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Colleges and
Universities The last class of the millennium
This essay is the final chapter from Jesuit Fr. Raymond
Schroths forthcoming history of Fordham.
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
In 1962, when the New York province
sent Jesuit scholastics who were teaching high school to summer graduate
classes at Fordham, I took a course on John Henry Newman from Francis X.
Connolly. I did not know then that Connolly had been at Fordham since the
1930s, or that he had been a major figure in the Catholic Renaissance of those
years. I did not know that his 1948 anthology textbook, Literature, the
Channel of Culture, would, after many of the norms and values it championed
had been discarded, stand unused on the library shelf as an artifact, a remnant
of a lost vision.
But I did know that inside that handsome gray head and behind that
gentle, courtly manner, was a flame lit from the first torch ever lit and
passed along at Fordham and that I should experience it before it flickered
out.
Connollys anthology was, in its own time, an innovation, in
that, contrary to the new criticism, which emphasized the literal,
objective context of the literary text -- poem or story -- over its
philosophical or historical contexts, Connolly looked at literature the way
Jesuits viewed philosophy, as a guide to life. Without a philosophical and
historical frame of reference, says Connollys preface, literary
delight may well become a riot of fancy and an invitation to anarchy. He
acknowledges that his selections -- Maritain, Gilson, Newman, and contemporary
priest writers such as Jesuit Fr. John LaFarge and Thomas Merton -- are
weighted toward a particular world-view. But he assumes that the average
young American of every persuasion needs more awareness of the continuity of
history and the coherence of truth than he does of the change and chaos which
floats in the intellectual sphere like bomb dust over a ruined city.
His first section, The Idea of the University, with
excerpts from Pope Pius XI, Maritain, Newman, and Fordham Jesuit political
scientist Fr. George Bull, establishes that education can be ideally
perfect only when it aims to form the true Christian and the useful
citizen. Contrary, he says, to John Deweys progressive
position that social utility rather than wisdom is the end of
education.
My final paper for Connollys course that summer tried to
show that, for Newman, the student-teacher relationship was the heart of the
educational experience. Connolly, I think, was the first person to alert me to
the famous line in President James A. Garfields address at Williams
College in 1871 that all one needs for an education is a simple
bench with Williams president Mark Hopkins on one end and the student on
the other. Personal influence was, for him, even more than books, the essence
of education. What matters is the intellectual friendship. For truth to
live in the student, I wrote in my paper, he must catch it from
someone in whom it lives already.
This is serious business
I dont think that is the first thought in the minds of the
20 students in my Fordham freshman English class, the first day of the
semester, January 1999.
Nor in mine.
I am laying down rules -- no food, no water bottles, no gum, no
absences or lateness, no late papers (not even one minute), no book bags on the
desk, no hats, no stacking books before the class is dismissed -- all meant to
drive home the idea that literature is extremely important, that the work we
are doing together demands every atom of our concentration. For the first time
in many years, to force myself to break from familiar material Ive taught
before, Ive put myself at the mercy of a standard textbook, Elements
of Literature. I chose it because it includes essays, fiction, poetry,
drama and film; because it is not divided into artificial categories like
stories about family life, etc.; and because it has none of those
questions for discussion after each piece like, Why do you
think the author said that?
We meet at 10:30 a.m., three times a week in a cinder-block
seminar room on the first floor of Dealy Hall, the same building, built in
1867, where I took my first English course 48 years before. For the editors of
my new text -- Robert Scholes, Nancy R. Conley, Carl H. Klaus, and Michael
Silverman -- Literature enriches our lives because it increases our
capacities for understanding and communication. It helps us to find meaning in
our world and to express it and share it with others.
Of the 100 authors in Connollys text, only 16 appear in
Elements of Literature. The only clearly identifiable Catholics are
Flannery OConnor and Gerard Manley Hopkins; but there are works by those
other writers I most love to teach: Thoreau, E. B. White, Virginia Woolf,
George Orwell, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and
Langston Hughes.
