Read Online Buying the Night Flight by Georgie Anne Geyer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Georgie Anne Geyer
Ads: Link
have done without him, his constant support, and his love.
But no amount of scrutiny of my childhood can explain why I wound up in Guatemala stumbling through the mountains ... or in Gairo talking with Anwar Sadat ... or in the rice paddies of South Vietnam ... or listening during a vicious sandstorm in Khartoum while American diplomats were gunned to death by Palestinian terrorists .... But as far back as I can remember, I wanted to know - - I had to know -- everything in the world. At ten I wrote a 110-page book (with myself as the heroine, naturally). In high school, in the absence of any guidance, I read right through the library. Even as a child I was terribly concerned about truth -- truth, that is, in the sense of "what is" in the world. I was also concerned about those "couriers" who carried truth. I looked outward for truth, not inward, and broadcast it with the ardor of the missionary I once wanted to be. Eventually I chose journalism because -- in opposition, for instance, to philosophy, where truth was theoretical -- our truths were concrete and approachable, if only because they were small, relative truths.
***
On a sunny fall weekend in 1952 my parents delivered me, an expectant package of sixteen, to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Very soon I felt I had arrived in paradise. This was the era of campus fun, of university joy, and of sorority parties -- but of great intellectual inquiry, too. All of the doubts of high school fell away. Suddenly it was not the cheerleaders of high school who were the popular symbol; it was the serious though socially-minded coeds. The conformity of high school also suddenly disappeared. We were free to dream, to be socially angry and intellectually productive; those of us in the prestigious Medill School of Journalism took these possibilities particularly seriously.
We of Medill were a close-knit, elitist group, no doubt about it, despite the dour ugliness of the old dark-brick building that stood on the lakefront. Indeed, on graduation, my closest friend, Mary "Miki" McDermott, whose father, Frank, had been the Irish boss of the South Side, decided to do something unthinkable in those times -- we gave a party in an off-campus apartment from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. and invited all of our professors! They all came in a state of surprised and pleased shock; that was an era in which professors and students stayed a formal distance from one another.
We were suddenly free to dream, and Miki and I saw ourselves as adventurers. We were going to live: fully. And love: fully. It was Anais Nin's "I will not be just a tourist in the world of images." Or, said in a heavy Bogartesque whisper, "He travels fastest who travels alone."
Despite the unfair image of the fifties generation as socially unconscious imbeciles, we had our very real causes. I did a paper on Paul Robeson and the prejudice against him and broke down sobbing as I wrote it. When the Supreme Court decision on integration came, we applauded wildly in classes and walked around the campus singing. And I made wonderful friendships, friendships that have lasted until this day: Lucy Woods Wiesner, Lynne Reich Basta, Carol Krametbauer Petersen, Phyllis Oakley .... People most definitely were not interchangeable in those days, nor did we have discontinuing selves. We were loyal and loving, and relationships lasted.
I also had my own feminism, and I researched it and wrote about it and talked about it in an era in which it was not even suggested as an historical subject. Everybody thought me quite dotty but I really didn't care much; I have never been much of a philosopher, but it just seemed frankly wrong to me that women should be considered inferior or that they should be expected to do only one thing in life. It was wrong, it was inhuman; and I wouldn't put up with it. It was only much later that I found out how hard the world made it not to put up with it.
Much, much later, actually in 1982,1 expressed to a
But no amount of scrutiny of my childhood can explain why I wound up in Guatemala stumbling through the mountains ... or in Gairo talking with Anwar Sadat ... or in the rice paddies of South Vietnam ... or listening during a vicious sandstorm in Khartoum while American diplomats were gunned to death by Palestinian terrorists .... But as far back as I can remember, I wanted to know - - I had to know -- everything in the world. At ten I wrote a 110-page book (with myself as the heroine, naturally). In high school, in the absence of any guidance, I read right through the library. Even as a child I was terribly concerned about truth -- truth, that is, in the sense of "what is" in the world. I was also concerned about those "couriers" who carried truth. I looked outward for truth, not inward, and broadcast it with the ardor of the missionary I once wanted to be. Eventually I chose journalism because -- in opposition, for instance, to philosophy, where truth was theoretical -- our truths were concrete and approachable, if only because they were small, relative truths.
***
On a sunny fall weekend in 1952 my parents delivered me, an expectant package of sixteen, to Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. Very soon I felt I had arrived in paradise. This was the era of campus fun, of university joy, and of sorority parties -- but of great intellectual inquiry, too. All of the doubts of high school fell away. Suddenly it was not the cheerleaders of high school who were the popular symbol; it was the serious though socially-minded coeds. The conformity of high school also suddenly disappeared. We were free to dream, to be socially angry and intellectually productive; those of us in the prestigious Medill School of Journalism took these possibilities particularly seriously.
We of Medill were a close-knit, elitist group, no doubt about it, despite the dour ugliness of the old dark-brick building that stood on the lakefront. Indeed, on graduation, my closest friend, Mary "Miki" McDermott, whose father, Frank, had been the Irish boss of the South Side, decided to do something unthinkable in those times -- we gave a party in an off-campus apartment from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. and invited all of our professors! They all came in a state of surprised and pleased shock; that was an era in which professors and students stayed a formal distance from one another.
We were suddenly free to dream, and Miki and I saw ourselves as adventurers. We were going to live: fully. And love: fully. It was Anais Nin's "I will not be just a tourist in the world of images." Or, said in a heavy Bogartesque whisper, "He travels fastest who travels alone."
Despite the unfair image of the fifties generation as socially unconscious imbeciles, we had our very real causes. I did a paper on Paul Robeson and the prejudice against him and broke down sobbing as I wrote it. When the Supreme Court decision on integration came, we applauded wildly in classes and walked around the campus singing. And I made wonderful friendships, friendships that have lasted until this day: Lucy Woods Wiesner, Lynne Reich Basta, Carol Krametbauer Petersen, Phyllis Oakley .... People most definitely were not interchangeable in those days, nor did we have discontinuing selves. We were loyal and loving, and relationships lasted.
I also had my own feminism, and I researched it and wrote about it and talked about it in an era in which it was not even suggested as an historical subject. Everybody thought me quite dotty but I really didn't care much; I have never been much of a philosopher, but it just seemed frankly wrong to me that women should be considered inferior or that they should be expected to do only one thing in life. It was wrong, it was inhuman; and I wouldn't put up with it. It was only much later that I found out how hard the world made it not to put up with it.
Much, much later, actually in 1982,1 expressed to a
Similar Books
