Benedict Andersons View of Nationalism

The child of late empire, who transformed the field of area

studies, lived a life beyond boundaries.
n 1967, Sudisman, the general secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whose
ranks had just been decimated in a series of massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead,
was put on trial. Of the top five PKI leaders, Sudisman was the only one who appeared in
court; the others were shot. Two foreigners were always present in the Jakarta courtroom:
Benedict OGorman Anderson, a 30-year-old scholar of Indonesia, and Herbert Feith, a
colleague of Andersons from Australia.
A Life Beyond Boundaries
By Benedict Anderson
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Amid the parade of Communist witnesses, only two of them spoke out in protest in the
courtroom and refused to incriminate others. One was an old woman who subsequently went
mad; the other, Anderson recalled many years later, was this little Chinese kid who looked
nineteen or twenty. Very calmly, and with great dignity, he gave his testimony. I was so
impressed by it.
Sudisman, who received a death sentence, also maintained his composure. In 2001, Anderson
told me that he was so dignified, so calm, and his speech was so great, that I felt a kind of
moral obligation to do something: As Sudisman was leaving the courtroom for the last time,
he looked at me and Herb. He didnt say anything, but I had such a strong feeling that he was
thinking: You have to help us. Probably you two are the only ones I can trust to make sure
that what I said will survive. It was like an appeal from a dying man. Anderson answered
that appeal in 1975, when he translated Sudismans speech into English from a smuggled copy
of the court transcript. A radical printing collective in Australia published it as an orangecolored, 28-page pamphlet titled Analysis of Responsibility, with an admiring introduction
by the translator.
After Sudismans trial, Andersons ability to do research in Java would eventually be
curtailed. The young scholar, entirely fluent in Indonesian, was being watched: A US embassy
document from 1967 stated that Anderson was regardedas an outright Communist or at
least a fellow traveler. He also found himself under attack in the Indonesian press: The
magazine Chas, which reportedly had ties to the countrys intelligence services, called him a
useful idiot in a front-page article. In April 1972, Anderson was expelled from the country.
It was the beginning of an exile that would endure for almost three decades.
With Indonesia closed to him, Anderson journeyed to Bangkok in 1974. It was a wonderful
time to be there, he later said. A heady interlude between dictatorships allowed Thai

radicalism to flower. The good times ended in 1976, when the military overthrew the civilian
regime and publicly shot and hanged student radicals in downtown Bangkok.
Still, the period Anderson spent in Thailand was essential to his intellectual growth, as it
forced him to think comparativelywhich, at the time, was rare among area-studies scholars.
Being in Thailand, he later said, forced me to think all the time about if I had to write
about Thailand and Indonesia in one space, how would I do it? Anderson, who died in Batu,
Indonesia, in December at the age of 79, overcame that challenge, and the result was
Imagined Communities (1983), a classic analysis of nationalism that has been translated into
29 languages.
***
In June 2001, when Anderson was 64, I traveled to upstate New York to profile him for
Lingua Franca. He lived in Freeville, eight miles east of Ithaca, in a spacious old farmhouse
surrounded by grazing cattle and with a barn topped by a Javanese-style weather vane. For
three days, we sat and talked in a breezy kitchen packed with unruly stacks of crime novels,
scholarly journals, Asian newspapers, and doctoral theses. Mounted on a wall was a striking
black-and-white photograph of a youthful Sukarno, the left-wing nationalist who led
Indonesia to independence in 1949 and was overthrown by General Suharto in 1967.
As I prepared to leave, I inquired if Anderson intended to write a memoir, and he said no. But
two years later, an editor at a Japanese publishing house asked him for a small
autobiographical volume. Embarrassed rejection was his initial response: Professors in the
West rarely have interesting lives. Their values are objectivity, solemnity, formality andat
least officiallyself-effacement. But when a special friend and former student, Kato
Tsuyoshi, of Kyoto University, agreed to assist him with the book and then translate it into
Japanese, Anderson consented. It was published, to his satisfaction, in Japan in 2009.
From the outset of the project, Benedicts brother, the historian and critic Perry Anderson,
urged him to publish the memoir in English, but he brushed the idea aside. In 2015, with his
80th birthday approaching, he changed his mind. Shortly before his death, Anderson
completed the final draft of A Life Beyond Boundaries, which is now before us. Its a neat and
tidy book about his unusual trajectory and sensibility, infused with inside jokes, idiosyncratic
asides, and sly humor. It is also a tart overview of academic life. But mostly the memoir is a
primer for cosmopolitanism and an argument for traversing geographical, historical,
linguistic, and disciplinary borders.
The history of the Anderson family reads like a Conrad novel. Benedicts great-greatgrandfather, along with a great-great-uncle, joined the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798, for
which they did time in prison. A nephew of theirs took part in the uprising of 1848, and
thereafter fled to Paris, Istanbul, and, eventually, the United States, where he became a
member of the New York State Supreme Court. Another branch of the family tree has AngloIrish landowners and military officers who served the British empire in Burma, Afghanistan,
Hong Kong, and India.
Andersons intrepid, linguistically gifted father spent most of his career in China as an
employee of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which began as a tool of British and
French imperialists and, in his sons words, was responsible for taxing imperial Chinas
maritime trade with the outside world. Benedict was born in Kunming in 1936, but his father

