A L S O_ T O D A Y Tom Tomorrow: Clinton joins ranks of great presidential prevaricators! T A B L E_ T A L K To Ph.D. or not to Ph.D.: Is a career in academia all that? Share your thoughts in the Education area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Recess A one-stop playground for weekend frivolity and fun (09/18/98) Going adjunct By Andreas Killen The grueling plight of underemployed academics and the violent fantasies they entertain (09/17/98) Vocational fiction 101 By Carol Lloyd The principles of creative writing can help make sense of the absurd autobiographical art of résumé creation (09/16/98) Penile Ponderings By Lori Gottlieb When a professor asks you to grope your friend's organs for extra credit, what's the right thing to do? (09/15/98) The $10,000 hoop By Zachary Karabell Why college doesn't matter (09/14/98) BROWSE THE IVORY TOWER ARCHIVE

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS | BY ISAAC ZAUR____ Beyond the bad food and the bad poetry, a tribe of students seek life's mysteries in a collective hallucination. Between August 1995 and May 1996, residents and friends of residents of H College Apartment #119 consumed more than 200 doses of LSD. No person or experience between that time and now has failed to be colored for me by the things I saw and said and heard in those incandescent mornings, nights and afternoons. Occasionally I still wake up from wild fractal dreams, the ozone stink of my own terrified sweat filling the room, sure I've fallen into the acid space my friends and I once named Perimeter. We were freshmen, 17 or 18 years old, living away from home and parents for the first time in our lives. The building that we lived in became our identity, the mark that set us apart from the rest of the school. We went there to read, get high, hang out, have sex, cook wretched meals of ramen and canned corn. We went there when there was nothing else to do, nowhere to go, when we wanted to simply be, and yet we complicated Being. We established slogans: "When you're not going anywhere, you're going to 119." "There is that which is the source of motion, and to which all motion returns. The Apartment is the Unmoved Mover and the destiny of men." Perimeter meant land between the Self and Other, Sane and Mad, the Mind and World. These dichotomies, and thus the schematic possibility of our drug-mediated adventures, were taught by our professors. We threw our desperate enactment of them in their faces like an accusation of their age, a testimony to our courage. No one could be strong who didn't ride along the edge of madness, testing intellect against the unexplainable. We were the young Americans pondering infinitude with what we held to be tremendous energy. Nighttime and daytime were dreamtime, and the kids who went to class and went to sleep and didn't go to the Apartment were the weak, the small, the uninitiated. One month Becky and Ramien tripped every day; they kept a journal more and more obsessively, then summoned everyone to witness an improvised ceremony on the last day. We crouched on the concrete porch of the apartment building. Ramien laid pieces of wood scavenged from the corners of the storage area deliberately into a hexagonal pile. Becky spat thrice: into the woodpile, off of the steps and at Ramien. He did not wipe the spittle off his dark shoulder but stared intently at the polygon he'd made. Becky's eyes were such narrow slits that no white was visible. She poured something (scotch whiskey, it was later determined) out of a brown glass bottle onto the heap and dropped a match on it. The trip journal was produced, and the two explorers read passages seemingly at random to the rest of us, and to a few "randoms" who wandered by. Every time one passed the journal to the other they would cooperate in ripping a page out and letting it drift onto the little flames by their feet. They read loudly. "MONDAY: DOSED AT 9AM AND WENT TO BREAKFAST. HAIRY LUNCH-WITCH (EVEN THOUGH BREAKFAST-TIME) TOLD RAMIEN HE COULDN'T EAT WITHOUT ID CARD. EVERY SINGLE RANDOM THERE TALKING ABOUT TRENT LOTT FOR SOME REASON. BECKY SWEARS HERE AND NOW SHE WILL NEVER RUN FOR OFFICE." Another entry from later in the month was less coherent. "PATCHWORK TRUCE DECLARED ON TAMMY'S COUCH. MAYBE ELBOWS SIGHTING (ACTUALLY TWO). CRITICAL INFO: NEG, NEG." The ceremony continued for over an hour, but only a few of us watched the whole thing. When it was over the journal was empty. Becky and Ramien stood with necks bent in S-curves looking at the sun. They turned inside. I turned on "Simpsons." Ramien packed a bowl. There were casualties. Gregory moved out of the Apartment halfway through the year, shouting wildly that his grandfather had died for our sins. Jason lasted a few months into sophomore year, but went into seclusion, emerging to disrupt parties with barely coherent demands that the music be changed to Philip Glass, or to play intricate but cruel games of flattery and insult with his girlfriend. Kristin's native psychic abilities were keyed up to such a pitch of sensitivity she went into convulsions when she saw in a dream that Brian, studying abroad, had been arrested for boisterous drinking in Paris. Members of the Apartment crowd were sent to jail for drug offenses, placed on disciplinary leave, spoken of in serious tones by the administration behind closed doors. But it was also a time of awe, of a great and supernatural beauty we had scarcely known existed. Lovers learned to speak to one another without making sounds. We all learned how to hold each other's hands and face down acid-summoned monsters decorated with kaleidoscopic glamour. And there were kindnesses, too. We all trembled before the holy power of our own words and ideas, and gradually the power of our kindnesses. Minutes before dawn in early winter I awoke in someone's living room from the darkness of an alcoholic sleep. Opposite me a girl named Ruth turned in her sleep, pulling her arms into her chest for warmth. Ruth had sex with everyone I knew but me and Gregory by the end of the year, and at this particular time she hadn't spoken to anyone in over a week. Stephen and Leo were playing chess in silence and watching the last fragments of color drain away from their hallucinations. Stephen moved his rook to Nick's last file and leaned over Ruth, placing a blanket from the back of his chair on her pale body. We're older now, living the quiet, studious lives we always meant our parents to imagine, but today a ring of youthful and unfamiliar faces sits smoking cigarettes between the Dining Center wall and the hedgerow along L-dorm. They are the kids we were, in tie-dyes, bells and leather jackets, most of all with bright red eyes from too much grass and too little sleep. Stephen and I linger, watching the girls to watch the girls, and watching them all to remember. SALON | Sept. 21, 1998 Isaac Zaur is a senior at Haverford college, majoring in English.