Connolly, guided by his religious vision, designed his texts to
teach not only literature but Christian virtue to Catholic men. These editors
have collaborated to produce a marketable product that must do three things:
Continue the canon -- those writers like Shakespeare, Tennyson and Fitzgerald,
without whom, presumably, no educated person can open his mouth in public;
contain enough explanatory material to compensate for the teachers
inadequacies; and teach the new secular virtue -- multiculturalism -- with
enough works by blacks, women and various minorities to satisfy a teacher who
wants to build a whole course around a political issue. The biggest change in
English teaching over 30 years, says a professor who revered Connolly, is the
imposition of political agendas on literary texts, which both distort the texts
and rob the student of the opportunity to discuss more fundamental questions
about human life that the original authors pose. On the first day of class we
have a 1500-page anthology with no up-front ideology, but 114 authors, from
Sophocles to John Lennon, with little sense of what we and it will yield in the
14 weeks that follow.
The 21 of us are crammed close together around four long narrow
tables placed in a rectangle, so we have to look at each other all the time.
Twelve women and eight men, four of whom have gone to Jesuit high schools.
Seven are in the business school. Two are varsity athletes -- one baseball and
one football. The ethnic-racial mix includes two Puerto Ricans, an Albanian,
one African-American, a Ukrainian, a Nicaraguan, and the usual component of
Italian and Irish. The Albanian, Lek Berishaj, resists removing his heavy
leather jacket -- a sign, I explain to him, that he does not intend to stay. At
this point in the semester he considers himself more Albanian than
American.
For about 30 years Ive taught journalism, American studies
and literature at five Jesuit universities. In recent years, partly to test
myself and to prove to my students that I can write, I have traveled to
international hot spots like South Africa, Syria, Iraq, Vietnam, Cuba and
Indonesia, and published articles and photographs on my adventures. In
Indonesia last summer I looked out the train window at miles of rice patties,
lush forests, mountains and poverty-stricken farmers on the way from Jakarta to
Yogyakarta and was overwhelmed by the realization of how differently God treats
us all. If I had been born the son of an Indonesian rice farmer rather than of
a Trenton, N.J., journalist, rather than know the joys of Beethovens
Fidelio, French bread, cheese and wine, Tolstoy and Walden Pond,
rather than teaching generations of students like those in this room, Id
be standing in a rice field in mud up to my knees, not even looking up to see
this train go by.
If my personal history repeats itself, one or two of these
students may take a course from me again, become my friend, running or biking
partner, dinner guest and host, write to me for years, maybe even invite me to
perform a wedding and baptize a child. Or bury a parent or spouse. And someone
else will finish the course bitter, angry at a low grade or some other offense
of which I may have been unaware. I must miss the second class in order to
preach at a friends wedding in St. Augustine; so, for the long weekend, I
assign nine essays, 59 pages. Two drop the course immediately.
Clarilibeth
One day when she was 12, Clarilibeth Torres, looking out her South
Bronx windows about 30 blocks south of Fordham, waved to her friend Hector on
his way home from his job. He waved and smiled; then suddenly a gang of men
appeared with baseball bats and beat him to the ground. They slashed his face,
pounded him, ripped his shirt and left him face down in a pool of blood. They
had stolen the gold chain Claras mother had given him for his birthday.
The next day she read in the paper that Hector had provoked the fight.
Now Clara, a freshman at Fordham, age 20, sits directly across
from me, determined to master the media, write poetry, have her own Web page
and her own magazine. Born in Puerto Rico, she spent the first five years of
her life shuttling between various aunts and grandparents in Puerto Rico and
the Dominican Republic. She has never met her father, although she once called
him on the phone, then hung up before he could answer. Years passed without her
seeing her mother, who does not even know her birthday. Her two older brothers
and three younger sisters have different fathers. When she moved to America in
1989 her mother and her mothers current boyfriend dragged her from Albany
to Philadelphia to all-over Florida, because the authorities in
each town were a few steps behind the boyfriend.
Today she divides her addresses between two Bronx
aunts, who are really cousins, commutes to lower Manhattan where
she works 30 hours a week as a receptionist at Barnes and Noble, and at Fordham
does her best to compete with students with more stability in their lives than
she has had in hers.
