Cornell will always remain essential to the palace of my imagination because of Nabokov's "Pale Fire".<br><br>But let me say something for the aggressive inferiority complex of the U. of Chicago, circa 1976, when I arrived their as a boy just turned 17, from a small town, shocked by this place where every professor seemed to live completely inside of his (sometimes her) head. The quantity of quasi-autistic 19 year old genius mathematicians was alone enough to frighten a poor kid who (mistakenly) thought he was smart, not to mention the crazy right-wing economists who for some reason seemed to congregate around the Law School, and Paul Ricouer who would walk around campus muttering to himself in French before he went to lecture at the Divinity School - and why the Divinity school for Zeus's sake? - and the damn physicists in the courses I took who expected me to know all they knew from the second session onward - and the full professors in my freshman classes who interrogated young kids from the suburbs like they were PhD candidates... Man, U of C was a strange place back then, made all the stranger because it was really created to be a Baptist college of the Rockefeller genus, and what it aimed to become was Cambridge with the atomic bomb, leap-frogging over Harvard.
<br><br>Sorry for reminiscing.<br><br>Jerry<br>