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.

1. June 1967 Introduction

In June, 1967, I boarded the Aurelia, a passenger liner of the Cogedar line, to spend a year in Strasbourg, France, during my junior year abroad. This was the first of several pivotal years in my life, and it is fitting to take some time to set down as many recollections as I can of that fateful year. I left the US a somewhat moderate liberal, having successfully transitioned from an adolescent infatuation with William Buckley; I returned a dogmatic Maoist who had witnessed les evenements de Mai. When I left, I had little to show for the 5 years of French I had studied until that point (3 in high school, 2 at Fordham); when I returned, I was thinking and dreaming in French, was inserting French phrases unconsciously into my speech, and was reading Les Communistes, by Louis Aragon. I had travelled throughout Western Europe, Tunisia, Greece and Turkey. I was a confirmed Europhile, and a world citizen, and saw life and world events in a totally different manner.