At the Bayard Rustin Humanities High School in Manhattan she was a
star. She won a Shakespeare recital contest, worked in an anti-drug program,
joined the photo club, softball and volleyball teams, yearbook and newspaper,
and edited her own magazine. The faculty loved her and encouraged her
creativity; but they did not teach her intellectual discipline, spelling and
grammar. This is not necessarily their fault. Surrounded by Spanish speakers
most of the day, she has settled into something she calls
Spanglish. Her favorite poet is Sylvia Plath, and she has read the
Confessions of St. Augustine twice on her own; but theres an
enormous gap between whats bursting out of her creative soul and what she
can say in Sylvia Plaths native tongue.
When she arrived at Fordham for the HEOP (the federally funded
Higher Education Opportunity Program) remedial summer courses, she loved it --
a beautiful campus, students like herself. But September, when the other 3800
arrived, threw her into a funk. To her eyes, she was swamped in a sea of
preppies, all cool in their J. Crew and Gap designer garb, all the middle class
white people and the minorities split into their own cliques and only the
resident students in on the fun. Those high school As and Bs
slipped to a 2.6. But somehow, though she is not formally religious, she
believes in Gods plan; she loves her courses and almost all of her
teachers, and she adapts.
She fights me. When I take 10 points off her quiz because she says
that Robert Frosts classic poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening --Whose woods these are I think I know/his house is in the
village though-- is about escaped slaves, she stays after
class to argue. Its her interpretation, she says; I demand evidence for
it in the text.
When we do four films at the end, I assign High Noon
(They have never heard of Gary Cooper!) and John Cunninghams story
Tin Star on which it is based; and the class unanimously prefers
the story, where the sheriff -- contrary to the films lone hero who wins
a shoot-out with four killers -- dies, deliberately taking a bullet aimed at
his deputy. But to Clara, Gary Coopers Will Cain, the 1950s
liberals ideal man of courage, is a coward, because he went
around trying to raise a posse, rather than handle it himself.
It is the most astonishing idea I have every heard from a student.
Perhaps her imagination is so distorted by Lethal Weapon, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Kung Fu movies, where comic book heroes
armed with automatic weapons, somehow never touched by the thousands of bullets
that splatter earth, sand, walls, and glass around them, blow away their
adversaries with machine gun bursts and flying kicks. Or rather, perhaps she
reads all literature totally through the prism of her own experience. She is an
escaped slave looking for a house in the snow. No posse or armed committee of
town folk have ever done anything for her, and she has survived. Gary Cooper
should quit whining and take care of himself.
When class goes well, it is 90 percent lively discussion; I sit
with my prepared discussion outline, broken into five or 10-minute segments in
front of me, and a long No. 2 pencil in my hand, look around to call on quiet
people who resist getting involved, and strain with my army artillery-damaged
ears to hear what to me are mumbles and whispers.
But sometimes I go to the board and outline the things I think we
should have learned so far. This is important stuff, I say. Most of them sit
back with their arms folded, either remembering it all or unconvinced that what
I say is worth remembering. How do I look to them, talking emphatically and
scrawling illegibly with my chalk?
In my first semester Nonfiction Writing course, a bright
sophomore, Amanda, took notes on me: The pencil is his heartbeat: the
blood of his life gushes on his students papers in a series of X-filled
circles and marks where he must have tap, tap, tapped in contemplation. The nod
is the invite to enter his universe. He is the center of this universe, pulling
each student onto his planet with an invisible cord that comes with the
penetrating eyes that stare from behind his glasses. Sitting ramrod straight,
his lean body clothed in a collared shirt and tie, he is relaxed and ready for
action. If it is cold he wears a cardigan sweater, and he is reminiscent of the
quintessential grandfather: strong, trusting and yet powerfully
authoritative.
But I am not ready to look like a grandfather. And if I am
authoritative, why are they not paying attention? Do they not know
I see their every move? Clara is doodling. Now shes talking to the boy
next to her. I never reprimand in public, so I speak to her after class. To my
embarrassment, she has been drawing a portrait of me. I am a hideous prune,
with big ears, deep eyes, wrinkled, bony cheeks, baldhead and a ridged brow
like those Klingons on Star Trek. She knows me well.
