8. Return east.

After an idyllic month in Ustaritz, the Summer University came to an end and it was time for me to make my way back east to Strasbourg. School was still several weeks off so this journey could be fairly leisurely. One of the Ustaritz folks offered me a ride back to Pau, where I spent several more days with the Pau group. My main recollection of this sojourn was an evening spent drinking very cheap wine at a city park, followed by a sleepless night in the university dorm racked by excruciating abdominal pains. Oh, did I mention that I was staying in the dormitory sub rosa? As a result of my nocturnal agony, I was found out and had to leave the dormitory. In fact, I ended up moving to another room with a vacant bed, but I was only staying another evening anyway.

A couple of days later, I was boarding an all-night train for Lyon, on my way to join the Fordham contingent at Grenoble. I had another task as well. During the last days at Ustaritz, I received a letter from my parents including a form which had to be signed and notarized by myself in order to receive the National Defense Loan which I had taken out to finance my junior year abroad. This could only be done at an American consulate, and the nearest consulate was in Lyon, where I would have to change trains for Grenoble. Therefore, my plan was to arrive at Lyon a bit after sunrise, wander around the city until the consulate opened, transact my business and catch the next train for Grenoble.

For a 20-year-old newly released in Europe, there are few pleasures more sublime than an all-night train ride. Armed with a collection of recent issues of Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaine, I rode across South France in the dead of night, and up the valley of the Rhone, arriving at Lyon just after daybreak. Alighting from train, I had now one priority: find a bathroom. This was an urgent matter, since the train station WC's had two drawbacks: they were filthy and they were of the dreaded "Turkish" style, without a seat. I left the gare and wandered nervously around the environs of the station, my bowels bursting. In desperation, I settled on a modest cafe about a block away. I entered and maide a beeline for the WC, but the eagle-eyed proprietess followed me, calling out "Vous consommez, monsieur? Vous consommez?!" "Oui, je vais consommer," I answered frantically, and entered the ... filthy Turkish-style toilet. To make short story even shorter, I made a major cultural accommodation to the situation, and, immeasurably relieved returned to the cafe to enjoy an improvised breakfast of croissant and hot chocolate.

It took about 2 hours for the consulate to open. Sign of the times: the American consulate was on the third floor of an old French apartment building that one accessed by one of those old-fashioned cage elevators. Getting the letter notarized took just a few minutes, and I was off to tour old Lyon. After several hours of walking, the highlight of which was the impressive Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourviere, an impressive edifice which overlooks the city, I caught the train for Grenoble.

Grenoble was about 2-1/2 hours away, and I arrived in mid-afternoon and set out for the University from the gare. Since arriving in France, I had become very comfortable with my ability to get anywhere by foot of public conveyance without asking directions. Somehow, by looking at a fairly basic map of Grenoble, I had convinced myself that the university was only a few blocks from the train station. Carrying my bulky, overloaded leather bag, I set out. An hour and 5 kilometers later, I arrived at the campus of the Faculte de Lettres of the University of Grenoble, which is now referred to as Universite Stendahl. Now exhausted from lugging the constantly-shifting load of my bulky travel bag, I must have seemed a pitiful sight as I trudged through the gates of the university, looking for the student union, whence I could try to find my Fordham comrades. Amazingly, however, when I arrived at the student union, I immediately saw Richard Martin, who led me to the whole crew, (Martin, Lance Compa, Peggy O'Kane, et.al.) who were lounging around in the student cafeteria. I felt as if I had arrived to student traveller Valhalla. Travelling solo had its charms but searching for a clean bathroom and trudging halfway across Grenoble had dissipated those, and I was so relieved to be among friends again.



I had arrived in Grenoble shortly before the whole crew was planning to return to Paris, so I had relative little time to enjoy the pleasant ambiance at the Faculte des Lettres, which enjoyed views of snow-capped mountains in the distance. We were soon headed back to Paris, where I stayed for a couple of days before returning to Strasbourg, this time for good.

6. First days in France

We were met on the dock in Le Havre by Father Robert Sealy, a professor of French and the faculty advisor of the Junior Year Abroad program. He had arranged hotel rooms for us for several days in le Cinquieme (the V arrondissement) near the Latin Quarter, and after we had checked in we gathered in a neighborhood bistro for our first meal in France.


