For 10 or 15 years, I have been intending to attempt a piece of writing called "Six Princetons"-the college and the community as they have variously appeared to someone who was born here and has lived here all his life. It would begin with the little kid who knew the location of every pool table and urinal on the campus, the nine best ways to sneak into the gym, the gentlest method of removing a reunion costume from a sleeping inebriate. Princeton through the eyes of a student in Princeton High School. Princeton from the omnicomprehensive undergraduate perspective. Princeton from the point of view of a commuter absorbed with other worlds. (So help me, in one era, I once said to my wife, "What are all these young people doing on Nassau Street?") . . . Princeton a fixed foot, as it appears after long stays elsewhere. Princeton as witnessed by a visiting professor who is neither visiting nor a professor, but in spring semester after spring semester is given tonic by the students and an abundance of evidence that their school is everything we might have hoped it would be.
"Six Princetons" will never be written, though, because new Princetons keep coming along. "Dear Parent: We are pleased to inform you that your daughter has succeeded you as an editor of the Nassau Literary Review, and, incidentally, that her room-board-tuition for the academic year has been raised quinque per centum to two million five hundred thousand dollars and fifty-three cents."

This is from the early 1980s:
Last August, I returned to the town in New Jersey where I was born 50 years ago. It looked much the same. Any town would, after five weeks. There was a great deal of waiting mail-08540, 08540, 08540. Not for nothing does that begin and end with a zero, I reflected. Good to be home. Nice to lift up the edges and crawl in under the only ZIP code I've ever known. A zip that doesn't flap. A zip that can be tied down. A zip with grommets at either end.
I opened a letter from a staff writer at a national travel magazine compiled and edited in Tennessee.
"I would appreciate it very much if you could answer some questions I have about New Jersey . . . I would like to know why a writer, who could live almost anywhere he wanted to, chooses to live in New Jersey."
Is he kidding? I have just come home from Alaska, from a long drift on the Yukon River, where, virtually under doctor's orders, I must go from time to time to recover from the sheer physiographic intensity of living in New Jersey-must go, to be reminded that there is at least one other state that is physically as varied but is sensibly spread out. New Jersey was bisected in 1664, when a boundary line was drawn from Little Egg Harbor to the Delaware River near the Water Gap so that this earth of majesty, this fortress built by Nature for herself, could be deeded by the Duke of York to Lord Berkeley and George Carteret. If you travel that line-the surveyors' pylons still stand-you traverse the physiographic provinces of New Jersey. You cross the Coastal Plain. You cross the Triassic Lowlands, a successor basin. You cross the Blue Ridge, crystalline hills. Now before you is the centerpiece of a limestone valley that runs south from New Jersey to Alabama and north from New Jersey into Canada-one valley, known to science as the Great Valley of the Appalachians and to local peoples here and there as Champlain, Shenandoah, Clinch River Valley, but in New Jersey by no special name, for in terrain so cornucopian one does not tend to notice a Shenandoah. A limestone valley is a white silo, a white barn, a sweep of ground so beautiful it should never end. You cross the broad valley. You rise now into the folded and faulted mountains, the eastern sinuous welt, the Deformed Appalachians themselves. You are still in New Jersey.
Are they aware of this in Tennessee? When you cross New Jersey, you cover four events: the violent upheaval of two sets of mountains several hundred million years apart; and, long after all that, the creation of the Atlantic Ocean; and, more recently, the laying on of the Coastal Plain by the trowel of the Mason. Do they know that in Tennessee? Tennessee is a one-event country: all you see there, east to west, are the Appalachians, slowly going away.
New Jersey has had the genius to build across its narrow center the most concentrated transportation slot in the world-with three or four railroads, seaports, highways, and an international airport all compacted in effect into a tube, a conduit, which has acquired through time an ugliness sufficient to stop a Gorgon in her tracks. Through this supersluice continuously pass hundreds of thousands of people from Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Texas, Tennessee, holding their breath. They are shot like peas to New York. If New Jersey has a secret, that's it.
I remember Fred Brown, who lived in the Pine Barrens of the New Jersey Coastal Plain, remarking years ago outside his shanty, "I never been nowheres where I liked it better than I do here. I like to walk where you can walk on level ground. Outside here, if I stand still, 15 or 20 quail, couple of coveys, will come out and go around. The gray fox don't come in no nearer than the swamp there, but I've had the coons come in here, the deer will come up. Muskrats breed right here, and otters sometimes. I was to Tennessee once. They're greedy, hungry, there, to Tennessee. They'll pretty near take the back off your hand when you lay down money. I never been nowhere I liked better than here."

1988:
My children have always thought me mildly eccentric for living my whole life in one town, yet there is no need to move away from Princeton to get a change of scene. You stay here all your life and you get a new town every five years.