Their favorites
In a rare small experiment with democracy, rather than assign my
old standbys, like Thomas Grays Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, I ask the class to read ahead and pick poems they want to
study. Some light on my favorites, like Langston Hughes Theme for
English B, about a black student at Columbia, overlooking Harlem, who
tells his instructor in a paper, You are white -- yet a part of me, as I
am a part of you. Several pick Shakespeares Sonnet 130:
My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun, in which the
speaker loves his mistress, though her hair is like wire, her cheeks are
colorless and her breath reeks. Reflecting, I think, their own insecurity about
their looks in a culture where, one tells me, no young woman can look in the
mirror and find herself thin enough, and young men take steroids and pump iron
for hours a day to chisel their pecs and abs.
They focus, too, on Adrienne Richs Rape, in
which a violated woman graphically describes her humiliation -- the
maniacs sperm still greasing your thighs -- and implies that the
policeman to whom she must report the crime is the very man who degraded her.
And they pick Gwendolyn Brooks The Mother, in which a woman
laments, though not necessarily regrets, her several abortions. At the end she
addresses her dead children: Believe me, I loved you all. As Brooks
has presented her, I doubt any reader is meant to believe her, and she may not
believe herself.
In his anthology, Connolly included Hemingways bullfighter
story, The Undefeated, perhaps because it represents spiritual
triumph in physical defeat; but our book has Hills Like White
Elephants, in which, without using the word, a selfish young man
intending to end his relationship, talks his girl into having an abortion.
Elements of Literature has no stated ideology; yet, the themes of race
and womens issues have naturally emerged. And though I did not know him
well enough to be sure, I think Connolly would approve.
Joseph
Joseph C. DeBarbrie, tall, smooth-complexioned, gentlemanly,
usually sits four seats to the left of Clara. A year before, as a senior at St.
Ignatius Prep in San Francisco, he sat in a musty, wood-paneled room at the
Jesuit retreat house outside Palo Alto, sipping Earl Grey tea and wondering
what was so great about kairos and agape -- buzz words that
annually floated home from the senior retreat. Then a retreat leader knocked,
came in, and handed him an envelope bearing St. Ignatius picture and
stuffed with surprise letters from family, teachers and friends showering him
with love and praise.
Joe is the kind of boy adults find easy to praise. His family --
insurance broker father and teacher mother who met at Santa Clara University
and married right after graduation, his older brother and younger sister -- are
so happy and supportive that he sometimes sat around just enjoying them rather
than studying. When surgery following a freshman year injury to his back ended
his varsity sports, he threw himself into four years of those extracurricular
activities that allow the Jesuit boy to thrive: manager and trainer for five
teams, the yearbook and newspaper, the liturgy, cheer leader, social action
and, above all, the theater. Appearing in plays and musicals -- like
Inherit the Wind, Our Town, Carousel -- for four years, as a senior
he won the male lead in Shadowlands.
Not that every moment was smooth. The over six weeks of
recuperation his freshman year took him out of circulation longer than an
adolescent can endure without losing out on friendships and the group. As a
sophomore he drifted into the wrong bunch of friends. One night when the gang
was hanging out smoking cigarettes by the San Francisco reservoir overlooking
the Pacific, his friends turned on him, told him bluntly that they
didnt like him, and that he was out of the gang. Go home. Emotionally
crushed, he staggered home in the rain.
He rebuilt himself in school activities, particularly on a
school-sponsored summer faith tour living and working in Belfast
and Dublin. In Dublin he lived at Gonzaga College and worked in a summer camp
for 8-to-10-year-old boys strung out on dope. In Ireland, he says, the campaign
against drugs resembles the American campaign against cigarettes -- graphic
posters of young people with rotting teeth. His little boys liked to show off
the track marks between their fingers where their older brothers and pals had
given them a hit. On walks he would cut through a graveyard where the boys had
left their needles strewn between the tombstones.
So on retreat he relished the notes of praise; but he was most
struck by the letter from his drama coach, who told him Its time to
exit stage left at the prep; rather than applaud, his director challenged
him to go on and become a good man.
He picked Fordham because Jesuits take care of their
students, because he liked the pretty campus with pretty girls, because
he liked the student bodys economic diversity and because he thought he
could handle New York. Though it took him a few months to be sure
he had come to the right place, he soon came on strong in residence hall
leadership, a role in the Mimes and Mummers production of Moon over
Buffalo, and a focused dedication to study that moved his high school B
average to a Fordham A-. In his theology course, famed feminist theologian
Elizabeth Johnson changed his image of God from the more simple, personal,
someone-I-can-talk-to encounter of his high school retreat, to a God who is
many things, masculine and feminine, still real, yet incomprehensible.
