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1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a fellow as you will meet in a
month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China
and Dream's Children. There follows an informal essay that ventures even
beyond Lamb's frontier, indeed, "informal" may not be quite the right word to
describe this essay; "limp" or " flaccid" or possibly "spongy" are perhaps more
appropriate.
2 Vague though its category, it is without doubt an essay. It develops an
argument; it cites instances; it reaches a conclusion. Could Carlyle do more?
Could Ruskin ?
3 Read, then, the following essay which undertakes to demonstrate that logic,
far from being a dry, pedantic discipline, is a living, breathing thing, full of
beauty, passion, and trauma --Author's Note
4 Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and
astute--I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a
chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And--think of it! --I was only
eighteen.
5 It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for
example, Petey Butch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age,
same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough young fellow, you
understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable.
Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be
swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender yourself to idiocy
just because everybody else is doing it--this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness.
Not, however, to Petey.
6 One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such
distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. "Don't move," I
said. "Don't take a laxative. I'll get a doctor."
7 "Raccoon," he mumbled thickly.
8 "Raccoon?" I said, pausing in my flight.
9 "1 want a raccoon coat," he wailed.
10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. "Why do you
want a raccoon coat?"
11 "1 should have known it," he cried, pounding his temples. "1 should have
known they'd come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all
my money for textbooks, and now I can't get a raccoon coat."
12 "Can you mean." I said incredulously, "that people are actually wearing
raccoon coats again?"
13 "All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where've you been?"
14 "In the library," I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on