Vision of Tarot by Piers Anthony
Actually, it was a very good discussion, and he enjoyed it. He contributed minimally—not because he was shy or bored or uninformed, but because he was not. He did not need to prove anything by dominating the program. The uninterested and immature students were absent; only serious ones were present. Paul could see that many participants knew much more about their areas of expertise than he did; he could learn from them, and he liked listening to them. He liked interacting with those who were intellectually aware. So though this session might be a technical loss for the college—in fact a disaster because it really educated so few students—it was a profitable experience for him personally.
Carolyn wandered in a couple of times, just checking on him. Reassured, she buzzed off around the campus again. Just like a student. She liked it here, as he had known she would. She did not care about the deep significance of the college or about the fact that his presence in this very room at an earlier hour than he had stayed last night had gotten him suspended. To Carolyn, the entire college was a giant playground with interesting people doing interesting things all around. It was barely possible that she would one day attend as a student here; then the other meanings would begin to form.
The attendance of the program swelled, then petered out into assorted sub-dialogues. Finally, by common consent, the remainder was canceled. The college had made the program available to its students, but could not make them attend—and it was right that it do this. There were principles more important than formal education, as Paul well knew. Institutions that lost sight of that fact might post high ratings on paper that only partially masked their fundamental failure. This college had been, and remained, devoted to the quest for a better reality.
In the afternoon, Paul took Carolyn down to the moraine on the southern border of the college. He had learned of this typical formation in a geology class here, and it had stuck with him ever since. "You see," he told her as they walked the path ascending the narrow ridge through pines with the sides falling off steeply on either side, "once huge masses of ice covered much of this continent. That ice was two kilometers thick. It was called a 'glacier.' At the edge it pushed up a pile of stones, sand, and debris. When it melted, it left this pile of rubble to show where it had been. The river ran right below it, formed from its melt, and the river is still here. So here we stand, on the glacial moraine." He knew she was more intrigued by the trees, slope and path, and the blackberries growing along it, than by the theory. But he was often surprised by her retention, and he hoped that some of the geologic background would stick with her. How much the teacher he had become, profiting from his own experience as student! (They should have put the moraine in that transcript...)
On the way back, Paul picked up an article printed about the college. "There are two rules," it claimed; "no pets and everybody works." Ho, ho! Minor hypocrisy had not abated either! Just so long as they did not try to expel any more students by selective enforcement.
After supper, Carolyn went up to the dormitory while Paul remained on the main campus to talk with people. The girl knew her way around now, so he didn't worry about her going alone. After all, there were ducks to feed. She had carefully saved her dinner scraps for them. He gave her the key. "And don't lock me out!"
Returning late, he found the door locked with a note on it. "FATHER PAUL—Carolyn could not locate you and was upset, so she is with me." A female name was signed and an address in another dorm.
Um. He didn't want his little girl upset. She tended to overreact and hated to be alone. He set out for the listed dorm.
"Oh, sure," a boy in the lounge said. "They were here a moment ago. Here, I'll take you to her room." He led the way down the hall.
The room was empty. "I think they went to the other dorm," a girl said. "The little girl was crying—"
Crying... "Thank you," Paul said. No question about the co-ed status of these dormitories; the boys and girls mixed freely throughout, and not merely the married ones. Paul only regretted that it had not been so in his time, as his suspension testified. The college had now admitted, in effect, that he had been right all along. Yet perhaps it had been his effort that encouraged them to change course; they must have been at least partially aware that they were fighting the most intellectually and socially aware students, not the misfits or crass ones. If the college admitted only those students who would obey restrictive and/or illegal rules, what would have been its future?
Ah, but would Paul send his innocent daughter to such a college with its carefree attitude toward the scholastic aspect and its completely open dormitories? Indeed he would, if her will and his finances permitted. He had fought for this very sort of freedom—freedom to learn to learn, to master real life—and still believed in it. The Vice Squad had won the battle and lost the war, and he was most gratified to see this.
He returned to his own dorm—and there was Carolyn. "Daddy!" she cried tearfully. "I thought you'd been killed in a car accident!"
Because she hadn't been able to find him. Her hyperactive imagination had brought her low. "I was in the Community Center, where you left me."
"I tried to call there, but they said you were gone."
How nice! Had anyone ever looked! Yet the same sort of thing had happened in his day. Paul himself had unwittingly caused much inconvenience to a visiting family because a phone call had come for a girl and he had not been able to go to the girl's dormitory (yea, and be suspended again?) even to call her from the lounge. He had explained this to the caller. Too late, he had learned that the girl, expecting the call, had been waiting—in the Community Center. He had not looked there, having no reason to believe that she would be there; one could not comb the entire campus every time the phone rang in the hope of such a random discovery.