I had been eagerly anticipating my first meal in France since before leaving the U.S. My head was filled with images of authentically French dishes, such as bouillabaisse or l'homard americaine, but the bistro we visited on that first night in Paris had a menu that seemed quite mundane. There were steak frites, entrecote de porc, poulet roti, all things I would come to love in due course, because the French can prepare the mundane much better than just about anyone else. But I had an imaginary menu in my head, and the only item I could find on this real-life menu was pot-au-feu. To be truthful, I had no idea what pot-au-feu was, but it sounded exotic, and I had always wanted to try one since coming across the name in the Women's Day Encyclopedia of Cooking. Well, it turns out that pot-au-feu is a boiled dinner, non plus. As served in this eatery, it was a pot of boiled beef, carrots, onions and turnips. One culinary writer has described pot-au-feu as central to the psyche of French culture, but to me it was little different from the boiled beef that my mother used to cook in her pressure cooker.


The first order of business after arriving in Paris was to check the American Express office, at the Place de l'Opera. The American Express office in the '60's was a vital link for student travellers, since it served as a mail drop for those without an address in Paris. Every morning, one could see dozens of young Americans lined up to see if they had letters from home. In my case, the priorities were letters from Fordham and from Bethesda, containing checks.
The next milestone was to travel to Strasbourg to cement our living arrangements. Bob Gilleran had come to Paris to meet me and Al Airone, who would be rooming together at 1 Rue du General Castelnau, chez Kraencher. So, after a day or so in Paris, he led us down to the Gare de l'Est for the first of many train trips to Strasbourg.
This first experience with the SNCF remains in my memory not for any significant event which occurred but for the images which I have always retained: the compartments in deuxieme which we shared with some French businessmen; the lengthy passage through the Parisian suburbs, followed by the city of Meaux with its striking cathedral (which will be immortalized in my memory because of the offhand comment of one of the businessmen in our compartment "Tiens, le cathedrale de Meaux"); the picturesque towns of Epernay and Chalons-sur-Marne; the major crossroads station at Nancy; the Vosges stations of Sarreburg and Saverne; and finally Strasbourg, with its majestic yet crippled cathedral towering over the city in the distance.

Our first stay in Strasbourg was quite brief. We got a room at a tiny hotel close to the gare, which was a fairly reasonable walk from our prospective apartment, on the third floor of 1 Rue du General Castelnau, just north of the main "island" of Strasbourg. On our first visit to this building, we met Mrs. Erna Kraencher, the landlady of the building, who also lived on the third floor, just across from our apartment. She was an elderly lady, but quite energetic, with a firm grip on the affairs of the building. She seemed to be quite fond of Mario and Bob, our predecessors in the apartment, but she was not unmindful of the fact that they were typical American college students with perhaps a larger than typical social life. We also met the third factor in the apartment's equation, a Tunisian medical student named Taofik Snoussi, a short, very intense person who rarely emerged from his room except to cook, but who nonetheless was the moral center of the apartment. He in turn introduced us to his jovial and earthy friend Mustafa, who lived in the loft apartments above our floor.
After a day or two in Strasbourg, it was time for us to return to Paris. Mario and his girlfriend were driving to the south of France, and they invited us to ride with them as far as Troyes, where we could catch a train for Paris. The drive, which took about 2-1/2 hours, made us aware of the human geography of Europe and what made it so different from the U.S. During the whole trip in Bob's friend's 2CV, I don't think that I saw a single autoroute of more than four narrow lanes, just the right size for the tiny car we were riding in. There were no controlled access routes, no exits, no Howard Johnsons. We felt just an arm's length away from French towns and villages. We eventually arrived in Troyes, where we were let off at the train station. Within a couple of hours, we were back in Paris.
There followed a fairly desultory week in Paris while we waited to go south for our summer studies. Most of the Fordham crew had dispersed, and Al Airone left with Rich Golden to travel somewhere as well, so I was alone in Paris, and the solitude began to wear on me. The days were filled with a routine that involved killing time: eat breakfast in the little hotel by Boulevard Saint Germain, take the Metro to Place de l'Opera to check mail at the American Express office, then back to the V-ieme to wander through the back alleys of the Quartier Latin, inspecting the little bookstores and record shops (and noticing how expensive records were in Paris, which was a mercy since I had no way to play them anyway); check out the truly exotic restaurants in the alleys such as the Rue de la Chat qui Peche - Indian, Greek, Vietnamese and North African places, none of which I had seen in New York; eat lunch at le self service, where I learned to eat a filet au sauce Bearnaise for the price one would pay for a knockwurst and sauerkraut at the Blarney Stone; wander along the Seine River to browse the bouquinistes, the used book stalls along the river (Actually, other than quaint postcards, there was little to interest a new student from the US, but one had to make a pilgrimage to the bouquinistes, since they were immortalised in our college French textbooks).

