And I had grand notions, too. I had quit hockey because I was too slow, but also so that I could read Kierkegaard. My history teacher’s list was nice, but here was Fear and Trembling. Here The Sickness Unto Death. I considered dipping into Weber. Occasionally the word Foucault would float from my tongue, a trial balloon. In such moods I denounced Ferdinand, he was not Harvard!, but at the end of the year I stayed with him. We were hanging out with lacrosse players and their girlfriends, I was badly drunk three nights a week, and some of my morning classes went by unattended, went by anyway, while I lay in bed moaning. And yet my political-science professor had still sent one of my papers to a peer-reviewed journal and laughed with gusto when I showed him my several fake IDs—on one of them my name was Jürgen Habermas. (In the little basement shop in downtown Boston, I had indignantly demanded the umlaut. “Yeurgen Habermas, not Yoorgen. Yeurgen!”) There seemed, in short, to be no system I couldn’t beat, whether I stayed with Ferdinand or not. In the weeks before rooming groups were due, I made a few half-hearted sorties in the Freshman Union to some of the more articulate kids I’d met in my classes, but they were as wary as they were intelligent, their groups had congealed and they liked it that way, and anyhow I hadn’t yet learned how to talk with them, and instead of Foucault the word douchebag kept escaping, like a dark secret, from my lips.