary in New York. But I wasn’t certain about that path either.
Another possibility arose when a career counselor told me about the Michael Clark Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship. Michael was the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York. After graduating from Harvard, Michael went on to explore the anthropology of New Guinea and brought home extraordinary artifacts and information about the Papuan people. He also wrote beautifully about how the experience had affected him personally. Tragically, and under unclear circumstances, he perished on a return trip to New Guinea. In his memory, his family established the fellowship to enable an individual to spend a year in a distinctly non-Western culture. It embodied the virtues of discovery and perspective that had become important to me, so I applied. The stipend itself was just enough money to get there and back—presumably so no one could move into an Intercontinental Hotel. For fellows, the bracing realities of Third World countries would not include room service. The point was to make your way in unfamiliar settings.
Applicants had to stipulate where they wanted to travel and why. Having never been overseas, I had no frame of reference. I chose Sudan because I had writtenabout it when interning at banks in New York and Boston during the summers in college. More than twenty years later, Sudan, and Darfur in particular, would be known for its bloody civil war, which led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in memory. But when I was applying for the fellowship, all I knew was that Sudan was the largest country in Africa as well as the poorest. It was in many ways still “uncharted” and a focus of increasing attention from international development
He’d ask the students, “What’s the moral?” His answer: If you don’t understand something, the reason may be that you are simply standing in the wrong place. “So if you don’t understand a theorem in physics or a passage from
Ulysses
or a Schoenberg trio or your roommate’s politics, remember Henry Moore,” he’d say, “and try a new perspective.”
My move from the South Side to Milton had given me some insight into Dean Knowles’s point. Though less jarring, so had the transition from Milton to Harvard. I had learned how culture explains why people sometimes draw different conclusions from the same information, and I continued to be fascinated by the complexities of what unites us and what divides us. I’ve always tried to be a student of humanity, which required a much broader horizon, an unpredictable canvas, an exposure to disparate environments, ideas, and perspectives. I decided I needed more practice at understanding and transcending differences, and I needed it before launching a career.
I was also not quite sure exactly what career I wanted. That was not unusual for college graduates in 1978, but less so for Harvard graduates. My classmates were driven and focused, with careers and, in many cases, pathways through life that already seemed set in stone. They were on their way to medical school or graduate school or jobs in finance, industry, or the arts. I was more flexible. Business school seemed like a good option because I liked management,but I was really not strong enough in math to be a compelling candidate. Nor was I ready to commit to law school, which one friend described as “the great sloth bin of the undecided.” I considered a calling in the clergy and even filled out an application for Union Seminary in New York. But I wasn’t certain about that path either.
Another possibility arose when a career counselor told me about the Michael Clark Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship. Michael was the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York. After graduating from Harvard, Michael went on to explore the anthropology of New Guinea and brought home extraordinary artifacts and information about the Papuan people. He also wrote beautifully about how the experience had affected him personally. Tragically, and under unclear circumstances, he perished on a return trip to New Guinea. In his memory, his family established the fellowship to enable an individual to spend a year in a distinctly non-Western culture. It embodied the virtues of discovery and perspective that had become important to me, so I applied. The stipend itself was just enough money to get there and back—presumably so no one could move into an Intercontinental Hotel. For fellows, the bracing realities of Third World countries would not include room service. The point was to make your way in unfamiliar settings.
Applicants had to stipulate where they wanted to travel and why. Having never been overseas, I had no frame of reference. I chose Sudan because I had writtenabout it when interning at banks in New York and Boston during the summers in college. More than twenty years later, Sudan, and Darfur in particular, would be known for its bloody civil war, which led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in memory. But when I was applying for the fellowship, all I knew was that Sudan was the largest country in Africa as well as the poorest. It was in many ways still “uncharted” and a focus of increasing attention from international development
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