After a day or two of this routine, I began to feel choked. For the first time, the fact of being alone in a foreign land began to hit me. The novelty of Paris had worn off, and the accomplishment of making Paris"my own" by treading the streets and sitting in cafes gave way to the tedium of occupying myself between meals in restaurants. Although I had as yet seen relatively little of Paris, I had little curiosity to see the sights all by myself, so I remained mainly in le Cinquieme, wandering the streets aimlessly. One day, as I was strolling through a street market, admiring the tufts of fur at the end of the legs of the rabbits hanging upside down in the outdoor boucherie, I looked up to see a contingent of Fordham students, Andy Kavanaugh, Rich Martin, Rich Superty and several others. Apparently they had been roaming Paris on their own for the same length of time that I had been, but we had never crossed paths. I had never felt such a sensation of relief vbefore: I was no longer alone.

7. Going South: Pau and Ustaritz

After rejoining my Fordham compatriots in the street market in Le Cinquieme, I was able to begin some serious sightseeing in the few days remaining to us before we migrated to our respective summer schools. In the space of two or three days, we climbed the Eiffel Tower, visited the Louvre, explored the cathedral of Notre Dame, took a bus out to Versailles and roamed that amazing place, and thoroughly familiarized ourselves with the Paris Metro.


The day eventually arrived when it was time to decamp to the south, to attend summer schools. Most of the Fordham group had arranged to attend summer classes in French to prepare for the ordeal of studying in French surroundings. The main destinations were the Dijon, Grenoble, and Pau. The Grenoble and Dijon contingents (I think that only one person went to Dijon) had already peeled off some time before, and the folks that I had run into in the marketplace several days earlier were all headed to Pau, in the Pyrenees-Atlantique, near the Basque country.


I, on the other hand, was headed to a different southern destination: l'Université d'été d'Ustaritz (The Summer University of Ustaritz), in the middle of the French Basque country. This school had been recommended to me by my French professor, Simone Retailliau, who felt that, having had 5 years of French in school, I didn't need to study French at a summer institute. The Ustaritz institute was a different enterprise, an educational forum for French-speaking people, both French nationals and "Francophones," foreigners who spoke French. Mlle. Retailliau believed that the experience of being immersed in the French language in a rustic setting would lead to more effective language acquisition than sitting through language lessons in a summer language institute. In addition to me, Maureen Fath and Mary Daly also planned to spend July there.

****

Our Paris group (4 or 5 of us) met at the Gare Montparnasse on a day in mid July, right around July `14th, Bastille Day. The station was packed to the gills, as if a mass evacuation were taking place. When we boarded our train, which was headed to Toulouse via Bordeaux and Pau, all the compartments were occupied, and we were confined to the corridor at the rear of the car, next to the W.C's. As the train departed at sunset, there was no scenery to be seen, so finding a way to sleep was the key task. I immediately looked around for a corner and found one opposite the men's toilet, right behind the rear compartment. I scrunched down, miserable and angry that I was being deprived of a wonderful train ride in a comfortable 2nd-Class compartment. However, I was much better off than some of my other companions: At least I had a corner to snooze in, and before I knew it, I was wiping sleep out of my eyes and looking around at a sun-brightened corridor. Shortly after sunrise, the train arrived at Bordeaux, and most of the passengers departed, and we rushed into the nearest compartment to luxuriate on the austere leather seats. The train sped down the flat plains of Aquitaine, veered southeast at the resort town of Dax, and by late afternoon, we were in the city of Pau.