On Thursday nights he occasionally enjoys the local bar scene,
which he sees as just one aspect of Fordhams generally healthy social
milieu. True, some students party too much, but that depends on the attitude
they bring with them; and better to visit the local pubs than drink on campus.
Besides, he says, the neighborhood is safe. On weekends he loves to ride the
awesome D train to Manhattan and, coming home, doesnt mind
the 12-minute walk from the subway down Fordham Road.
Joes final paper focused on three films -- Citizen
Kane, Casablanca, and Four Feathers -- where
strong men either compromise or sustain their integrity. I teach Zoltan
Kordas 1939 British Empire epic, Four Feathers, both because
it is a wonderful work of art and because its thinking and rationale, its lofty
concept of duty and commitment, are so foreign to 1990s young people reluctant
to commit themselves to anything beyond Saturday nights date -- which
they will also break if something better comes along.
Its also one of the first films I remember seeing. As the
son of a World War I hero who wiped out a German machine gun nest on his own
and who personified courage and integrity all his life, I must have identified
with the hero, young Harry Faversham. He joined the army just to please his
Crimean War veteran father and was terrified that his father would ever
consider him a coward. As everyone over 50 -- plus some of my college classes
-- knows, Harry resigns from the army after his fathers death, just as
his regiment is on the way to the Sudan. When his friends send him white
feathers as a sign of cowardice, he disguises himself, goes to the Sudan and
saves their lives. For Joe, Harrys true courage was in refusing to follow
the army career; his war exploits were merely a brave gesture to regain the
respect of his friends and fiancée.
Other things going on
Other things happened this semester. Tornadoes killed more than 40
persons in Oklahoma and Kansas. The Yugoslav army drove a million Albanians out
of Kosovo. NATO bombings killed anywhere between 400 and 1000 innocent Serbian
and Kosovar civilians by mistake. High school students gunned down their
classmates. Fordham Colleges new dean, Fr. Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., a
historian from Princeton, Yale and Georgetown, spelled out the trustees
plan to move Fordham to the national prominence that Georgetown and Boston
College once enjoyed. During Black History Month someone smeared racial and
sexual insults on a door in Finlay Hall, prompting weeks of self-examination on
the possibility of racism in our midst. Three of the five students we helped
prepare for Fulbright Fellowships won -- to France, the Philippines and an
alternate to Indonesia. A series of Fordham Ram surveys sampling 50
students revealed that 86 percent drink, and 42 percent had missed class at
some time because of drinking; 88 percent could name three Shakespeare plays,
but only 22 percent could name three of the 12 apostles. The Ram ran a
series of articles on Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul IIs 1990
guidelines for an authentic Catholic university; most writers seemed relatively
content with Fordhams Catholic character, whatever it may be.
With the help of students and alumni -- plus a rambunctious gang
of happy hecklers called The Sixth Man -- who packed the gym for home games,
basketball caught fire. Fr. Avery Dulles, S.J., who celebrated his 80th
birthday and 10th year in the McGinley Chair, lectured to a crowd of 700 on
Can Philosophy be Christian? The Ram praised in its
editorial the Mimes and Mummers production of Jesus Christ
Superstar for casting a black Jesus and interpreting Jesus death as
his solidarity with oppressed groups everywhere -- African-Americans, Jews,
women and homosexuals.
The Security files report 410 incidents for the semester. These
include: a Guinea pig loose in the cafeteria, a dozen stolen wallets (including
mine), stolen book bags and computers, students caught with beer or marijuana,
misparked parked cars, broken elevators, emergency illnesses, fire alarms and
two tombstones toppled in the Jesuit cemetery.
The last week of the year, I visit a student friend, a senior, in
the hospital. After early morning words exchanged in a local pub, he was
outnumbered on the way home and beaten senseless. They punched in his face and
could have killed him. In the final month we, as a nation, have been
overwhelmed by the shock of American middle class boys with guns who somehow
release the demons that plague them by shooting down their classmates. This
madness seemed far away, in the West or South. But this was done not by
neighborhood troublemakers, but by Fordham freshmen. My friend is victim of the
alcohol culture, surely, but also of whatever it is in the American mores that
says men should settle their differences by resorting to violence in its many
forms. But we can hope those freshmen will not be back; and the senior received
his diploma in person to a standing ovation.
