O great, incomparable, and never-to-be-surpassed Crimson! What have you done? What have you not done? What will you do? You are a microcosm of the universe.... --from "Ode to The Crimson" circa 1880

The Crimson? It's like cornflakes. I eat it every morning, then forget about it.   --Harvard student circa 1981

O CRIMSON, light of my life, fire of my loins, wrapper of my fish, what are you, really?

You are five in the morning, a newsroom of rubble, an endless metronome of wire-machine clattering to no one, a sea of crumpled paper and broken typewriters, a resting place for tradition that stares down from the peeling yellowed walls, womb of a thousand dreams and careers and distortions and corrections and insights, a repository for the mediocre and the brilliant and the misfired and the passing-through and the incorrectly pasted up, O Crimson, you are a line on a resume and a way of life.

You are cleaned up every morning by a coughing old man named Kenny who has been coming in since God knows when to bring order into our chaos. Of us, he knows only the photos on the walls and the misfits who sleep on couches.

O Crimson, every day you think you capture the reality of an unreal world, set it in 9/11 sc type, and proclaim it to the universe, every day you turn people into profiles, life into leads, death into obits. Existence is your weather pic. You break big stories and powerful men, and big men and powerful stories. You are the powers that will be flexing young muscles; you are the turning points of the corridors of power; you dare to misspell the names of the famous and little-known alike; you valiantly rise above the blue books and problem sets and open letters and no interhouses and $20 dollar late fees and ad board hearings, and cry out "I will be read!"

Sometimes you are delivered.

You are the slimy and the courageous, the forgotten and the forgetful, the vicars of Washington and the viceroys of Vermont, you are the churner of words to fill the spaces between ads, and you also buy the ads. You are Pat Sorrento, the shop man who tells us stories of "the good old days." You are David Rockefeller '36 and Caspar W. Weinberger '38 and Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 and John F. Kennedy '40 and David L. Halberstam '55 and Bill Lee (Red Sox pitcher, honorary) and David Riesman '31 and F.A.O. Schwartz '24.

Walter Lippman '10 and John Reed '10 thought you were too stuck up and clubby, and you probably were. Now you are consciously, sub-consciously and unconsciously racist and facist and sexist and communist (or Marxist-inspired) and incestuous and pederastic and homophilic and homophobic and wishy-washy and contentious and anarcho-syndicalist and autocratic and authoritarian and libertarian and middle-class and upper-class and naive and snobby.

Worse, sometimes you are inaccurate.

O Crimson, every year you are taken over by a bunch of well-meaning ambitious types who think they are going to set you on fire and make your pages glow and glitter and sparkle and grab readers by the eyeballs and pull them into your embrace until they moan and beg for more. Every year you will be remade in their image, and you give some and take some, but keep your basic shape until another like-minded team starts rubbing its palms in anticipation.

You get better and you get worse, but you can never know if it matters. O Crimson, you are future and you are past, and your present is a fleeting spark for us; you are a great friendly whore who takes us for our one-night four-year stand and barely stirs when we depart, for the line outside you door is never-ending.

O Crimson, you are the woman I desire but can never possess, who traps me but does not fulfill me, who makes me hate and love, who is burned into my brain for no damn good reason in the world except that nothing else is, and because, after all, she must be sincere when she tells me she really does like me.

You are also a waste of time. Maybe. We're not sure yet.

NOW, WHERE DOES The Harvard Crimson Anthology fit into all this?