I have only a few recollections of Pau; it was a pleasant enough town but I only spent a few days there before moving on to Ustaritz. Hugh Grady, Andy Kavanaugh, and several others would be staying at Pau for a month to study French. All of their classes would be with other international students at a language institute on the campus of the local university, whereas I was planning to attend a summer institute on contemporary studies, which would consist entirely of French-speaking people, both French and Francophone foreigners. I stayed in the dorms with my friends for 2 or 3 days, and then set out to Ustaritz.

As it happened, on that day, the Tour de France was coming through Pau. I had a couple of hours before I had to leave, so I packed my bags into the consigne at the train station and wandered down to the outskirts of Pau, where a huge crowd lined the road leading out of town. After about 30 minutes of waiting, the entourage of sports vehicles covering the race appeared, followed quickly by the peloton, the mass of dozens of bicycles whizzing by , accompanied by raucous cheers of the spectators. What made the greatest impression on me was the the sports van belonging to L'Humanité, the Communist Party daily. No communist media in the US that I was familiar with had ever shown the least interest in sports; L'Humanité, on the other hand, had all the features of a daily paper. The seemingly normal position of the communist press in the French daily life was a surprise to me and influenced my basic outlook on French society. What I had always taken exotic and out-of-bounds in American society seemed to be well within the bounds of French life. Thus began a subtle alteration in my world view, in which I at times uncounsciously began to shift the parameters of social life.

To get from Pau to Ustaritz, I took the train to Bayonne and after an hour's wait, during which I called the school to inform them of my arrival, I boarded a local train with two cars. After about three stops, it deposited me at a tiny roadside stop, composed of a house and a barrier, where a car was waiting to take me to L'Université d'Été d'Ustaritz.

Ustaritz was an extraordinarily pleasant stage in my acculturation to France. The "Summer University" was located in a residential lycée, perched on a hill overlooking the valley of the Nive River (see illustration). The student population consisted of a mixture of French people and Francophones from other countries: Upper Volta, Tunisia, Greece, Sweden, among others. Fordham was represented by myself, Mary Daly and Maureen Fath. Georges Hahn, a tall, imposing professor from the University of Toulouse, ran the Institute, along with an executive secretary and a handyman/driver, both of whose names I have forgotten.

Our daily routine kept us surprisingly busy for a summer programme. After a breakfast of tartine (a fancy french term for bread with butter and jam) and a bowl of cafe au lait (morning coffee was served in bowls, while evening coffee came in cups), we would assemble on the patio for a morning program, usually consisting of a lecture or panel discussion on a topic related to culture, politics or literature. Lunch was usually the main meal, followed by an afternoon siesta or minor excursion. In lieu of a nap, I often walked down into the village to pick up a copy of Le Monde in a nearby tabac. After supper, we would attend an evening program or excursion, or, in the most magical moments, drink coffee on the patio and marvel at the sublime peace reigning over the Nive valley.

Since my command of French was still precarious, I have to confess that the content of the sessions appeared to me through a dense fog, and I have little recollection of them. However, the weekend excursions made an indelible impression on me. There were basically four of them, from shortest to longest:

1. A short day-trip into Bayonne, whose highlight was a visit to the beautiful Gothic cathedral in the middle of the city;


2. A day-long tour along the Nive valley, visiting several old Basque villages, ending in St. Jean Pied de Port, at the head of the valley;


3. An excursion along the Basque coast, including St. Jean de Luz and the splendid Biarritz;


4. A weekend-long trip to Spain, which included San Sebastian, Pamplona and the Roncesvalles Pass.

I have retained few details of the courses and discussions that I attended in Ustaritz, but Ustaritz lives on in my memory because so many epiphanies occurred here. Ustaritz was my first experience with international culture that was unmediated by American influence. There were many firsts:

• My first string quartet concert, at the Gardens of Arnaga, in Cambo-les-Bains, where Edmond Rostand lived;
• My first tapas, in San Sebastian (in a gloomy bar in the old town - for a recent picture click here - we filled up with tapas while drinking sherry at the bar; only later did I learn, in a separate cultural epiphany, that tapas are not free!)
• My first street festival in a foreign country: During our Spanish sojourn, we spent our first night in Azpeitia, the birthplace of St. Ignatius Loyola. Azpeitia at the time was celebrating a major festival (I believe it was the Feria de San Ignacio). This festival was associated with another epiphany:
• My first drunken revel at a street festival at a foreign country. I and my friend Jean, from Upper Volta, were touring the street festival when we came upon a booth where one who could separate a ribbon from a bottle of wine with an air gun would win the wine. Jean and I tried over and over to win the prize, until finally the owner just handed us the bottle. We then promenaded throughout the festival until we had empied the bottle. Despite our hilarity, we were regarded rather severely when we showed up 30 minutes late for dinner that evening in the convent where we were spending the night;
• My first authentic Hemingway moment, a visit to Pamplona, during which I drank sherry in one of the hotels Hemingway was said to have patronized during his fateful visit in 1923, which inspired The Sun Also Rises.
• My first organ concert, in the great cathedral in Bayonne. We sat in the balcony and listened to Bach and Buxtehude as bats flitted around the vast nave.
• My first penetration of a major Western cultural myth, occasioned by our visit to the Pass of Roncesvalles, the site of the epic battle between Charlemagne and the invading Moors. However, as we learned from reading the literature at the memorial at the pass, Charlemagne was not facing Moors at Roncesvalles, but rather the Basques, who were also Christians. This was the first of many cultural icons which were shattered by my encounters during my junior year abroad.
  
  

In addition to the axial events mentioned above, the people I knew I Ustaritz were my first non-American acquaintances, and they spanned a variety of countries: There was Jean, from Upper Volta; Ali and Habib from Tunisia (Ali boasted of being a "fils de Bourguiba," i.e an orphan who had grown up in a group home under the supervision of the Tunisian government); and Hera Kerkyra from Greece. Hera was the first person from whom I heard direct accusations about the foreign policy of the US.

About 6 weeks before we boarded the Aurelia, the constitutional government of Greece had been overthrown in a coup d'etat engineered by a clique of right-wing colonels. This "regime of the colonels," which lasted until 1974, oversaw a campaign to root out all manifestations of liberalism and modernism from Greek society, including banning the music of Mikis Theodorakis and other left-wing artists, and even (according to some sources) banning the custom of breaking plates on the floor during festivities. I had read about this coup in the newspapers at the time, and was suitably appalled by this blow against democracy. However, in Ustariz, as I got to know Hera, who was a young, cheerful, and friendly college student from Athens, I was taken aback by her vehement insistence that the colonels had taken over with the connivance of the US. My instinctive reaction was to defend the US: I agreed that the colonels were terrible, but what evidence was there that the US would commit such a dastardly deed? Her reaction was to state that everybody in Greece knew that the US was responsible, and besides, if the US could commit such acts in Vietnam, why not in Greece?

I should digress at this point to point out that the word "Vietnam" didn't have the resonance in America that it did in Europe, or for that matter that it would have in the US within the next 12 months. It took me a while after I arrived in Europe to realize that opposition to the US war in Vietnam was a necessary premise for further discussion, not a conclusion reluctantly and painfully arrived at, which was the case with many American liberals.

In any case, Hera and I remained friends despite our different levels of political awareness.

5. The Aurelia Voyage

To a young, relatively impoverished college student, the week-long voyage on the Aurelia was simply heaven on earth. Perhaps it was the full schedule of camp-like social and cultural activities that were scheduled for the students on the boat - well, probably not as I attended very few of those - except for a showing of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, the insurgent interpretation of Jesus' life by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perhaps it was the lamb chops for breakfast, or the always full lunch and dinner tables. Perhaps it was the nightly happy hours, before and after dinner - in those days, mixed drinks went for about $1.50 (they were a bit watered down, I will acknowledge). Perhaps it was the langorous feeling of total freedom - Shall I take a nap, or should I sit in the lounge and read, or should I go out on the deck and watch the ocean (something that one will do much less frequently than one would imagine, given the utter monotony of it).



