My Best Friend at Harvard

Male companionship at a premier undergraduate institution.

My best friend at Harvard was this really sagacious engineering major named Willie who studied psychology in his spare time. Willie had invented a new way to analyze peoples’ personalities that he’d dubbed “The Egypt Test.” Subjects were asked to clear their minds and suspend all conscious thought, then he would prompt them, “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the word . . . Egypt?” Most people responded, “Pyramids” or “The Nile,” and if you answered with neither, Willie would prod you to keep free-associating until you said one or the other. After the test, Willie explained that if you said pyramids first, you were partial to artifice, geometry, and the mind. If, however, you answered Nile, you favored nature, the sexual universe, and believed organic things to reign supreme. When Willie did the test on me, I took forever to answer. Pyramids or Nile . . . Nile or pyramids! I couldn’t decide. The truth is, both popped into my head at the exact same time. When I confessed this to Willie, thinking I’d failed the test, he told me, “No. You are the third category. You reject my simplistic dualities and see beyond the mind-nature dichotomy . . . into the truth of things.” I wiped my tears on the sleeves of my blazer. Willie gave me a hug. He was my best friend at Harvard.