Chapter: AT the University I had the good fortune to come immediately under the
influence of a brilliant and inspiring young scholar. Gaston Cleric had
arrived in Lincoln only a few weeks earlier than I, to begin his work as
head of the Latin Department. He came West at the suggestion of his
physicians, his health having been enfeebled by a long illness in Italy.
When I took my entrance examinations he was my examiner, and my course was
arranged under his supervision.

I did not go home for my first summer vacation, but stayed in Lincoln,
working off a year's Greek, which had been my only condition on entering
the Freshman class. Cleric's doctor advised against his going back to New
England, and except for a few weeks in Colorado, he, too, was in Lincoln
all that summer. We played tennis, read, and took long walks together. I
shall always look back on that time of mental awakening as one of the
happiest in my life. Gaston Cleric introduced me to the world of ideas;
when one first enters that world everything else fades for a time, and all
that went before is as if it had not been. Yet I found curious survivals;
some of the figures of my old life seemed to be waiting for me in the new.

In those days there were many serious young men among the students who had
come up to the University from the farms and the little towns scattered
over the thinly settled State. Some of those boys came straight from the
cornfields with only a summer's wages in their pockets, hung on through
the four years, shabby and underfed, and completed the course by really
heroic self-sacrifice. Our instructors were oddly assorted; wandering
pioneer school-teachers, stranded ministers of the Gospel, a few
enthusiastic young men just out of graduate schools. There was an
atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the
young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years
before.

Our personal life was as free as that of our instructors. There were no
college dormitories; we lived where we could and as we could. I took rooms
with an old couple, early settlers in Lincoln, who had married off their
children and now lived quietly in their house at the edge of town, near
the open country. The house was inconveniently situated for students, and
on that account I got two rooms for the price of one. My bedroom,
originally a linen closet, was unheated and was barely large enough to
contain my cot bed, but it enabled me to call the other room my study. The
dresser, and the great walnut wardrobe which held all my clothes, even my
hats and shoes, I had pushed out of the way, and I considered them
non-existent, as children eliminate incongruous objects when they are
playing house. I worked at a commodious green-topped table placed directly
in front of the west window which looked out over the prairie. In the
corner at my right were all my books, in shelves I had made and painted
myself. On the blank wall at my left the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper
was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German
scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from
abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theater at
Pompeii, which he had given me from his collection.

When I sat at work I half faced a deep, upholstered chair which stood at
the end of my table, its high back against the wall. I had bought it with
great care. My instructor sometimes looked in upon me when he was out for
an evening tramp, and I noticed that he was more likely to linger and
become talkative if I had a comfortable chair for him to sit in, and if he
found a bottle of Benedictine and plenty of the kind of cigarettes he
liked, at his elbow. He was, I had discovered, parsimonious about small
expenditures--a trait absolutely inconsistent with his general character.
Sometimes when he came he was silent and moody, and after a few sarcastic
remarks went away again, to tramp the streets of Lincoln, which were
almost as quiet and oppressively domestic as those of Black Hawk. Again,
he would sit until nearly midnight, talking about Latin and English
poetry, or telling me about his long stay in Italy.

I can give no idea of the peculiar charm and vividness of his talk. In a
crowd he was nearly always silent. Even for his classroom he had no
platitudes, no stock of professorial anecdotes. When he was tired his
lectures were clouded, obscure, elliptical; but when he was interested
they were wonderful. I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a
great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative
talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of
personal communication. How often I have seen him draw his dark brows
together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the
carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his
brain. He could bring the drama of antique life before one out of the
shadows--white figures against blue backgrounds. I shall never forget his
face as it looked one night when he told me about the solitary day he
spent among the sea temples at Paestum: the soft wind blowing through the
roofless columns, the birds flying low over the flowering marsh grasses,
the changing lights on the silver, cloud-hung mountains. He had willfully
stayed the short summer night there, wrapped in his coat and rug, watching
the constellations on their path down the sky until "the bride of old
Tithonus" rose out of the sea, and the mountains stood sharp in the dawn.
It was there he caught the fever which held him back on the eve of his
departure for Greece and of which he lay ill so long in Naples. He was
still, indeed, doing penance for it.

I remember vividly another evening, when something led us to talk of
Dante's veneration for Virgil. Cleric went through canto after canto of
the "Commedia," repeating the discourse between Dante and his "sweet
teacher," while his cigarette burned itself out unheeded between his long
fingers. I can hear him now, speaking the lines of the poet Statius, who
spoke for Dante: "_I was famous on earth with the name which endures
longest and honors most. The seeds of my ardor were the sparks from that
divine flame whereby more than a thousand have kindled; I speak of the
AEneid, mother to me and nurse to me in poetry._"

Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about
myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself
for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me
with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it.
While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric
brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found
myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.
They stood out strengthened and simplified now, like the image of the
plough against the sun. They were all I had for an answer to the new
appeal. I begrudged the room that Jake and Otto and Russian Peter took up
in my memory, which I wanted to crowd with other things. But whenever my
consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within
it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new
experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to
wonder whether they were alive anywhere else, or how.

 At the University in Lincoln, Jim meets Gaston Cleric, who is his mentor in the Latin Department and who arrived at the same time he did. Jim stays in Lincoln during the summer studying Greek, and he spends a lot of time socializing with Gaston, who helps effect his mental awakening. During that time, the University is still very new, and it is full of earnest young men from the farms and enthusiastic, young instructors. Jim lives in a small cramped apartment where Gaston used to come visit him to talk about poetry and Italy. Gaston talks very vividly and poetically, and Jim imagines that he might have been a poet if he didn't waste so much creativity talking to other people. Jim particularly remembers one conversation they had about Dante's admiration for his teacher Virgil. Although he admires Gaston, Jim knows that he cannot be a scholar because he loves the people and places of his past so much. He has very vivid memories of them sometimes.