This is also 1988-from the bow-lookout on a merchant ship in the eastern Pacific Ocean:
Minutes went by, the gray became brighter, and still Andy did not call. At 06:41:36, the telephone rang in the bow. Andy said to Peewee, "Good morning. This is the equator."
Andy drops money on the equator. I wondered how much he was dropping on it now. I imagined myself throwing money on the equator, and shivered at the thought.
I also shivered in the cool of the morning. At noon that day, one degree south, the Fahrenheit temperature was 78 degrees, the relative humidity 75 percent. At noon that day in Princeton, New Jersey, I learned later, the temperature was 85 and climbing. The day's high humidity was 91 percent. All through the summer, everybody in New York and its perisphere had been living in the sort of climate that seals the skin and pops veins in the head. They waded in humidity. Every day for weeks, the high temperatures remained between 88 and 97. Before I shipped out, I met a Liberian who had come to Princeton on a fellowship. I asked him if he liked America. He said, "Everything but the heat. It is intolerable. Never in my country have I experienced such heat." By comparison with New York, Panama was cool. The canal, creeping through the forest, was cool. The evening we left Panama, the temperature in the North Pacific was in the 70s. The weather was almost unnerving. As soon as the ship crossed the equator, you heard people say, "It's winter now"-a technicality that is not persuasive there at the latitude of Borneo, with the hull's velvet slide over that soft ocean. We entered the Gulf of Guayaquil. Just the sound of that name-Guayaquil-spelled coffee and chocolate to me, spelled mangoes, bananas, guavas, and heat. At four that afternoon, though, when the temperature in New York City was 89, the temperature in the Gulf of Guayaquil was 75. I finally understood where the tropics are, why the nights of the iguana are on 47th Street, and Broadway steams with rain.

I am eternally indebted to Princeton professors, ancient and modern. I have dedicated books to them in gratitude as well as friendship. When I was in high school, I worked for geneticists as a fruit-fly killer in the basement of Guyot Hall. I began learning from Princeton professors then, and am still learning from them now.
When plate tectonics arrived in geology between 1960 and 1968, contributions of particular significance came from Cambridge University, Columbia, Berkeley, Australian National University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Princeton. At the one end, a Princeton professor began the story; at the other, a Princeton professor completed it:
It was on the mechanics of the seafloor that geology's revolutionary inquiries were primarily focused in the early days. Harry Hess *31, a mineralogist who taught at Princeton, was the skipper of an attack transport during the Second World War, and he carried troops to landings-against the furious defenses of Iwo Jima, for example, and through rockets off the beaches of Lingayen Gulf. Loud noises above the surface scarcely distracted him. He had brought along a new kind of instrument called a Fathometer, and, battle or no battle, he never turned it off. Its stylus was drawing pictures of the floor of the sea. Among the many things he discerned there were dead volcanoes, spread out around the Pacific bottom like Hershey's Kisses on a tray. They had the arresting feature that their tops had been cut off, evidently the work of waves. Most of them were covered with thousands of feet of water. He did not know what to make of them. He named them guyots, for a 19th-century geologist at Princeton, and sailed on.

In 1960, Hess's paper titled "History of Ocean Basins" touched off the scientific revolution. In the paper's conclusion, he said, "The writer has attempted to invent an evolution for ocean basins. It is hardly likely that all of the numerous assumptions made are correct. Nevertheless it appears to be a useful framework for testing various and sundry groups of hypotheses relating to the oceans. It is hoped that the framework with necessary patching and repair may eventually form the basis for a new and sounder structure." The new and sounder structure came eight years later:
W. Jason Morgan *64, a geophysicist at Princeton, can fairly be described as an office geologist who spends his working year indoors, and he is a figure of first importance in the history of the science. In 1968, at the age of 32, he published one of the last of the primal papers that, taken together, constituted the plate-tectonics revolution. Morgan had been trained as a physicist, and his Ph.D. thesis was an application of celestial mechanics in a search for fluctuations in the gravitational constant. Only as a postdoctoral fellow was he drawn into geology, and assigned to deal with data on gravity anomalies in the Puerto Rico Trench. Fortuitously, he was assigned as well an office in Guyot Hall that he shared for two years with Fred Vine, a young English geologist who, with his Cambridge colleague Drummond Matthews, had discovered the bilateral symmetry of the spreading ocean floor. This insight was fundamental to the revolutionary theory then developing, and sharing that office with Fred Vine drew Morgan into the subject-as he puts it-"with a bang." A paper written by H. W. Menard caused him to begin musing on his own about great faults and fracture zones, and how they might relate to theorems on the geometry of spheres. No one had any idea how the world's great faults-like, say, the San Andreas and Queen Charlotte Faults-might relate to one another in a system, let alone how the system might figure in a much larger story. Morgan looked up the work of field geologists to learn the orientations of great faults, and found remarkable consistencies across thousands of miles. He tested them-and ocean rises and trenches as well-against the laws of geometry for the motions of rigid segments of a sphere. At the 1967 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, he was scheduled to deliver a paper on the Puerto Rico Trench. When the day came, he got up and said that he was not going to deal with that topic. Instead, reading a paper he called "Rises, Trenches, Great Faults, and Crustal Blocks," he revealed to the geological profession the existence of plate tectonics. What he was saying was compressed in his title. He was saying that the plates are rigid-that they do not internally deform-and he was identifying rises, trenches, and great faults as the three kinds of plate boundaries. Subsequently, he worked out plate motions: the variations of direction and speed that have resulted in exceptional scenery. I once heard a friend of Morgan's ask him what he thought he could possibly do, if anything, as an encore to all that. Morgan is shy, and speaks softly, in accents that faintly echo a youth in Savannah, Georgia. "I don't know," he answered, with a shrug and a smile. "Prove it wrong, I guess."

