I first read the book in 1968. If I remember correctly, my encounter was not during the spring of 1968, when some solar wind blowing from East to West and back again disturbed the adrenaline and testosterone of large groups of people in their twenties. I did not read it in the spring watching urban riots in Washington, participating in campus occupations in New York, fleeing police massacres in Mexico City, facing Soviet tanks in Prague, displaced by the Red Guards in the Chinese countryside or stoned out on a country commune in Vermont where the veneer of suburban refinement gave way to maggots churning in the compost and mice rattling the rafters over the bed.

No, it was in the confusing fall of that same year when I returned to the village in Ohio that was my chosen college town, the place fate dropped me through a series of bait-and-switch operations I was too slow to catch. The entire structure of civilization seemed fragile by then. It was like a thin mesh of glass filaments, rigid and brittle. Everywhere I looked people were disobeying orders, crossing lines that were not meant to be crossed, walking through walls. Each time it happened to me or my peers, we were not sure our molecules would reassemble in the same way on the other side. In the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, sliding down the interstate network that connected every major city and suburban development with every other city and suburban development – for the greater good of homogenization and access to shopping malls – the speed at which the molecules of my body and the bodies of those beside me accelerated towards some future position illuminated by the twin headlights was greater than or equal to the sound of a drum solo playing on the radio. We were looking for the answer buried beneath the trivia already embedded in the waxy DNA of young media-drenched minds, and hoping that somewhere down the road we would find someone who would tell us where to find it.

The entire structure of civilization seemed fragile by then. It was like a thin mesh of glass filaments, rigid and brittle. Everywhere I looked people were disobeying orders, crossing lines that were not meant to be crossed, walking through walls.

That fall I took an elective class in the religion department from a newly-arrived and very young professor named Jee-Gook Kim. The class had a vague title, something like comparison of religions. Jay, as people learned to call him, was Korean-American and had recently graduated from a college in Staten Island. I grew up around New York and thought I was pretty sophisticated. I knew where Staten Island was. It was the place where you go on the Staten Island ferry and then return without bothering to get off because there’s nothing there to see. I knew that Korea was where we won a war against Communists around the time I was born, much like the war that was going on in Vietnam that we all wanted to avoid.

This small town in Ohio contained only one thing, a school that had begun as an Episcopal seminary in the early nineteenth century and become a liberal arts college for 700 men. We all took our meals in a Great Hall modeled on an Oxford college, with stained glass depicting authors from the pantheon of British Literature. The last group of Anglican seminary students had abandoned the place the year before. Attending the church had been optional for decades and, as one student after another refused to wear a tie and jacket for this or any other occasion, the formal Sunday lunch meant to follow services was rapidly degenerating into just another meal.

In this aquarium, where all the fish swimming about knew each other by sight if not by name, Professor Kim did not fit. No one was surprised but some of us were disappointed when he did not come back for a second year. He had little patience with the way students responded to his teaching style. The books he assigned us were difficult because they were not about any form of religion we knew. But the most difficult part was that he expected us to read and discuss these books without telling us what we were supposed to say about them.

The first book he assigned was The Sexual Life of Savages by Bronisław Malinowski. The title certainly caught our attention. The sexual life of college students was a constant subject of discussion. Reading about an anthropologist making notes on the sex life of people in the South Pacific was more interesting than reading Plato or Kant and easier than reading Chaucer. At least Malinowski’s book had photographs. The detail I still carry with me was the discussion of what constituted marriage on the Trobriand Islands. Similar to the situation in the dormitories, it was not a question of whether a young man and woman had sex with each other. Anyone could do that with anyone, apparently. The man was married to the woman if they had sex and then went to her parents’ house the next morning to share breakfast. I made a note of that.