Цитаты из книги Admission

And I just… suddenly, I just looked at them, and I realized. Every one of them, my mom and all her sisters, they went to junior college for one or two years, and then they got married. And that was it. And then it just dawned on me, you know? That I never thought about my future, and they never thought about my future. They never asked me, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Or if I wanted to go to college. And I never asked myself. Because that part of my life was just kind of supposed to end after a year or two, and then I was supposed to get married and do what they’d done, which was have babies. And it was totally bizarre, because here I’d come to find out I was going to have a baby, and suddenly the one thing I knew was that wasn’t what I wanted.

By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she’d been one of them. She knew that they were soft-centered, emotional beings wrapped in a terrified carapace, that even though they might appear rational and collected on paper, so focused that you wanted to marvel at their promise and maturity, they were lurching, turbulent muddles of conflict in their three-dimensional lives. She knew that they were dying to leave home and petrified to go, that they clung to their friends but knew absolutely that no one truly understood them. When she went out into their world, departing her ivory, literally ivy-clad tower to visit their schools — and it was oddly immaterial if their schools were sticky with wealth or held together by municipal duct tape and valiant teachers — she knew precisely who they were and what they were going through. She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration (sometimes, in the case of the girls, literal self-laceration) and that their stated passions were, more often than not, arid things assembled in their guidance counselors’ offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren’t brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.

Inside every one of her fellow students, she understood now, was a person who didn’t live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn’t hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math. They were convinced they were not all they’d been cracked up to be: the track star, classicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher’s favorite. The driven ones she’d known in college feared they weren’t driven enough, and the slackers were sure they’d find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves. Up and down the corridors of the dormitories, behind each closed door, and whether the person within was davening over organic chemistry or drinking himself into a stupor, the Dartmouth she’d attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure.

It was an oddity of her work that she might know these young men and women so intimately from the records of their accomplishments, their confessed secrets, their worries and ambitions, and yet when the flesh-and-blood applicants arrived on campus a few months later, they were always strangers. Somehow, the folders turned into these bodies: high-spirited, intense, beauteous, or plain, usually clever but sometimes quite dull. They looked like teenagers walking the campuses of Notre Dame or Texas A&M. They sounded like kids at the mall or on the subway. The special, unique eighteen-year-olds, whose applications had so thrilled Portia and her colleagues, or made them argue passionately for admission over wait list, or wait list over rejection, had somehow morphed into these strangely ordinary beings. They chatted and texted away on their cell phones incessantly. They clutched identical Starbucks containers and shouldered identical backpacks. They went to the U-Store and bought their Princeton garb and so completed their transformations into Princeton students, disappearing into orange anonymity. This was not, of course, to take away from their brilliance. They were still brilliant, still gifted, still passionate about everything from Titian to nitrogen fixing in soybeans. They still wanted to give back, make things better, cure disease, and alleviate poverty. They were good kids, ambitious kids. But they were so ordinary, too.

She nodded to his book, still held open where he had left off, as if he had no wish to waste time finding his place again. “Tell me about Edie,” she said. He lit up. “You know this book? It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s the first biography I’ve ever read where the narrative form reflects the content.” She frowned. “I don’t know what that means.” “I mean that in this depiction of the sixties, the fragmentation of the experience is mirrored in the use of oral history. You feel as if you’re there, because so many impressions are competing for your attention. No single witness can claim to understand the subject of the biography, but cumulatively you do come to see who she was. I’m fascinated by the entire Factory thing, actually. Warhol — I can’t quite decide if he was utterly talentless or utterly talented. And his passivity. You know, how does someone so resoundingly passive wind up with all of these forceful personalities deferring to him?