The Arcadian Days

Oppermann referred to these as the days of our Scholarly youth at the Colorado College. A place we referred to in great detail in reference to a certain Institut fur Deutsche Romantik: "the Institute for German Romanticism" in a novel, the name of which I constantly am reminded of and forget.

The Wikipedia Article contends:
Arcadia (Greek: Ἀρκαδία) is a modern Greek province dating back to antiquity. As a consequence of its sparsely inhabited mountainous topography it was occupied mainly by pastoralists. Subsequently it has become a poetic byword for an idyllic vision of unspoiled wilderness filled with the bounties of nature and inhabited by shepherds (having more or less the same connotation as Utopia), and as a concept originated in Renaissance mythology. The inhabitants were often regarded as having continued to live after the manner of the Golden Age, without the pride and avarice that corrupted other regions.^[1] It is also sometimes referred to in English poetry as Arcady. The inhabitants of this region bear an obvious connection to the figure of the Noble savage, both being regarded as living close to nature, uncorrupted by civilization, and so virtuous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29

More will need to be said about the Arcadian, including a detailed review of the experimental existentialist photographs we took during that period. In my mind's eye Oppermann has hardly changed.

The essence of the Arcadian image in Oppermann's Imagination was that it was a period of blissful belief in growth and real academic contention and education: at that time we believed that knowing was in some manner possible, that our professors were also in some manner wise, and that we sought after something akin to dwelling close to the truth.

My experience of this time was one of intense satisfaction: the college provided an intense atmosphere of knowledge and the possibility of some vague erotic experience with our then interlocutor, young women companions. Today we might call such erstwhile companions "nubiles" in an attempt to free ourselves of the erotic web of destruction that younger women hold for older men. This I might either reduce to a healthy sense of misogyny, or perhaps itself may become a dangerous calcination: a becoming too brittle. One must love without being seduced. Too bad that the Arcadian vision itself may be little more than a seductive intrigue of the anima, and that we could no more go back there than we ourselves be destroyed. I distinctly remember walking under a bridge one day in 1990, some cypher I discovered there sprayed as grafitti under the Unintah Street bridge: "Fuck you CC college children!" I think that the vandal spelled every word correctly, without idiomatic alteration of the text. And yet this moment served to punctuate the experience in an unforgettable fashion: it was Arcadian for some... and therein it broke its Arcadian innocence for me, for not everyone felt that college could be an effortless expression in the same way.

In the place of Arcady, the pastoral vision, we have "War all the time" and its attendant precept: "Some hostages are being released while still more hostages are being taken." It is unfair to state it thus, and it requires a great deal of examination, but: "So much for the Arcadian!"