In the famous troubles of 1968 and 1969, I was in some of the roughest spots — Harvard, Frankfurt — but the students absolutely respected an unreconstructed Platonist like myself. I had no trouble. They detested, they disagreed, but they knew that I felt passionately. They came to feel only contempt for those who wanted to howl with the wolves. Students can see through hypocrisy as through a glass not darkly. They know who is merely trying to please and flatter them. You cannot have it both ways. A person for whom Plato and Bach and Shakespeare and Wittgenstein are the stuff of his dreams, of his love, of his exasperations, of his daily life, of his communication, cannot pretend that he is a populist creature. It is that which nauseates me. If I come up against someone like Camille Paglia, who said Jimi Hendrix is more important than Sophocles, or if I meet someone who is really living that style of life, with all its dangers, then hats off. I may disagree with them. I happen to believe, for instance, that heavy metal and rock are the deconstruction of all human silence and of all hopes for human quietness and inwardness. But if somebody tells me that they're the voice of the future, and they are living that, and not pretending to do it from a white clapboard house with a large lawn and tenure, then there's absolute mutual respect, no difficulty. It's the cant of our profession, the cant, the bloody hypocrisy which gets me: wanting to have it both ways, running with the PC wolves in order to be loved.