The Aurelia was a student ship: All of the passengers were students on their way to Europe, but not all students were equal: At the lowest level were students travelling to Europe for the summer. These students travelled in large groups, in fairly regimented formations, eagerly participated in shipboard activities (since the week on board the Aurelia was a much more significant portion of their European experience). The next level consisted of students who were spending the entire year abroad with college-sponsored programs in Europe. Thus, a group from Indiana University was travelling to Strasbourg because their school maintained an office, a coordinator and a liaison with the university there. However, although they would be soaking up the Europe atmosphere for a year, the courses they would be taking would be confined to those offered by their own program there.



The pinnacle of "Cool" were students who were travelling to Europe for independent study, unfettered by American ties. We were in that group (as far as I know, we may have been the only people in that group on this passage). One of the most pleasant sensations on this trip, from the standpoint of a not-quite-junior student, with a bit of the sophomore still clinging to the mind, was the sensation of being superior, especially to the younger summer students, those who would be spending most of their vacation in special summer institutes, learning a smattering of local language and culture and taking motor coaches to see the local scenery.



About four days out, we ran into a North Atlantic storm, the kind immortalized in all those World War Two convoy-against-U-boat movies. While we were never in peril, the constant pitching and rocking of the relatively small liner did take a bit of sheen off of our once-in-a-lifetime experience. Most of us kept to our cabins, and the breakfast lamb chops didn't seem as delicious when the plates were careening up and down the tables.



My year in Europe was marked by a number of epiphanies. The first of these occurred on June 17, the day before we arrived in Europe. It was the last day at sea, and, after a particularly exultant after-dinner happy hour, a lot of the Fordham people ended up stuffed into one of our cabins, where we talked until the very wee hours. We decided to go topside, and as we arrived on deck, the sky was just beginning to lighten. As we looked up, we saw seagulls! We were approaching land! Then, scanning the horizon, I saw a fishing vessel, tiny, bue growing as it approached the starboard bow. This was the first human encounter we had had since setting out, and as it came closer, I had a surreal moment. Looking at the Fordham classmates, arrayed along the deck and close to unconsciousness, and back at the fishing vessel, I felt like I was in the final scene of La Dolce Vita, in which the dissolute partygoers who have been celebrating all night stagger onto a beach where fishermen have captured a huge fish, who is still alive and who stares at all the onlooker. Well, what can I say? I had just seen La Dolce Vita for the first time the previous spring, and had just learned the meaning of the term "Fellini-esque," so I was ripe for this kind of epiphantic transference.

I dragged my self down to the big lounge and lay down on one of the couches for a dawn nap. I had fitful dreams, involving some authority figure bellaboring me with instructions as if I were a young student in a tour group ... and awoke to find myself in the middle of a tour group of young students, being given final instructions prior to debarcation. I drowsily sat up, soimehow attracting almost no attention , and looked out the windows to see the Englich countryside passing by. We were arriving at Portsmouth.

Of the rest of the trip, there was little to remark. The Aurelia docked in Southampton, where about a third of the students got off. After about 3 hours, we were underway again, landing at Le Havre in late afternoon. From there, after all customs formalities were completed, we boarded the boat train for Paris, and a little over two hours later, we arrived at the Gare St. Lazare. We had arrived in France.

4. Travel Plans and Separation Anxiety

As the Spring semester of 1967 ended, I began making preparations for my trip abroad. Of course there was a passport to be acquired, my very first, which I obtained through the Federal Building in Manhattan. The boat ticket was arranged through the Honors Program.

There was also the question of lodging in Strasbourg: Traditionally, Fordham students stayed where Fordham students of previous years had stayed. I made arrangements with two upperclassmen (Mario Mendez-Penate and Bob Gilleran) to stay in the apartment of Ms. Erna Kraencher, at 1 Rue du General Castelnau, near the center of Strasbourg.

JUNIOR YEAR ROSTER:
The 1967-68 Junior Year Abroad contingent consisted of the following folks:
PARIS: Lance Compa, Peggy O'Kane, Rich Martin, Mike Gadbaw, Andy Cavanaugh, Rich Superty, Mary Ellen Curran, Hugh Grady.
STRASBOURG: Myself, Al Airone, Bob Golden, Maureen Fath and Mary Daly
ROME: Vincent Farenga
VIENNA: Joe Moss
OXFORD: Ron Berube
Plus Jack Williams, who arranged to spend a year in a Jesuit boy's home in Charleroi, Belgium.

