This ain't the Chelsea Hotel.

I didn’t attend Harvard Law School. I eavesdropped on it. That’s the sense I have — I had — the whole time I was there.

At first I thought I belonged there. For a few brief days, when I visited and the Dean of Admissions was trying to convince me to attend. I remember going to the Admissions Office to meet her and speaking to a man at the front desk who asked me how it felt to be there and I said, “Surreal, like a dream.”

And he said, “How long have you been dreaming of this?” And I was taken aback by the question because it seemed to gather the whole of my life into one dense cloud now hovering in the air between us, and as I stepped inside it I was transported to a lunch table from my childhood I had almost forgotten, one of the very, very rare occasions in which my father and my maternal grandmother were seated in the same room. On the probable subject of college football, someone had asked me where I wanted to go to university one day and I said, with the seriousness of children who say absurd things perfectly oblivious to their absurdity, “Harvard.” And everyone erupted into laughter, except my grandmother, who said calmly and soberly underneath the laughter, “Then you should go to Harvard one day.” Twenty years later, her reaction to my telling her I was starting law school at HLS was just as unfazed, as though I were telling her a fact she had always known. “Well of course they accepted you, it would have been stupid of them not to — and they do have a reputation for being very smaht,” she said in a teasing Boston accent.

“Kind of forever,” was what I answered to the Admissions Office guy. He and I shared a smile.

That was the first and last time anyone at that institution acknowledged me as an individual who had been and was worthy and capable of doing the work. At least, that’s how it felt. Everything that came after felt like a strange and labyrinthine mousetrap intended to intimidate and to exclude. I wish I could say I wasn’t intimidated, but my God I was.

It felt like a carnival game — a sleazy one. Toss a round basketball through a simple hoop. Seemingly straightforward, fair, fun. Only, tilt your head to the side, take a clearer look, and you’ll see the hoop is actually an oval through which a sphere of that diameter could never pass. You thought you were so clever, and yet you gave the man in the Admissions Office all the vulnerable, naive, beautifully optimistic and beautifully delicate realness of a five-year-old girl who considered a question asked of and about her and responded in honesty:

“Where might you want to go to university one day?”

“Harvard.”

“How long have you been dreaming of this?”

“Kind of forever.”

What a sucker. What a clean and easy con.

I had and still have the sense that I was an intruder those three years — a spy, or a ghost. I kept my head down. I didn’t speak unless spoken to. I existed between my happy, domestic bubble with my partner — just two ordinary residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts — and my favourite desk in the reading room of the law library — that hallowed space with all the portraits and busts of the former Deans, the lunchbox Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes took to the Supreme Court each day, and large, gold Latin script that wound around the whole room above the massive columns of Langdell Hall. I must have read that inscription a thousand times. I have utterly no idea what it said. Some quotation about the nature of law or of justice — no doubt something that sounds really nice. But if you look at the hoop from another angle, if you spend the hours reading the case law in the rows and rows of stacks underneath that Colossus of golden, Latin text, you’ll see it’s an optical illusion, an oval through which justice was never meant to pass.

Dean Manning got a new portrait in the middle of one term. They re-shuffled the canvases to place the new addition. Instead of Dean Bell’s figure above my favourite carrel, I now had Dean Pound presiding over my hours of resigned, cynical study.

Bored one day of whatever casebook I was reading, I made the mistake of googling Dr. Roscoe Pound, Dean of HLS from 1916-1936. Roscoe Pound is one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20^th century. However, he only formally studied law for one year at Harvard Law School, in 1889. His Bachelor’s and PhD from the University of Nebraska were actually in botany.

I leaned back in the library chair and thought with envy on how many fewer cases there were to learn at Harvard Law School in 1889. I thought about how refreshingly and gloriously simple the doctrine had been on so many points in 1889 — how much had been re-worked and further developed in the jurisprudence of every single area of U.S. law since then. I thought about how brief an answer to an exam question on the Commerce Clause could have been in 1889 and nearly wept for the me of a previous semester. And to think international law as we know it hardly existed in 1889!

