The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

The Bureau of Dreams to be Continued

Page 162

Calvin

"The Seminar of Smoke and Mirrors"

Setting: A liberal arts college in New England, 1967

The campus was a patchwork of ivy covered buildings and protest posters, where the scent of chalk dust mingled with the lingering smoke of clove cigarettes. It was a place where minds were supposed to be molded, but for Calvin and Miriam, it felt more like a stage set for someone else’s play.

They met in a required seminar titled "The Moral Imagination in Western Thought," which neither of them had chosen. Calvin, son of a Boston banker, had been told college was “non-negotiable.” Miriam, daughter of a literature professor and a suffragette, had been told it was “her duty.” Both arrived armed with skepticism and a shared allergy to pretense.

Calvin wore his cynicism like a tweed jacket; frayed at the elbows, but still functional. He had a habit of answering rhetorical questions with literal ones, and once asked the professor if Plato’s cave was “just a metaphor for tenure.” He was majoring in economics, though he privately believed money was a collective hallucination.