Outside the Window: May 14, 2009. New York, New York. Rain again.

Inside the Book: 2000. Oxford, England. Continual rains and mists.

        Mullaney’s education changes markedly when, after Ranger School, he reports to Oxford on his Rhodes Scholarship. While his instructors at West Point and at summer training camps tightly controlled his schedule, his dons at Oxford don’t give much direction at all. They’re hard to find, and not especially helpful once found. (“Read and think,” says one. “Simultaneously if possible.”)

        He learns more from his fellow students. In the dining hall, Mullaney says,

It was as if I had landed on the planet Scrabble. Matt [a statistician] used words like “defenestrate” and “lachrymose.” Hayden [an M.B.A. student] was even stranger. He combined a Ranger’s command of curse words with Matt’s triple word scores. Dinners with them were verbal obstacle courses, but a complex vocabulary helped unlock complex ideas.

I perked up when I read this because it reminded me of my favorite moment in Joan Didion’s The White Album. The year is 1968, and Didion is reporting from San Francisco State College, where the students have shut down the campus. In that dry, sardonic tone of hers (I’ve always thought “pitiless as the sun” describes her work better than “slouches towards Bethlehem”), Didion dissects the scene:

“Adjet-prop committee meeting in the Redwood Room,” read a scrawled note on the cafeteria door one morning; only someone who needed very badly to be alarmed could respond with force to a guerrilla band that not only announced its meetings on the enemy’s bulletin board but seemed innocent of the spelling, and so the meaning, of the words used.

I love Didion’s notion, admittedly snooty, that spelling a word correctly is a prerequisite for understanding it. Clarity of expression and clarity of thought are inseparable. And not only are our ideas no better than the words we use to articulate them, but the words we know determine what kind of ideas we can grasp and act on. No one, in her mind, who can’t spell “agitprop” could possibly produce it.

        At Oxford, Mullaney’s academic freedom results in new perspectives on his education thus far. Reading Foucault’s Madness and Civilization and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest “convinced [me] for a period of weeks that West Point had much in common with an insane asylum (and not just because cadets routinely streaked nude during full moons). Oxford, in general, made me much more skeptical of authority.”