On a Farther Shore Read Online Free PDF Page B

lumber” or the desire for “a stronger and more perfect body” at the expense of their intellectual development, without explaining how any of these concerns were exclusive of one another. But at the center of the essay was a celebratory passage on the importance of books—not just any books, but the very best kind of books, the kind that stayed with you forever. Like everyone who loves books, Carson felt at once awed and aggrieved that there was more to read than could ever be read, and that to choose to read one book was to forsake the chance to read a different one. “If you read this, you cannot read that,” Carson wrote. “The hour you spent today on the latest best seller can never be recalled.” How much better it would be, Carson continued, to spend that hour reading “real literature, something that would raise you a little higher than you were yesterday, something that would make you willing and able for your part in the work of the world.”
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    Pennsylvania College for Women—commonly known as PCW—was like an island, hidden away in the wealthy enclave of Woodland Road among the steep, ash-covered hillsides on the edge of Pittsburgh’s East End. Founded in 1869, PCW by the 1920s occupied nearly half of a horseshoe-shaped ridge that overlooked Fifth Avenue, where electric streetcars ran to and from the city proper for five cents a ride.The base of the high ground on which the college stood formed a natural, wooded amphitheater. An expansive view to the north took in the gothic steeple of the Third Presbyterian Church, which rose sharply into the sky against a background of distant bluffs marking the Allegheny valley. The verdant campus featured neatly mowed lawns and well-tended walkways.
    The college itself comprised a handful of buildings, of which the most imposing was Berry Hall, where Rachel Carson came to live as a freshman. Formerly a private mansion, the palatial structure, with its soaring ceilings on the inside and a dizzying profusion of peaked gables and crenellated walls on the outside, had sixty rooms, many still richly appointed with carpets and fine furniture. Said to have at one time been the largest residence in the county, it had been subsequently enlarged and connected by a covered passageway with Dilworth Hall, a vine-entombed brick building with heavy arches that had been the college’s first major addition when it opened in 1889. To Carson, coming from a house without even running water, her new home must have seemed opulent beyond belief.She arrived on September 15, 1925, accompanied by her father and mother,in a borrowed Ford Model T.
    Carson had won a $100 scholarship in a statewide competition, and her parents planned to help pay her college expenses by continuing to sell off—and borrow against—the Springdale property.Tuition in Carson’s freshman year was $200, room and board another $575.Later, tuition rose to $300.The Carsons managed to keep up for a couple of years, but eventually they fell behind, and Rachel would spend the second half of her college years accumulating knowledgeand debt in equal measures.When one of Rachel’s classmates visited the Carson home, she noticed their dishes were the kind given out as premiums with rolled-oats cereal, the good china having been sold off to help pay the bills at PCW.
    There were eighty-eight women in Carson’s freshman class. Half lived on campus; the others were “day students” who lived at home.Students were not allowed to live on their own in apartments off campus and were not permitted to get married while in school—though this rule was sometimes broken, causing no end of delicious scandal within the student body, where such liaisons were regarded as adventurous and romantic, and were reliably kept secret from the faculty and administration.There were regular teas and luncheons,and a formal prom that was held at the swank Schenley Hotel early in the second semester each year. Attendees wore long gowns