Looking at the girth of the casebooks in front of me, I thought about just how many cases I had read in my years (plural) at HLS at that point. It occurred to me, just practically speaking, that I had studied a lot more law at HLS than Dean Pound ever did. So had all my classmates. We were, just practically speaking, likely far more prepared to teach law than Roscoe Pound had been when he started on the faculty of law at Nebraska the year after finishing his botany PhD. But maybe he was a DEI hire — good to get a variety of backgrounds and perspectives on the law faculty, I admitted.

Only Dean Pound’s eclectic viewpoint doesn’t stop there.

You see, if you ask anyone speaking on behalf of the law school they will insist Dean Pound was not a Nazi. And so I will be clear. Dean Pound was not a Nazi. He just admired Hitler, and supported his ideology, publicly, and was presented with an honorary degree from the University of Berlin by the German ambassador to the U.S. in 1934, which he accepted, publicly, and spent a lot of time in Germany and Austria in the 1930s while serving as Dean, and provided a legal alibi to his assistant, Anton-Hermann Chroust, who was legally found to be a Nazi agent. But ladies and gentlemen of the jury, don’t get led astray by all this circumstantial evidence, you’re smarter than that. There’s no proof Dean Pound was a Nazi — what a shameful, disrespectful accusation to throw at a respected botanist, ahem, I mean legal scholar.

I came to Harvard Law School the same way I had come to the other Cambridge, the English original — that is, with Sylvia Plath’s little ladders and glue pots and pails of Lysol, ready to do the work of lovingly mending this Colossus of Ruins. I tried, so humbly, to make a bed for myself in the cornucopia of his left ear. But it was cold, and deaf, and so very much dead. I wondered sometimes if it had ever even known living.

A few weeks after my final exams and graduation had passed, I was still in my usual carrel in the library, meeting Dean Pound’s unblinking gaze each time I looked up from my bar review books. My hometown best friend texted me sad and anxious — the Dobbs decision had been leaked to the press earlier that spring and now the few remaining days of the Supreme Court term were tick-ticking by.

“I think an ectopic pregnancy might be my biggest fear,” she told me. I confessed to her that the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade didn’t disturb me like it would have three years prior. Roe was a shit opinion anyway — a scam oval hoop — a prop that had been there to give you the illusion that this Colossus was a benevolent patriarch, sagely weighing and analyzing the scales of justice. And besides, Casey had already overturned Roe in all practical respects in the 90s. In high school, Justice O’Connor’s eloquent words in that opinion had actually, embarrassingly succeeded in bringing tears to my eyes. She wrote:

“Our Constitution is a covenant running from the first generation of Americans to us and then to future generations. It is a coherent succession. Each generation must learn anew that the Constitution’s written terms embody ideas and aspirations that must survive more ages than one.”

What a sucker I was.

And what a clever, intergenerational con. Her sleight of hand was so skillful, playing dutiful lip service to our cherished principle of stare decisis all while completely re-writing and narrowing Justice Blackmun’s decision in Roe.

Our Constitution is an ectopic pregnancy — a covenant written in blood on the bodies of Indigenous Americans, on the bodies of enslaved, legally fractional peoples, on our bodies. It seems to promise new life in exchange for your careful labour, but it’s a non-viable parasite. Its disrespect for the womb you have to offer is ultimately a death sentence.

Now I sit with Sylvia Plath on her hill of black cypress, staring at the fluted bones and gold-plated letters littered to the horizon. We open a picnic from Justice Homes’ trusty tin ammunition lunch box. The sandwiches, of course, are long since stale and moulded. Static above us, far above my favorite carrel, above the portraits of Dean Pound and Dean Bell and Dean Manning and Dean Kagan, the embossed frieze of Langdell Hall reads:

‘Non sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege‘

Not under Man, but under God and the law.

I turn to Sylvia and say,

“You defy godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.”

Sylvia continues,

“Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.”

Dear ones,

I’m turning thirty this March.