The young lady who had taken charge of Carolyn accompanied them into the room. Amaranth in co-ed guise, of course; she had portrayed Susan too. All young women were the same, under the stage makeup, here in Animation. Paul was glad he had made the beds and kept the room neat, even to placing Carolyn's octopus doll on her bed. He had hardly expected female company at midnight! A friendly dog also wandered in, an Irish Setter, reminding him of another long-ago episode and recent hypocrisy. Carolyn was immediately cheered. Paul thanked the student for her kindness; she said good-bye to Carolyn and departed. All was well again.
Next morning Carolyn found a girl her own age to play with. It was the granddaughter of the cleaning lady. The two set off for the kitchen to scrounge for food for the assorted animals of the campus, especially the voracious ducks. Carolyn also wangled a ride in the canoe on the little lake, another marvelous experience for her. To be eight years old again, carefree... yet there was more even to childhood than this, as the prior evening had shown.
Paul's programs were over. Now he was following up on other matters of interest: the college's new solar-power facilities, the resident water-dowser, the specialized Savonius-rotor windmill under construction, and the experimental crops grown on sludge. All these things had been exploited massively during the Exodus years, of course, but now that pressure was off, there was time to work out refinements and ascertain what was best for the long haul. They were raising crayfish as a crop and using wood for supplementary heating. All these things paralleled what the Holy Order of Vision was doing, and all were vital to the modern world. This was another new direction for the college, and he strongly approved. The years of wasteful, mechanized pollution were over, and it was good to see the college being so realistic. Institutions could learn and grow in much the same manner as individuals!
Then he set out to run down Will Hamlin. The man was as coincidentally elusive as all things were, here, but finally Paul caught him in his office in the library building. The door was marked "Dean"—was that his position now?
"I have seen the college of my future, as it were," Paul said. "It has been twenty years, but my life has been elsewhere, so to me it is very like yesterday. I note many changes—and many similarities." He wondered whe
Will was the only apparent survivor of that score of years, although a couple of other instructors were in the vicinity and Will's secretary was the wife of the other student member of the Vice Squad in Paul's day. That student had been an intelligent, sensible sort who had known better than to get into the kind of rough-and-tumble Paul had enjoyed. Paul had disagreed with him on a number of matters, but always respected the individuality and perception of the man. To disagree openly was no crime; it was hypocritical agreement that was wrong. At any rate, there were some evidences of continuity in the college. But the fundamental carry-through, by the benificent irony of circumstance, was Will.
Will, Paul thought privately. There were cards in the Tarot deck identifying the concepts of Love, Victory, and Justice. The card for Fortitude or Discipline had been redefined by the Thoth deck as Lust; maybe two cards were required there. Yet were Fortitude and Discipline identical concepts? Perhaps they should be separated again, and a new card set up to cover Purpose—perhaps better titled Will.
Love is the Law, Love under Will. It was not necessary that anyone comprehend the pun; the concept was valid in itself. It had taken extreme fortitude to last it out here, surely. It had taken Will.
Paul's question, at any rate, was right in Will's bailiwick. Suddenly Paul was the student again, and Will the teacher, and the subject was the College: retrospect and prospect.
"It is hard to know where to start," Will said. "When you were here, the college was less than twenty years old—"
"Yes," Paul agreed. "When I came, it was fourteen; when I left, eighteen. Some of the students were the same age as the college." And the college had certainly been going through its adolescence then! Paul himself was four years older than the college; that was close enough for strong identification.
"I would say that at the outset the emphasis was on the college as community, and as involved in the larger community—about the first eight years," Will said. "Then a decade of concern with the nature of the learning process, and experiments with classroom methods derived from this concern—"
That was Paul's period. He remembered: philosophy class outdoors on the lawn, students falling asleep in the sun; geology, walking beside the river, learning to see it with phenomenal new awareness, its effect on the landscape, moraine and its own sedimented convolutions; art all over the campus, spending two hours looking at a landscape before making his first mark on the canvas, and the teacher had understood. Paul still had that painting today—not expert art, but another record of his learning experience. Drama, the plays and playlets performed on stage or in any available space on tour, once even in a private living room. Great exercise in versatility of expression! Dressing room facilities had not always been adequate; Paul's eyes had nearly popped the first time he had seen the very pretty leading lady blithely undress and change into her costume in the crowded backroom, while he and the others wrestled with make-up and cold cream and such. She had aspired to a career as an actress, but had later broken her leg in a skiing accident. That had, it seemed, destroyed her main qualification for the career. All classes had been discussion, not lecture, with all viewpoints appreciated. Yes, that had been worthwhile! Will called it "concern with the learning process;" Paul called it "learning to learn." How poignantly it returned, now!