I have worked for 20 years in the East Pyne building at Princeton, in a corridor dominated by the Department of Comparative Literature, where the Humanities Council (my employer) has a small inholding. Comp Lit has had two chairmen in its history at Princeton, Robert Fagles, whose translations of Homer have recently been completed, and Robert Hollander '55, curator of Dante. As both are overly fond of saying, I am an interloper there, a fake professor, a portfolio without minister. For all that, the third floor of East Pyne is a superb place to work. By 6:30 in the evening, it is essentially vacant. Only Roger Mudd and I are there-the unofficials, the visiting professors. Even the tenure track is quietly rusting. At 7:30 in the morning, though, a lonely figure will be wandering the hall-the back arched, the head a little cocked, the lips in perpetual motion-mumbling about warriors armed in bronze. Fagles understands bronze. Anyone with that much brass would understand bronze. Long ago I learned that if you hear him coming, step into the corridor, and confront him with a question, he turns into an ambulatory checking department, a mine of antique material, the willing donor in an act of cerebral osmosis. For example, there came a time when my geological compositions became focused on a passage about the island of Cyprus. I heard him coming, stepped into the hall, and later went back to my machine and wrote: "In 2760 B.C., smelting began in Cyprus. Slag heaps developed in forty places. The Iliad is populated with warriors armed in bronze. Bronze is copper hardened by adding some tin, and the copper would have come from Cyprus. (Copper was mined on Cyprus for nearly two thousand years before Homer.) . . . The word 'Cyprus' means copper. Whether the island is named for the metal or the metal for the island is an etymology lost in time."
When I bring Fagles fish from the Delaware River, as I sometimes do, he asks that they be gutted, finned, and scaled, and wrapped in my work.

When Bill Bradley '65 was a New York Knick, in the early 1970s, he occasionally came down to Princeton to practice alone:
One day, feeding the ball back to him, I developed a grandiose fantasy. "Suppose I were somehow to get into a game with you in Madison Square Garden," I said. "Could you get me a shot in the NBA?" "Of course," he said, and he sketched out a certain baseline move by which a person two feet tall could score on Abdul-Jabbar. At that moment, out of nowhere, Tom Eglin '54 appeared. Tom had been Bill's freshman adviser, his mission being to guide this aimless youth toward some sort of utilitarian destiny. Bill told him to guard me, and the play worked. Tom and I reversed roles, and the play worked-the play being so ambiguous that I couldn't stop it even though I knew what was going to happen. Now two people whose height added up to a single basketball player's would forever be grateful to Bill for their one and only shot in the NBA.
And, as a final fragment, this from 1965:
Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple-two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton players shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.
Bradley has a few unorthodox shots, too. He dislikes flamboyance, and, unlike some of basketball's greatest stars, has apparently never made a move merely to attract attention. While some players are eccentric in their shooting, his shots, with only occasional exceptions, are straightforward and unexaggerated. Nonetheless, he does make something of a spectacle of himself when he moves in rapidly parallel to the baseline, glides through the air with his back to the basket, looks for a teammate he can pass to, and, finding none, tosses the ball into the basket over one shoulder, like a pinch of salt. Only when the ball is actually dropping through the net does he look around to see what has happened, on the chance that something might have gone wrong, in which case he would have to go for the rebound. That shot has the essential characteristics of a wild accident, which is what many people stubbornly think they have witnessed until they see him do it for the third time in a row. All shots in basketball are supposed to have names-the set, the hook, the layup, the jump shot, and so on-and one weekend last July, while Brad-ley was in Princeton working on his senior thesis and putting in some time in the Princeton gymnasium to keep himself in form for the Olympics, I asked him what he called his over-the-shoulder shot. He said that he had never heard a name for it, but that he had seen Oscar Robertson, of the Cincinnati Royals, and Jerry West, of the Los Angeles Lakers, do it, and had worked it out for himself. He went on to say that it is a much simpler shot than it appears to be, and, to illustrate, he tossed a ball over his shoulder and into the basket while he was talking and looking me in the eye. I retrieved the ball and handed it back to him. Throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop, he said, "When you have played basketball for a while, you don't need to look at the basket when you are in close like this. You develop a sense of where you are."