Many of you have already bravely crossed this threshold. I have teased you for our existential fear of this otherwise seemingly trivial number, all the while holding my breath.

The truth is, for me 30 marks a step into the unknown. All the literary heroes of my youth never made it this far. John Keats succumbed to tuberculosis at 25. Both Anna Karenina and Edna Pontellier, bored, hopeless and unfulfilled, take lovers at 27 and are dead by 28. Lily Bart, heroine of The House of Mirth, refuses to compromise on her aesthetic and moral ideals and so abandons life at 29. And Sylvia Plath, as we know, was lost to the endless February of 1963 in Yeats’ house in Primrose Hill at 30 years, 3 months and 15 days old.

Youth is a beautiful form of narcissistic blindness.

When I finished Anna Karenina in the early hours of the morning on my 16^th birthday, I thought I had perhaps at last read everything, learned everything, uncovered everything. I wrote a draft uni admissions essay on the novel. One of my teachers politely told me it was full of shit. Because I knew it indeed was, I politely told him he was full of shit. Because he knew he indeed was, he gave me a glowing recommendation. And he gave me something else, too – his favourite passage from the closing of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed – a science fiction novel I loathed this teacher even more for making me read.

As I begin to shed the cataracts of my youth, the truth is, friends – I think about this passage from this sci-fi novel I loathed, so beloved by the teacher I loathed, basically all the time.

You see, The Dispossessed was published in 1974 and takes place on a fictional planet called Urras.  Much like Earth in 1974, Urras is largely divided along the axes of two main superpowers: the capitalist, patriarchal state of A-Io,  and the authoritarian, communist state of Thu. Prior to the events of the novel, a revolution funded by Thu breaks out in the developing state of Benbili, which A-Io then invades, initiating a proxy war. (Sound familiar?). A group of anarchist idealists from Urras have seen enough and form a utopian society on Urras’ moon, the mining colony of Anarres.

Skip forward in time and enter our protagonist, Shevek, a brilliant physicist from anarchist, collectivist Anarres who is trying to develop a temporal theory for the greater good of both the Anarresti and humanity throughout the galaxies. Unfortunately, he discovers that aspects of his fledging hypotheses conflict with the prevailing political mores of Anarres, and like all open-minded truth-seekers on the scent of something intriguing, he begins to face censorship.

After a stint in the Anarresti gulag, Shevek renounces his homeland by accepting a scholarship to develop his theory further at a prestigious university in A-Io on Urras, fleeing Anarres a traitor. But alas, ever more disillusioned Shevek comes to discover that Urras really is a capitalist, patriarchal hellhole after all, and the A-Ionians only want to get their grubby materialist hands on his physics. Teaming up with underground revolutionaries in A-Io, Shevek leaks his science patent-free and abandons Urras. The novel closes with Shevek Anarres-bound aboard a spaceship belonging to the Hainish, a very ancient people from another faraway planet. Here Shevek meets Ketho, a young Hainishman making his first journey to Anarres intrigued by the idealism of its utopian anarchism. The world-weary Shevek tries to caution Ketho against the heartbreak of believing in Anarres, of believing in anything.

And now with all this context, we arrive at the line I can’t seem to help but carry with me – young Ketho’s wise response to Shevek:

“My race is very old,” Ketho said. “We have been civilized for a thousand millennia. We have histories of hundreds of those millennia. We have tried everything. Anarchism, with the rest. But I have not tried it. They say there is nothing new under any sun. But if each life is not new, each single life, then why are we born?”

Isn’t that marvellous? The beautiful, narcissistic blindness of youth that so timelessly retorts to history, “But I have not tried it.”

And isn’t life an experience, wholly each of our own to get to try, to to taste, to savour, to fondle, to fumble, to feel, to live?

So here I stand at 29, aware that there is nothing new under any sun, and also aware there are so, so many suns amongst the stars whose warmth I have not yet felt on my skin.

