Paris, 1988/89
Those nine months changed my life.
The transcripts, student cards and lecture notes still lie at the bottom of my cupboard yellowing
with age - a reminder of how I felt then.
It had taken me a week to fill in the application forms. I
was untouched by the political, economic or fashion fronts in one of the most
beautiful cities in the world because writing about why I wanted to
study at the American University absorbed me entirely - on my way to
fulfilling an ambition: higher education. Armed with my ID on the first
day I crossed the Seine and headed for 31 avenue Bouquet in the seventh
arrondissement. Buses ran leisurely along the Boulevard. Nobody seemed in a
hurry except me. By contrast, the inside was a power house. I soon became
familiar with the bookshop and the cafe on the ground floor and the library
just across the road.
Paris Through Its Architecture: my
first course as an auditor, was about the city's origins, and its economic and social
forces to the early middle ages. Dr. Kathleen Chevalier lectured at the
Parsons School of Art at La Motte Picquet and arranged for visits to Notre Dame,
Cluny and the Sainte Chapelle, Saint Eustache, the Louvre, the Marais, the
Left Bank, Les Invalides and the Pantheon. We were introduced to
entablatures, allegorical statues, flying buttresses, spandrils, cupolas, cast-iron load
bearings, transepts, Corinthian piers, bas-reliefs, and triforiums and
learned to compare the Baroque, Rococo, post-Revolutionary, late
Renaissance and Gothic. I was enthused enough to write about them. Dr
Chevalier agreed but there were problems.
Leaving school at 16 with very little
experience of writing essays at higher education level proved
laborious. Sunday mornings found me in the streets staring up
and sketching Baroque fruits, scrolls, cherubs and nymphs from
classical mythology and translating them on to the page. When
the comments came back they were encouraging : "A pleasure
to see you're interested", "I'm inspired by your stamina" and
"Bravo" uplifted and hung around for weeks. (They still
inspire and the red ink looks as though it dried yesterday).
We were a mixed bunch and I was the eldest. I
regretted not knowing the other students better, but it was difficult because I worked
part-time as a secretary at the OECD. When the three months came to an end I
was sorry to miss the lectures and the excursions and vowed that another
time I would find the time to socialise.
The next: a credit course: The Introduction to
Psychology from 7 till 10 p.m. took up Thursday evenings. We were only a small group of all
ages. Some came to work out their own personal problems while others,
like myself, came fresh to the subject. Dr. Paul J. Marcille talked about
developmental psychology, psychophysiology and the brain, consciousness,
conditions and learning, memory and thinking, personality theory,
psychological assessment, abnormal psychology, changing behaviour, health, stress,
coping and social psychology. Although my first reaction was that much was
common sense, I quickly realised that studies and data needed to be
scientifically proven. The amount of reading seemed overwhelming. There were also
mid-term and final exams, a term paper and brief presentation. How I
worked! There was so much to get through and so much I didn't understand.
During a short break I visited a friend in
a psychiatric hospital in England who suffered from depression
and used her case study for my presentation. My life
became increasingly focused and disciplined as deadlines
were met and hours spent in the library reading. Luckily, my
husband understood. I was on vacation when the results of the
exam came through: 91 1/2. I was thrilled. Studying had
become a way of life.
The Summer School was another new experience. I
worried that four mornings a week for four weeks weren't going to be long enough to write
three papers with footnotes, an extensive bibliography (properly presented
- why are lecturers so fussy about bibliographies?), and a mid-term and
final exam, and I was right. It was a struggle. Dr. Kathleen List's
Intensive Writing course introduced literature, criticism, discussed time,
settings, plots, characterisation, the effects of parallelism, repetition,
subordination, lexical sets and context. We also wrote poetry. There
were no excuses for later papers, she said, she'd heard them all before! The
pressure was on.
The students came from all over the world both to take a
vacation and learn about French culture. The AU organised visits in the
afternoon to museums and art galleries which I was unable to join because I worked
but their feelings of lightheardedness were contagious and it was fun to
meet up for dinner in the evening. I also remember sitting with Dr. List
in the cafe opposite discussing re-writes. I was a novice but the B-'s
soon became B+'s. Her last comment"I'm truly impressed" on my
paper on Joseph Conrad's Secret Sharer lies close to where my last full stop
ended.
I had acquired a taste for academic work which stayed with me
for a further six years. Studying at the AU opened a window - taught me to
push boundaries and gave me greater self confidence - a step I
never regretted.
Not bad for 42!
Message in a Body
Who are Your Heroes?