SIDE TRIP TO MONTREAL:
Several weeks before we were to set sail, I was invited to join a group of friends driving up to Montreal to see the big cultural event of the epoch, Expo 67. This was my first and (until now) last trip up the Hudson to Canada. In fact, it was my first trip out of the USA, and a dress rehearsal to travelling in a French country. Our group, which included my friend from Brooklyn Paul Tapogna, and some of his friends from school, stayed in a two-bed hotel room (several of us slept on the floor) and spent two days in Montreal. We limited our visit mainly to the Expo, which was, for the time, a spectacular collection of international cultures, not too different from the New York World's Fair, which my family had visited in the summer of 1964. The biggest difference was the variety of countries participating - Expo67 contained a greater diversity of countries than New York, and especially the presence of the Cuban pavilion, which gave the whole event an air of danger and rebellion to us. It turned out that the Pavilion was not very rebellious at all, focusing on social welfare and international fraternity. The same was true of the Soviet pavilion as well.

The main feature of this trip which endures in my mind was that we spent just about all our money in the first couple of hours at the Expo. To penniless students, everything seems expensive, and all I can remember is how little we had left after buying some French gouffres (waffles). Montreal itself seemed just a tad dingy, not at all quaint or "foreign." After two days, we headed back for The City, and I continued my preparations for departure.

EVE AND DEPARTURE
Like so many events during college, the departure for Europe was preceded by a very late-night gathering at some classmates' apartment. The dominant image of that night was the music of Cream, Fresh Cream, a totally new sound for me (well, maybe not totally, as 1966-67 was the year that I discovered the Blues Project and Paul Butterfield - but Cream as much more a rock band than the others). I can never listen to this record without remembering Ron Berube telling me "Wait 'til you hear the lyrics on this song. Listen to these great lyrics!" while playing "Cat's Squirrel," which turns out to be an instrumental piece interrupted in the middle with "Alright alright alright alright alright alright // alright alright alright alright alright alright."

In the morning, we caravaned down to the pier in midtown Manhattan where the Aurelia awaited. A great party of our friends and relatives met us at the pier, and we boarded the ship all together. After loading our luggage in our tiny cabins, we went back on deck for what turned out to be about a 1-hour farewell party before the loudspeaker warned all non-passengers to leave the ship. About another 30 minutes or so later, as we crowded along the rails waving at our friends on the dock below, the ship began to inch away from land and out into the Hudson River, and little by little, as our farewell party receded into the distance, we passed Staten Island, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and we were pointed to the Atlantic, headed to Europe.

2. From the Honors Program to Strasbourg

Another key decision that I made in 1966-1967 was to accept an invitation to join the Fordham Honors Program. This was a no-brainer, since the main benefit of the Honors Program was the Junior Year Abroad program, and I had set my sights on studying abroad.

The Honors Program consisted of several elements: a) the Honors House (also known as Alpha House), a tiny club house in the middle of the campus where one could hang out and study; b) an Honors Seminar in sophomore year, which was dedicated that year to reading about the interaction between science and philosophy and society: We read The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler, and Physics and Philosophy by Sir James Jeans, among other titles; c) Junior Year Abroad, which this memoir is about - all Honors Program candidates had the option of spending their junior year in Europe; other students could do so also, but it required special arrangement; d) the Honors Thesis, written and delivered in the senior year (I never did it).

During the spring, we were to write a major paper (10-20 pages), and I decided to write mine on the subject of the role of Arabic philosophers in transmitting Greek philosophy from the Middle East to Europe in the early Middle Ages. The tale of how the remains of Greek thought were preserved and translated by Nestorians, then interpreted by great thinkers such as Al-Farabi, ibn-Sina (Avicenna) and Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) is a familiar story to scholars, but I was transfixed by the narrative.

In the course of writing the paper, I was also faced with the necessity of choosing a place to spend my junior year abroad. Among the senior honors program veterans, the name Strasbourg kept coming up in conversations. Even though the majority of JYA students ended up in Paris, Strasbourg had a certain allure. I was also interested in Renaissance-era universities with a strong background in theology and philosophy, and the names Friburg, Freiburg and Tubingen kept appearing as well. Each of them had distinguished Catholic faculties with strengths in philosophy as well as theology, and each of them was located in a small college-oriented town. In the end, though, I was sold on Strasbourg as a compromise between the quaint medieval town-campuses and the majoritarian orthodoxy of Paris. I began to look forward to going there.

