The bleakest day of all—among the bleakest in American history—was November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy affected every one of us profoundly. He had represented everything good about the country. To my mind, he also seemed to be someone I could strive to emulate. Now, that role model, like my vision, was gone. A double loss.
The days would go like this: wake at six; listen to tapes; prepare for class; see Sue off to school; listen to tapes; go to class; meet with readers (morning, noon, and night); talk to professors or classmates walking to and from class, with or without the help of a guide; eat a light lunch (often enough, a tuna sandwich); more classes; walk across the quad, lugging the tape recorder; nick my shins or elbows or knees; arrive home and listen to tapes; wait for Sue to arrive home; arrange things as tidily as possible; fail at this effort, or succeed only marginally; keep listening to tapes from the classes; take a few minutes to consider the world and the perils of the future.
When Sue returned in the evening, she would throw down her stuff, let out a long breath, and begin to cook dinner, something simple and filling. We would talk for a bit, then eat. After that, I would continue with my tapes while she looked over her students’ work. We were too tired to talk much. Visitors would often come over after dinner to read to me, and Sue would entertain them for a while as well. Sometimes they had dinner with us, and then our awkward silence would temporarily disappear.
Then we slept. In the morning, the same routine began.
Out of my own necessity, I also invented, and later patented, a compressed-speech machine that speeds up the reproduction of words from recordings without distorting any sound so that anyone who needs to absorb large amounts of recorded speech can listen to two to three hundred words or more in a minute. An ordinary tape playback could only reproduce one hundred fifty words per minute.
As Professor Cantor had recommended, I applied for a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford University. It was a scholarly thing to do, as well as prestigious, and I needed all the prestige and scholarship I could find in those humbling days. What would become of us after the conclusion of my studies at Harvard was uncertain. My experience and heritage seemed to require that I anticipate misfortune. Any advantage might help, and the Marshall selection committee thankfully obliged.
Sue’s and my parents came to the dock to see us off to England. As we walked up the gangway, waving goodbye, Sue wept. But she was still young, and her spirit was too strong to be down for long. She did not know what misery lay ahead in England. Nor did I.
At Oxford, I was to continue working on my doctoral thesis on South Africa, following which I would return to Harvard to complete my work for the degree. Owing to the generosity of one of the professors at Oxford, I was given a gigantic office in the Bodleian Library to accommodate my many readers—an unprecedented gesture. Most faculty members did not have offices that large.
The Bodleian is the second-largest library in England, containing, among many other wonderful things, a complete set of Shakespeare’s first folios. The library’s holdings of letters and correspondence comprise “the sentences of gods,” as a graduate student in Victorian English, one of my readers, expressed it to me. She was openly envious that I had my own workspace in the library. I admitted that I was lucky to be situated among so much of the collected brilliance of the world—as if its brilliance would drip off onto me. It was a bitter-cold brilliance, however. The library was frigid, offering nothing that could be detected in the way of physical heat. Cold makes me sleepy. Every single day I had the urge to flip the hood of my jacket up and lay my head on the table. In fact, what I remember most about England is that cold: Sue and I huddled up in our little rented apartment, the to-and-fro to the library, everywhere. It was the kind of cold you cannot imagine ever being able to shake off. And I grew up in Buffalo!
At one point, we ran out of money entirely and could no longer afford to heat our own little rented rooms. Not long after that we were hit with a triple whammy, part of it weather related. Sue came down with a burning pneumonia. Meanwhile, I found an odd lump emerging from the side of my face. In addition, complications from my previous eye surgeries had to be dealt with. All three problems required medical attention, and so we made an emergency trip home. I went on to Detroit for eye surgery before we returned to the country that sunshine seemed to have forgotten.
Eventually, Oxford wore me down. I had never thought of myself as pampered, but the winter cold was unrelenting, and the omnipresent hard surfaces were a constant threat to a blind graduate student trying to feel his way around an unfamiliar campus. Even so, I would never trade away that experience. Study at Oxford taught me, sometimes with gleeful nastiness, to seek precision in words. That in turn entailed an unrelenting pursuit of precision in thought, which in turn demanded accurately limned perception of the facts and clear, logical reasoning, all of which has been a priceless gift in disparate realms, from government and business to philanthropy and my personal thoughts. Oxford also provided us with a few memories that warm me still: the lovely English spring, mornings and evenings on Christ Church Meadow, rowing and punting on the Thames.
Following our return from England, we spent a brief period back in Cambridge so I
