Harrison did know who he meant. He’d known more or less since “contemporary,” “the south,” the autodidacticism reference and, most of all, the book. There was only one person whose story rang all of these bells, and Harrison had been obsessed with him for months.
Eli Absalom Stone was a name you’d be unlikely to forget if you happened to see it, say, in print, which Harrison had first done as the subject of an Atlantic Monthly profile, before senior year. A wunderkind writer, Stone hadn’t attended school for most of his life. Instead he’d studied at home, and home was a shack on a mountain somewhere in Virginia. （Harrison, who remembered the failure of his own attempts to self-educate, had been especially wowed by the breadth of Stone’s autodidacticism.） Before he was even eighteen, this remarkable young person had become the author of a small publishing miracle called Against Youth, in which he had called out his own generation （their shared generation） for complacency, anti-intellectualism, and carelessness with the English language. Harrison, naturally—and not without envy—had rushed out to purchase this book, which he found to be annoyingly persuasive and unimpeachably well written, and its author the very first of his own contemporaries he might have to muster some actual intellectual regard for, in the unlikely event that they should ever meet. There had been no author photo, Harrison remembered; Stone, whose ethnicity was central to the Atlantic Monthly piece, was apparently uninterested in being identified as African American. Apparently, he had the radical belief that his words alone should represent him.
“I read his book,” Harrison said now. “It was remarkable.”
“A young thinker, untainted by current indoctrinations. Someone who might do some real good in the world.”
Harrison didn’t disagree, not that he’d ever given much thought to the good Eli Absalom Stone might do in the world. He hadn’t even considered the good he himself might do.
“So,” he said, reaching back to the last time the conversation had revolved around himself, “you don’t think I should go to Harvard?”
“Oh, eventually. You could do worse than end up at Harvard.”
Harrison’s head was churning now. He felt defeated. If this was another test, he had obviously failed it, too. “I don’t understand,” he finally admitted. Dr. Loring looked around for the waiter.
“My young triplet friend,” he said. He held up his empty cup. “I hope you are not expected home to your unappreciative family just yet.”
Harrison frowned. “No, not yet.”
“Good. Because I would like to tell you a bit about Roarke.”
And this he proceeded to do, right there in that green Naugahyde booth.
Even by American standards, Roarke was not ancient. It had been founded only in the 1970s, as the tsunami of liberalism and enforced diversity began its crest over even the most resistant American universities. One by one they fell to coeducation and quotas, absorbing their sister schools and appending departments that required the word “studies” to have any meaning: women’s studies, Afro-Am studies, gender studies, media studies. And what had been shunted aside to accommodate each and every one of these “studies”？ All of the subjects that had never required the word “studies” in the first place. Latin. （Latin studies?） History. （History studies?） The much-degraded Western canon that had merely produced two millennia of knowledge, art, and culture!
The school began in a decommissioned Shaker Village in upstate New York, a promising setting with its asceticism and simple beauty, but by the mid-1970s there was pressure from the national historic preservation movement to reclaim the site. Then a Dartmouth alumnus who’d watched the dark incursion of femininity ooze across the Ivy League, and now saw that his own alma mater （the last to fall!） was poised to admit women, offered Roarke’s founder a property just north of the Presidential Mountains and not far from the Maine state line. The first students constructed the buildings themselves; first, in the manner of the earliest American colleges, a single structure in which they lived, ate, and studied, then a barn for the animals, then a library, then a dormitory. Students and professors grew much of their own food and raised their own animals, though not as a faddish or progressive practice. Quite to the contrary! Self-sufficiency and self-governance were traditional principles, reaching back to scholarly monastics, and they were to be essential principles at Roarke, as formative to the very special men the school aimed to produce as intense classwork and deliberate separation from the various distractions of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, with the students’ intentional labor more symbolic than strictly necessary, Roarke men were expected to set the annual curriculum, hire the faculty, muck out the cow stalls, and oversee the annual arrival of first-year students in the parking lot of a Concord, New Hampshire, diner.