3. June 1967, New York Prelude

How I came to choose Strasbourg as my destination for my Junior Year Abroad had a lot to do with theology. During three successive years, I had come under the influence of three teachers, each of whom helped to determine the direction that I would take intellectually. During my senior year at Good Counsel High School, the first of these axial professors was my senior religion teacher, Brother Meric, who was also the coach of our debate team, at a time when we tied for first place at the National Catholic Forensic League. Brother Meric foresook the traditional Catholic apologetics-cum-senior-prom-sex-lecture in favor of an ambitious survey of philosophical theology, beginning with an introduction to the proofs for the existence of God, followed by a narrative of the views of God from David Hume to Kant to Hegel. Meric's class awakened in me a sense of the power of rationalism, and, paradoxically, a greater allegiance to the Catholic Church.

The second teacher to shape my thinking and, indirectly, point me towards Strasbourg, was John Sexton, another theology teacher, but in many ways the polar opposite of Brother Meric. Sexton, whom I had met a year earlier in the National Catholic Forensic League (he was the coach of the St. Brendan's debate team, the leading girls' team in New York). With an energy to rival Meric's, Sexton sought to demolish the edifice my high school teacher had built: On the first day of class, he categorically proclaimed that there was no way to prove the existence of God. The first semester of Freshman Theology was devoted to introducing students to analytic philosophy as it encountered religion. The second semester introduced us to phenomenology of religion, Van der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, as well as that most seductive of movements, the "God is Dead" movement. By the end of the freshman year, I was fascinated by the complexity and richness of issues which constituted theology, and I was determined to become a lay theologian.

Sophomore year, however, turned out to be a bit disappointing on the theology front. From my freshman class and my own reading, I had formed an image of theology as a stimulating field of free thinking, investigation and open-ended speculation, with not a little debunking of stale orthodoxy. When I began taking courses in the department, however, I discovered that the reality was a bit different. To begin with, the actual curriculum for a theology major at Fordham required a foundation in ancient Greek, a solid background in Old and New Testament, and acquaintance with Church history, Patristic theology and apologetics. I ended up taking two courses in the department, one on Christology, and one on Modern Atheism. The former I found somewhat dull, and the latter only marginally less so. The saving grace of the course on Modern Atheism was that it introduced me to Ludwig Feuerbach, which, somewhat later, introduced me to the Early Marx. But this course, far from the challenging iconoclasm of John Sexton's class, was taught by a senior Jesuit who seemed to be on a mission to save the world from atheism, and i just went throught the motions of enjoying it.

On the other hand, in the required curriculum, my sophomore philosophy class led me to the third of the axial influences of my pre-Europe development: Dr. Robert Kane. This slight, thin, bookish man from Yale came on the scene somewhat modestly, but his impact on me was enormous. The required philosophy sequence at Fordham included a semester of classical texts, and a semester of selected philosophical problems. Kane's explication of the Phaedo was my first experience of actual philosophical pain, a kind of mental headache which one experiences when one confronts arguments from every direction that challenge basic beliefs. The stimulation that arises from seeing the dialectic in action is replaced by repeated discomfort when you discover that every argument that you make has an answer. In the Phaedo, Socrates proves the immortality of the soul by four arguments, the most challenging of which is the theory of recollection, according to which certain knowledge, e.g. mathematical truths, is actually recollection from past lives, in which the immortal soul, having passed through other bodies in the past, brings previously acquired knowledge into the present world. This leads Socrates to a theory of reincarnation. The headache begins when, despite our confident dismissal of reincarnation as exotic superstition, it turns out to be supported by compelling logic, which, in the hands of Dr. Kane, is almost irresistible.

That was it! Between the mental calisthentics of Kane's class, which left me exhausted but exhilirated, and the fact that the Modern Atheism class was jointly offered by the Theology and Philosophy departments, I realized that the major for me was Philosophy, not Theology.