The next surface we reach is less pleasant; many of those taken with the exotic air of Europe equate a dashing, alien air with uncleanliness. And indeed the air around them often seems to have a dash of something in it, and sometimes does serve the purpose of alienation.

Uncut hair, grubby hands and nails, an unctuous face and general disorder of appearance, along with the tattered clothing and an accompanying look of explosive distraction, or sometimes protracted introspection, build up to the effect aimed at--an appearance of depravity. Cantabrigians under the spell of Continentalism would join the desperate people in Sartre's stories and the creatures of Camus in their state of elevated wretchedness--a vilifying yet inexpensive estrangement that sets them off from their humdrum fellows. They have in their minds' eye the limbo of clandestine disbelief they think is occupied by post-war, or just post-nineteenth century, European intellectual degenerates. Needless to say, they fall short, and usually end up feeling what they imagine French poets feel or at least what philosophy students at the Sorbonne feel when they look at American tourists with a disdainful glare.

Continentalism is as hard to study as it is easy to incur. Its relatively new thread is often hard to single out from the longer-established strands of traditional New England Anglophilism, or impotent Cambridge bohemianism, or merely the shabby genteel. Are that tweed cap and turtleneck sweater and that pair of Colin Wilson glasses long standing affectations, with family sanction, or have they been induced by a fortnight in London? Does that hawk-shouldered young lady with the unattached hair and dangling earrings long to be at Mary Vorse's place instead of the Mandrake? Or is she dressing funny to emulate the women she saw in Vander Elk's "Paris At Midnight" photography exhibit? It is hard to tell. Are those lacerated loafers, that patched jacket, and ragged shirt collar a disdainful protests against the brandnew clothes, the slick show of affluence by the ascendant vulgar, or just magnificently down-at-heel aristocracy? Perhaps the diagnosis of a sophomore trying to look like a pre-publication existentialist is all wrong. It is hard to tell.

One can be pretty certain of one thing, however: the people in Cambridge who dote on the illustrious decadence of the Continent lack the strength of the convictions they don't have. Their eccentricities are externally wrought. They do not have the extraordinary values that extraordinary dress and manners ought to spring from.

For this reason we shouldn't take the devotees of Continentalism too seriously. The Continentalism movement is as harmless as its members are ineffectual. In another few years they will probably have terminated their college fling, got a hair cut and a family, and will have swapped their Creeping Continentalism for a Galloping Professionalism, or at the least a Beaming Suburbanism.

The cart will fall apart and the rider will drop into an Ivy model suit. Fetishism such as this is like an old school ring; when it begins to pinch, you leave it at home in your dresser drawer