As the literary heroines of my youth reveal, women are so often deprived of the chance of ageing, of living, of making mistakes, of getting to experience things for themselves rather than blindly following the dictates of some supposedly sage authority, of writing a shit essay on Anna Karenina and living another decade and maybe writing another, of coming to their own conclusions, of changing their minds, of changing at all. Until writing this, it never occurred to me, or the gravity of it never fully sank into my chest, that if Anna Karenina is 27 when the novel begins, she was married to a man 20 years her senior by 18 and a mother by 19.

Even heavier of a weight is recognising the female icons of my cultural mythology were but mere children.

Did you know that Antigone is, at the oldest, 15 during the events of Sophocles’ play?

Did you know that historians estimate Mary was between 12 to 14 when she gave birth to Jesus?

Did you know Pocahontas was 10 when she first met Disney’s favourite paedophile, Captain John Smith, in 1608?

Ten.

At ten all I wanted was to grow up, or at least someday grow boobs. I wanted to retreat from public gaze into a private chrysalis of puberty and emerge only once I had resplendent wings of my own. At ten the last thing I wanted was to be remembered as the delicate pupa I was.

But at ten is where Pocahontas lives frozen in our cultural memory, the playful, precocious misfit who turned cartwheels with the boys of Jamestown.

Time turns cartwheels of its own and in 1609, when Pocahontas was eleven, the First Anglo-Powhatan War broke out between the English settlers at Jamestown and the Powhatan natives. Pocahontas was captured and held for ransom in a plot hatched between the Patawomecks, seizing the opportunity to act on their opposition to her father Chief Powhatan’s rule of Tsenacommacah¹, and the English settlers. She lived captive for at least a year in the English settlement of Henricus, now called Henrico – i.e., my hometown. Like me she spent most her time in Henrico studying English, white people’s etiquette, and the Bible.

In 1614, at 16, her dad finally bothered to negotiate for her release. Princess Pocohantas said no thank you. According to the surviving accounts, she said something roughly translatable as “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Better to remain with the Englishmen than to be just another sword or axe in her father’s bellicose bargaining arsenal.

As Plath knew best, what’s a girl with daddy issues to do next? Get with an older foreign man, and quick, of course! Just a month later Pocahontas married English tobacco farmer John Rolfe, ushering in an eight-year period of relative peace between the English and indigenous peoples of Virginia. I wonder if she ever thought of her marriage as the diplomacy of which her father was incapable. Rolfe, for his part, thought he was saving her heathen soul. ² And he probably smugly thought he did, as like the most dutiful of Christian women, Pocahontas, now baptized Rebecca, promptly bore him a son nine months following the wedding.

In 1616, The Virginia Company sent John, Rebecca and baby Thomas Rolfe to London on a PR tour where she met King James. Legend has it he was so unremarkable that she didn’t realize he was the monarch until someone told her to whom she had just been introduced. (If you’re keeping count, that’s king #2 she made it known she found unimpressive.) She died in Gravesend, England in March 1617 when she fell sick at the outset of the return voyage to Virginia. She was roughly 20.

Rest in Power, Pocahontas-Rebecca. I don’t ever want to speak for you, but I bet you would have loved intersectional feminism and vaccines.

I like to imagine her setting out down the Thames, nursing the cough that would soon prove fatal, once more travelling between England and Tsenacommacah, between Urras and Anarres, between one false god and another, a princess of no kingdom but her own.

What would she tell young Ketho? Perhaps the same words as Shevek:

“We are the children of time.”

Ah, time – that nebulous Never-Never Land from which none of us can ever be dispossessed.

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¹ The Algonquian name for Eastern Virginia, which means “densely inhabited land” – a fact that chills the body with its testimony that the indigenous peoples of Virginia, like the oysters of the Chesapeake Bay, though an endangered rarity today were once spectacularly numerous.

² We know this because he had to write the governor of the Colony of Virginia for permission to wed her. Here, I am reminded of Vladimir Nabokov’s apt observation that the interracial marriage “which is a complete and glorious success” is among the most engrained of American taboos.