"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

I've visited many places in this world, and elsewhere, but I've never been to
Atlanta. I did drive down to Georgia in the 1920s, to find what was left of Helen's Mill—
not even memories—but managed to do it on dirt roads that didn't go through that
horrible city.
By the time I was seventeen, I believe Dorothy Partridge was as tired of me as I
was of her. I was told that there was a sum available adequate to see me through college,
and I took the examinations for Mount Holyoke and Wellesley.
I passed both, but wound up choosing Wellesley, for various reasons. Both
Boston and Harvard were nearby, and Philadelphia was agreeably distant. It was a new
school then, beginning its fifth year.
Perhaps it was not the best choice for me; perhaps I would not have been an
outstanding scholar anywhere. I made no lasting friendships there, and was an indifferent
student and terrible athlete. We were encouraged to engage in physical activities like
gymnastics and the newly fashionable lawn tennis, which at the time seemed mannish
and unnatural to me. (Could I have foreseen my coarse life to come, in Kansas and
Alaska, I wouldn't have believed it.)
 At the time there were critics of female higher education who claimed that
athletics would overexcite us and lead us into unwholesome practices. I found it boring
and tiring—and, I have to admit, more than half believed that overexertion would lead
me into some mysterious nameless state of sin, which terrified me. I knew almost nothing
about sex, except that it was all about sin and shame and pain.
If at any time in my life I needed a friend, it was then. I was surrounded by girls
and young women who were sophisticated and cosmopolitan, who might have brought
me fast into real life. But my background cut me off from them—I was a slow-witted
Southern belle with no social graces and no family connections—and once ostracized, I
tried to make a virtue out of my separateness.
I was also beautiful in those days, at least to people other than myself, which
didn't help. To the boys I was an exotic Southern flower, and I can see now that my terror
of them, and subsequent awkward rejection, made me a valuable prize, and further cut me
off from the other women—who of course saw my clumsiness as shameless and artful
seduction.
So my fondest memories of college are all times of solitude. Reading in the
library or long walks in the woods and fields. When the weather was fine I would paint or
draw, but I enjoyed the walks even when it was storming or I had to pick my way through
the snow. Most Saturdays I would walk unescorted around Boston and Cambridge, which
produced a little tingle of danger.
My original plan had been to study theology, both out of a natural inclination and
a sense that I might eventually do some good with it. But my inability with languages,
which had earned me beatings and confinement at the hands of Mrs. Pattridge, kept me
from that course of study. I had no Latin and less Greek, as someone said. Most of my
classmates had studied both for years. I had just managed to drag my way through
French.
As if in compensation, I discovered an ability with mathematics, losing myself for
hours at a time in trigonometry, geometry plane and not so plain, algebra, and calculus. I
also had enthusiasm for natural philosophy and natural history, both terms subsumed
under "science" long since.
I studied as much biology and astronomy as was offered at the nonspecialist level,
and then pursued astronomy as far as my mathematics would allow. It was a congenial
study for me, solitary under the night sky at the school's small observatory, making
careful measurements, and doing pencil and ink drawings of the moon and planets. I