Chapter 32 first quarter

The autumn semester of 1954 has begun.On the neck of a not-so-beautiful marble statue of Venus placed in the front hall of the Humanities Building, someone used lipstick to blindly paint a red mouth mark of a kiss. On-campus parking is being discussed again on The Wendell Chronicle.Conscientious first-year students have penned in the margins of library books such helpful notes as "Depiction of Nature" or "Satire"; On the version of the book, a line was drawn under the difficult word oiseaux in purple ink, and the word "bird" was scrawled on it.The autumn wind blows the fallen leaves, blows them up and sticks them on one side of the latticed corridor from the Humanities Building to the Frieze Building.On a clear afternoon, the orange-brown monarch butterflies flapped their wings on the asphalt road and lawn again, and flew south lazily. Their black legs were not fully folded, and they hung low on their polka-dotted bodies. under.

The work of the academy is still going on.Some strenuous graduate students, accompanied by pregnant wives, were writing dissertations on Dostoevsky and Simone de Beauvoir.Literary departments still toiled under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were all great writers. Words like "conflict" and "style" are still in vogue.As always, the unproductive faculty succeeded as "production" by writing articles to comment on the writings of their more productive colleagues;Thus, an interesting, modest bonus offered to the accomplished Starr couple - art department babyface Christopher Starr and his young wife, Louise - made the handsome couple The couple had the rare opportunity to somehow gain permission to infiltrate East Germany to record postwar folk songs.Anthropology professor Tristram Vi Thomas ("Tom" to his friends) has been awarded $10,000 by the Mendeville Foundation for his research on the eating habits of Cuban fishermen and palm tree climbers .Another charity actually funded Dr. Budd von Faternfels to complete a "Catalogue of Monographs and Manuscripts of Recent Years Evaluating the Influence of Nietzsche's Followers on Modern Thought".Last but by no means least, a particularly generous prize was awarded to Dr. Rodolfo Aura, a renowned psychotherapist in Windell, to perform the so-called "finger-in-the-bowl" on ten thousand schoolchildren. "Test", let the child dip the index finger into several bowls of solution of different colors, and then measure and compare the length of the full finger and the length of the wet part, which are displayed in a variety of attractive charts.

The fall semester had begun, and Dr. Hagen was in an awkward situation.This summer, an old friend informally asked him whether he could consider accepting a well-paid professorship at West Boulder University, a much more important institution than Wendell College, next year.Such problems are relatively easy to solve.But on the other hand, there is a chilling thing left behind: the department he worked so hard to build, even the French department with a much stronger fund in the city of Laurengui, can't compete with it in terms of cultural influence. would fall into the hands of the perfidious Faternfuss, whom Hagen himself had hired from Austria, and turned against him--had in fact managed to get Hagen out of the The leadership of the influential quarterly "New Europe", which had been founded in 1945, had been taken over.Hagen's intention to leave the university--so far he had not given a word to his colleagues--would have an even sadder consequence: Assistant Professor Pnin would inevitably be left behind and in peril.There was never an official Russian department at Wendell College, and our poor friend had always been hired by the German department for a branch of comparative literature, and thus kept his teaching job.Budo would have cut that branch out of sheer selfish anger, and Pnin, who had no tenure at Wyndale, would have been forced to leave unless some other Department of Languages ​​and Literatures agreed to take him in.It seems that only the English and French departments may have some room for negotiation.But the dean of the English department, Jack Cockerell, had always objected to what Hagen was doing, thinking that Pnin was a laughing stock, and he did informally and possibly enlist a great Anglo-Russian writer to teach if need be. That man could teach all the lessons that Pnin lived to teach.As a last resort, Hagen had no choice but to find a way to see Braulenghi.