Making the rounds
I close up my deserted sophomore deans office a little
before 5:30 p.m., trying to decide which I need more, daily Mass or a quick
swim. Tonight Ill go to the wake of a sophomores father who has
died in a fall. At a student Mass in my residence hall room on Monday night we
prayed for those whose lives come apart in the last weeks of class and during
exams. During the semester about a half dozen have withdrawn for a while with
depression. On the way to the gym I pass John -- hospitalized two years ago,
now one of our successes. His philosophy professor calls him a star; his mother
says any other school would have forgotten about him.
In the campus center and Vince Lombardi Sports Complex, the newly
installed network of around-the-clock TV monitors in the lobby, cafeteria,
lounge and weight rooms has given the area the atmosphere of an airport waiting
room or a sports bar without the beer. On the screen, commercials, news trivia
and MTV: Performers kiss, their tongues meet, they unbutton their clothes. In
the Jesuit graveyard I make the rounds of the tombstones, try to decipher the
names, many of which time, air pollution and New York winters have washed away.
The plan is to destroy the old stones before the elements reduce them to rubble
and replace them with a little bronze plaque for each man and a statue of St.
Ignatius. A fitting memorial, to be sure, but not an old-fashioned college
graveyard with whatever those stones have to teach the young.
It begins to rain. The skies open. The earth is drenched. Three
students -- two guys and a girl -- cavort onto Edwards Parade and send
their Frisbee sailing through the torrent. They leap, tumble, roll, laughing,
splashing in the lush green grass.
The last day of class
On the last day of class I give them a short slide show, pictures
Ive taken over 30 years, but mostly within the last few months.
Nineteenth-century Fordham: Dealy Hall, in which we sit, and Hughes Hall, in
which several of us live, when they first went up. The baseball bleachers no
longer on Edwards Parade.
For the group photo of the 1857 Jesuit faculty, I point out: Fr.
Tissot, the Civil War chaplain; Fr. Doucet, the friend of Edgar Allan Poe; Fr.
Daubresse, who taught moral philosophy but did not know English; and Fr.
Legouais, the funny-looking fellow with the face of an angry goat, the dwarf,
whom students loved. I dont tell the anecdote about Legouais on a walk
with students when a rude fellow by the side of the road made fun of his
appearance and a burly Fordham boy resolved the situation by pummeling the wise
guy with his fists. The Third Avenue El passing by the campus in 1916.
Myself swimming in Walden Pond and sitting by Thoreaus
grave. Hemingway posing with a dead leopard in Africa and kicking a can in
Idaho shortly before killing himself. The campus in fall and spring.
And finally themselves. The class photo -- my last class of the
millennium -- very few of them the same persons who sat looking at me and one
another in January. Lek, though he still hates poetry and old movies, makes an
exception for Four Feathers. It may help him stand up to his father
who wants him to move back to Albania. The baseball player has quit the team.
The football player thought of quitting but stayed. Two of the 18 in the
picture have failed the course.
Joe could go one of two ways. This summer he works for the Gap in
San Francisco. With a Colombian grandmother, he speaks Spanish well. Some day,
as a Gap executive, he could go to Latin America and convince his company to
apply Jesuit social justice principles to their factories there. Or he could
take some risks, take communications courses, stay in New York, make it
here, and end up host of the Today Show.
Clara ends the year evicted by her aunt, split from her boyfriend,
but with a solid average Fordham grade. Her favorite essay is James
Thurbers short fable, The Moth and the Star, about a young
moth who ignores his parents commands to flutter around the street lamps
like the other moths and get his wings singed. Rather, every night, for years,
he tries to fly to a star, as if it were right beyond the treetops. He never
reaches it, of course; but he begins to think he did, and lives a long life
happy with his imagined accomplishment.
His parents, brothers and sisters all burned to death when they
were young.
Jesuit Fr. Raymond Schroth is a regular contributor to
NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, September 24,
1999
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