so we come back to the same question again and again: princeton or harvard?

i don't much feel like saying much on the matter - i've thought too much about it all and felt uneasy about it all and after all the best laid plans etcetera so how would anyone know?

everyone at princeton was genuinely warm and kind and engaging and the school struck me as a nurturing place, if somewhat cloistered. the department is theory-driven, the school culture is similar to virginia's, and it's close enough to new york for me to go up to the ballet, and i would actually have time to go. and the campus, why, if, as nohrnberg says, yale is all about gothic presence and harvard about making the best of the colonial backwater, princeton has quiet beauty and dignity and oh how heartclenchingly like charlottesville that town the familiarity was unmistakable.

in addition to the fear of isolation and unfriendliness harvard seems to have all the conditions that will allow my bad habits as an undergraduate to flourish. four classes is much too heavy-going, and wouldn't leave me enough time to explore on my own, which is something i value, although of course it isn't excessively unreasonable there are quite a few schools that do that, penn and columbia come to mind, for a start, and it's only for the first two years, anyway. but you see then, with a setup like that, of course i'd get around the coursework my usual way, which is to say with a combination of petulance and urgency and surface skating and seizing insights for something beautiful and astonishing but which i will immediately forget. "quick wits are unapt to keep," didn't bob reeder write? and cambridge always strikes me as being so aged and even slightly seedy, although of course even as i complain i quite realise that i couldn't possibly live in princeton or for that matter, charlottesville, anymore - being home this year has made me see that after all is said and done i was always made to live in the city, with its skyward leaps and subterranean existence, its vibrance, provocativeness, activity and heady potency.

shall i be safe then? and live in my inviolate solitude? or shall i leave that behind - has that sort of life already taken too much away from me? better to burn out than to rust? will it be too late if i wait any longer - am i too tame now?