Despite the packaging, posturing and pretensions that went into my candidacy for the Class of '88, the powers that were at Harvard received at least two bits of disturbing insight into my psyche circa 1984. Now I'm not proud of this, but I filled in the last question on the application form. That was the one which asked if we had any special talents or qualities which the admissions committee should be aware of before passing judgment on our young personages.

I thought that I did, so I told them: "I do perhaps the best Bill Murray imitation on the East Coast." This was no idle boast, for my claim, so far as I knew, was true. Having travelled from my home on Long Island as far north as Boston and as far south as Atlanta, I had yet to encounter any fellow youths whose Murray mimicry could rival my own.

Though many tried, not a one could match the loving precision with which I recreated the intonations of Carl Spagler--the cretinous golf course groundskeeper-turned-gopher-killer the future ghostbuster played in Caddys-hack. "Hello? Mr. Gopher? Yeah, hi, it's me, Mr. Rabbit," Carl would say as he dangled a plastic explosive in the shape of a rabbit into the gopher's hole. "I'mnot a plastic explosive or anything."

When my mother came across a photocopy of myapplication with this little bit of dementia onit, she was sure my chances of getting in haddisappeared. But Harvard took me anyway. Thesecond crack in my application armor was revealedonly after I was accepted, so no one could do muchabout it. My parents were aware of this one,though, because they let it slip.

Like all parents of the incoming Class of '88,they were asked the summer before freshman year towrite a little bit about me to help with roomingassignments. My father was the writer in thefamily, and to him fell the task of summing up myexistence in no more than one single-spacedtypewritten page. I was a fine boy, he wrote, afine boy. But though he expressed cautious faithin my adaptibility and sociability, he suggestedit might be best if I were not roomed withclassmates of conservative political orientation.That might cause problems, and problems are bestavoided.

People who know me now probably won't believethis. But, dear reader, you're just going to haveto trust me on this one. In high school my heartbled and my knee jerked with the best of them. InCrimson editorial debates, on the otherhand, I was from the start, against my desires orintentions, cast on the right. I've developed areputation in Crimson circles, at least, asan incipient neo-conservative. This I deny, and ifany of you wish to talk about it, you know whereto reach me.

Yet I cannot deny two things. The way I thinkabout things has changed. And I've always been twodifferent people at home and at school. Now thatthis distinction is about to be dissolved, I haveto begin figuring out which one is me. The beautyand charm of going away to college is the processof self-understanding that is forced upon you. Theugly danger lies in the odd chance that you mightnot like what you see.

Some time early in April, I started calling myold friends from high school more frequently thanI had done in the previous three years. We all hadkept in touch, and every year, come vacation timewe would resume our cliquey ways. But when atcollege, we tended to become absorbed in ourdifferent worlds.

By April, though, I began to realize that theperfunctory once-a-month phone calls were becomingmore frequent and more substantive. As we werefacing the future, my old friends and I wereinstinctively reaching back into the past.

Since Thanksgiving of freshman year, I havebeen aware of how easy it is to forget one worldwhen you're living in another. I always feltmyself instantly gliding into my respectivepersonas and roles as soon as I moved from oneworld into the other. At the same time, the otherworld immediately receded from memory andconsciousness.

I don't have any desire to return to my highschool days and ways, and I'm not allowed to gothrough Harvard again. Why, then, the groping backto my older friends as an uncertain futureapproached? Home has always been more real to methan college. The ties there bind ever so muchmore tightly than those made at Harvard.

Before he was elected president, Woodrow Wilsonbecame famous as the president of Princeton andthe governor of New Jersey. But he grew up asTommy Wilson in Virginia. Though he left theSouth, the South never left him. He was once askedin his later years about his attachment to aregion in which he had not lived for decades. "Inthe South," he replied, "nothing has to beexplained to me."

Nothing has to be explained to me when I'mhome, either. But I mean this in more than just acultural sense. It's bothered me that I've neverfelt I could duplicate at college the friendshipsI had at home. It seems to me a physical, mentaland temporal impossiblity. There are kids I grewup with who I've not spoken to or socialized within years. Yet were I to get together with themtoday, I would still feel that I knew them betterthan I know anybody here.

I know all about their first-grade foibles,their nicknames in sixth grade and the fights theygot into with their older brothers or sisters. Idon't care how much we think we have changed,those things still matter. They are thicker, theyresonate more than the things you can learn atcollege, where everyone has the chance to reinventthemselves. This is no doubt liberating for many,but it requires a severing with the past thatcannot be cost free.

Freshman year is the closest thing to atabula rasa any of us are likely ever to bea part of. History and memory don't have to matterif we don't want them to. Cast into this vortex,however, I flailed about. I was like an electronin the new physics. Here one second, there a splitsecond later, I was all over the place and nowhereat once. I left no traces. Late night bullsessions for me were usually about political--notpersonal--first principles as I resisted makingpersonal revelations or admitting to anyunhappiness or imperfection. The closestembodiment of ironic detachment this side of DavidLetterman, I was conscious of my inordinateself-consciousness (meta, no?), yet unaware of howmiserable I was. At least Dave had his TV show.