Anything else if self-indulgence, which is difficult to glorify in any case and particularly difficult to justify when the hero's grievances are temporary and external to the university. Society needs places for sensitization and places for serious academic study. But they can be separate places.
So this, ultimately, is the reason I left my romantic comrades in University Hall. They were enjoying themselves too much. Had they been in pain, I might have been able to stay, as an existential being crying out against an oppressive world I did not really hope to change. And then I would have been justified in quoting Camus. True, one must imagine Sisyphus happy, but only while he experiences "boundless grief" which is "too heavy to bear."
Something there was in me that was disturbed by the happiness which came before the bust. I wanted to stay; I wanted that clean feeling of opposing cops.
I might very well have left for another reason; I left for this one.
9
"It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us."