Persist In

"The storm center of all this grading, shoveling, hauling and hammering is the college campus itself. A clean modern factory, brick and glass and big windows, already three-quarters built, is being finished in a hysterical hurry. (The construction noises are such that in some classrooms the professors can hardly be heard.) When the factory is fully operational, it will be able to process twenty thousand graduates. But, in less than ten years, it will have to cope with forty of fifty thousand. So then everything will be torn down again and built up twice as tall.
However, it is arguable that by that time the campus will be cut off from the outside world by its own parking lots, which will then from an impenetrable forest of cars abandoned in despair by the students during the week-long traffic jams of the near future. Even now, the lots are as big as the campus itself and so full that you have to drive around from one to another in search of the last little space. Today George is lucky. There is room for him on the lot nearest his classroom."


"George has been trying to train himself, lately, to recognize his student's cars. (He is continually starting these self-improvement projects: sometimes it's memory training, sometimes a new diet, sometimes just a vow to read some unreadable Hundredth Best Book. He seldom perseveres in any of them for long.)"


"What do they think they're up to, here? Well there is the official answer: preparing themselves for life which means a job and security in which to raise children to prepare themselves for life which means a job and security in which. But, despite all the vocational advisers, the pamphlets pointing out to them what the technical training-pharmacology, let's say, or accountancy, or the varied opportunities offered by the vast field of electronics-there are still, incredibly enough, quite a few of them who persist in writing opens, novels, plays! Goofy from lack of sleep, they scribble in snatched moments between classes, part-time employment and their married lives. Their brains are dizzy with words as they mop out an operating room, sort mail at a post office, fix baby's bottle, fry hamburgers. And somewhere, in the midst of their servitude to the must-be, the mad might-be whispers to them to live, know and experience--what? Marvels!"