"Then an eight year period when much effort went into curriculum experimentation," Will was saying. "There were strong influences from a number of social scientists and psychologists."
Those were the years immediately after Paul's departure. They sounded disorganized—as Paul's own life had been. Ages nineteen to twenty-six for the college: early maturity, but not necessarily the period of best judgment. A good age to heed the advice of specialists, certainly. Had that advice abolished the Vice Squad and started the trend toward dormitory deregulation? Had it returned the government of the Community to the Community, aborting the faculty oligarchy?
"Six years during which the college was trying to 'grow while staying small'," Will continued. "This was done by dividing its growing population into two relatively separate campus groups and by means of the organization of student-faculty 'living-learning' units."
Ages twenty-seven through thirty-two, Paul thought. Time to get married and settle down. But how could a college marry? Instead it reproduced by fission, like a creature of Sphere Nath, forming a satellite campus, propagating its species in its own fashion. Paul himself had gotten married in that period of his life after returning from his experience on Planet Tarot a changed man. But what man could visit Hell itself in his quest for God and not suffer change?
"And the past six years," Will concluded. "Involving growing program autonomy for the five programs developed, under an overall view of education as a rhythmic alteration of action and reflection, resident and nonresident experience, the analytical and the creative." Educationese came naturally to an educator!
Paul, too, had developed new programs. His daughter Carolyn was one of them. Now he was forty-one, almost forty-two, still four years older than the college. To the extent his life could be taken as a guide, the auspices for the college were promising. Its progress would continue, changing to accommodate the larger circumstance of a changing world. The microcosm always reflected the macrocosm; free will was to that extent a delusion.
Will produced a paper from his files. "The philosophical ideals of the college have been reflected in its catalogues," he said. "This first catalogue encouraged the education of young men and women for real living through the actual facing of real life problems as an essential part of their educational program. It urged the participation of students in the formulation of policies and management of the college..."
"I believed in that," Paul said. "But I was suspended for practicing it."
"You were suspended? I had forgotten."
Evidently the event had not loomed as large in Will's life as it had in Paul's! And why should it have? This did not subtract from its significance. Will had been true to the college catalogue he quoted when the rest of the faculty had seemingly lost sight of its precepts. Will had done it because that was the way he was. Perhaps he assumed that others who expressed similar ideals also practiced them.
"I had more trouble with practice than theory," Paul said. "In theory we learned about practical life by finding work during the nonresident work term. In practice, it saved the college somewhat on the winter heating bill."
Will looked at him. "Didn't you find the work program beneficial?"
"It was an education—but I think not the way intended." It had proved almost impossible to get a job for just two midwinter months. Not if a person told the truth. Some students lied; they said they were looking for permanent employment. Then they'd quit when the work term ended. Those who told the truth could spend more time looking for a job than they did actually working. The obvious lesson was: to succeed in life, you had to lie.
Paul had not lied—and had almost lost credit for one of his work terms. An honest search and honest failure were not acceptable. One had to play the game by its rules! But no point in belaboring Will about this; life was rough and fraught with inherent unfairnesses, and he had learned this. The thoughtlessness of the college could be interpreted as an aspect of its accommodation to reality.
"Many things work out that way," Will agreed, not aware of Paul's thoughts. "The history of the college has other examples."
"Oh?"
"One such was the Action Group. It was composed of selected faculty and students who set up residence just off campus. Instead of academic sessions, texts, and papers, they sought to find, through action and facing problems, the real need for depth of study for
"That hardly seems different from life itself," Paul observed.
"So it turned out. Some students proved less ready for the cooperation and interaction the project demanded than they had judged themselves to be. Two faculty members had problems. There was some romanticism about the group which led, among other things, to its welcoming wanderers who had no connection with the college. One was a young man with emotional and behavorial problems requiring professional help; another was an old woman who was soon observed to be both senile and physically ill. So it seemed the project was a failure after one year—yet later analysis showed that a significantly large number of Action Group participants had stayed on at the college to become some of its most serious, most hard-working students. Several important later projects originated in the Action Group, and these projects are still operating today. From these came the 'cooking dorms' in which students are responsible for planning and preparing their own meals."
There it was—the origin of the co-ed housing Paul had marveled at. The offshoot of a failed experiment.
"From them, too," Will continued, "came a number of special interest residences-houses for vegetarians, for the student-manned fire department, for feminists, political radicals, for persons interested in certain schools of philosophy or psychology, an organic-gardening group—"