50 years after Harvard...

David Epstein, Harvard College Class of 1957.

50th Class Reunion

October, 2006.

“The Register” of our freshman year described an exotic classmate, Cesare Undula Balzotti, III. He resided at “1369 Rue Eartha Kitt” in Kenya, Africa with hobbies that included “falconry” and a probable major in “Sanskrit or Indic Philology.” He campaigned for election to run the “Freshman Smoker” but was disqualified when pronounced a hoax. (Harvard Crimson, December 8, 1953.) He makes no further appearance, not in the 1957 yearbook “Three Twenty One” nor in the ten reunion reports of our Class.

Cesare Balzotti had a limited fictive life. He did not soar like Shakespeare’s King Henry V at Agincourt. He was not Alyosha Karamazov challenged by the story of the Grand Inquisitor. He also did not descend into “The Heart of Darkness” like Kurtz and proclaim, at the end, "The horror! The horror!"

Cesare Balzotti may have offered us some life lessons. For those days when we thought he was real, were we gullible like the Trojans in allowing the wooden horse into gates of the city or like Othello in looking at the handkerchief and listening to the deceitful words of Iago. Is a deception harmless if no one suffers ? If we could not believe the truth of this Harvard publication, where was “Veritas” ?

Balzotti never had to engage in retrospection. All that he would ever achieve happened by the time he entered college. We have shared the intervening years benefited from the technology of jet planes, scanners, computers, and the internet and the scientific discoveries of DNA, the human genome, and deep space. We heard “ I have a dream” and “That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

In the five decades since we received our degrees, there are no longer just Harvard Men but an equal number of Harvard Women.

By inclination and professional training, I ask many questions. My first big question was in the 1940’s during World War II. My father drove me to Woodlawn Elementary School each morning. We did not have a car radio so he would not leave until he had finished listening to the war news. As a consequence, I anxiously arrived just seconds before the sounding of the tardy bell. One day, I hopefully asked, “After the war will there still be news ?”

I know the answer. We have lived in the “interesting times” of the oft-quoted Chinese curse. I, like many of us, served in the military at a slice of time when war was cold. We have seen much irony. Communism seen by some as the wave of the future decayed, the Soviet Empire collapsed, and free market capitalism rather than impoverishing is beneficially transforming the lives of billions. Events offer surprise. One American President resigns, another is impeached. The Republic endures. A Harvard President is hounded from office. History reverberates as a cry is raised to establish a world-girdling Islamic caliphate. A Pope confronts this cry with an appeal to millenial discussions about the relationship between faith and reason.

Until multiculturalism became the byword, I had not thought of presenting myself as having at least as exotic a personal history as Cesare U. Balzotti, III. I was born in Texas to parents who came from Eastern Europe and my home language was Yiddish, English in the schools, and a cowboy drawl or Spanish in different parts of the marketplace. My many maternal relatives all lived in Mexco City. Going each semester to and from Cambridge was a forty-five hour train trip that included listening to the emotional life stories of a procession of travelers while looking out the window at a country that was, at times, ramshackle humble, industrially powerful, and always vast and beautiful. A quaint way to travel as I have since bounded to the most distant parts of the planet in many fewer hours.

Now I sit in my home office above a canopy of leaves. My litigation practice has moved a few miles away from the world of Washington law firms. The digital age permits me to have all of the law at my fingertips. My documents go to a secretary whom I have never met. The final versions are electronically filed in distant courthouses. I look at my computer screen and listen to professors lecture on astronomy, music, and anatomy.

The five children that Ellen and I have raised are having an impact in their respective pursuits. The generation beyond them is beginning to unfold.

Yet, those calling for annihilation of the Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel are out to get me. Millions are feeding on a frenzy of hate whose major goal is destruction. The United States, a country that my parents loved with the passion of immigrants, is under attack from many who would come to live here in an instant, were they given the opportunity, but, in the meantime pray and dance for its collapse. The preservation of Western Civilization is not just a course taught in college, but a cause for concern.

Fair Harvard, are we living in the Age of Discovery, the Age of Democracy, the Age of Faith, the Age of Reason or the Age Anxiety ? Choose one or several or all of the above and explain your reasons.