made a consequential decision in 1941 to move the family to California: Had they remained in
China, they might have been imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp.
In 1945, the family moved to Ireland, where they lived in a house full of Chinese scrolls,
pictures, clothes and costumes, which we would often dress up in for fun. The radio was
another source of entertainment and enlightenment: In the evenings, the family listened to
classic novels that were read aloud on the BBC by distinguished actors, so that our
imaginations were filled with figures like Anna Karenina, the Count of Monte Cristo, Lord
Jim, Uriah Heep, Tess of the DUrbervilles, and so on. In those years, traveling theater
groups proliferated in Ireland, and the Anderson children (including Benedicts sister
Melanie) absorbed plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, Wilde, Sheridan, and OCasey.
His father died young, when Benedict was 9, and the children were dispatched to boarding
schools in England. His English mother, who was passionate about books and ideas, was
scraping by on a pension, so Benedict had to win scholarships. He ended up garnering one of
13 vacant slots at Eton, a place that immediately sharpened his sense of class distinction. The
scholarship boys lived in a separate dorm from the sons of the British aristocracy and had to
wear a special medieval outfit. But he received an extraordinary old-fashioned education in
literature, art history, ancient history, archaeology, and comparative modern history.
At the core of the curriculum was rigorous language study in Latin, Greek, French, German,
and a bit of Cold War Russian. (Later, Anderson would learn Indonesian, Javanese, Thai,
Tagalog, Dutch, and Spanish.) The memorization and recitation of poems in Latin and French
were an essential aspect of his education; his teachers also asked him to translate English
poems into Latin and even to compose poems in that language. Few students after him were
educated in so rigorous a fashion. It was the end of an era.
Having flourished at Eton, Anderson found Cambridge University to be a tranquil holiday. He
became enamored of film (Japanese cinema, especially) and felt the first stirrings of
politicization. One afternoon during the Suez Crisis of 1956, he crossed the campus and saw a
group of brown-skinned students demonstrating:
Suddenly, out of the blue, the protestors were assaulted by a gang of big English student
bullies, most of them athletes. They were singing God Save the Queen! To me this was
incomprehensible, and reprehensible.
The protestors, mostly Indians and Ceylonese, were much smaller and thinner, and so stood
no chance. I tried to intervene to help them, only to have my spectacles snatched off my
face and smashed in the mud.
After graduating from Cambridge, Anderson lingered at home for six months, quarreling with
his mother, who wanted him to become a British diplomat. An alternative presented itself
when a friend invited him to work as a teaching assistant in Cornell Universitys department
of government. He arrived in Ithaca during a snowstorm in January 1958 and stayed there for
the duration of his long, productive career.
***
The 1950s and 60s were heady years to be a graduate student in Southeast Asian studies at
Cornell: It and Yale were the only American universities with robust programs in that area.
Money was plentiful, not only from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, but also from the

US government, which was keen to understand peasant rebellions and nationalist movements
in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Anderson savored the intellectual excitement of toiling in a
new field: students felt like explorers investigating unknown societies and terrains. His
peerssome of whom were from Burma, Vietnam, and Indonesialiterally built the Cornell
Modern Indonesia Project, installing steel pillars to reinforce the rotting floors of the
abandoned frat house where the program was located.
Some of the most pleasurable pages in A Life Beyond Boundaries feature finely etched,
affectionate portraits of Andersons mentors. First among them was George Kahin, the savvy
department chairman who was a specialist in Indonesias late-1940s struggles for
independence from the Dutch, and whose sympathy for Indonesian nationalism would later
result in the temporary revocation of his passport during the McCarthy years. Anderson writes
that Kahin, who had participated in Quaker activism in defense of Japanese-Americans in the
1940s, formed me politically. Another influence was Claire Holt, a Russian-speaking Jew
from Latvia who, after working as a ballet critic in Paris and New York, moved to Indonesia
and became the lover of the German archeologist Wilhelm Stutterheim, who shared her deep
interest in Indonesias precolonial civilizations. Holt had no scholarly credentials, but Kahin
brought her to Cornell to teach Indonesian languages to his graduate students. Anderson spent
countless hours in her house, absorbing her extensive knowledge of traditional Javanese art,
dance, and culture; sometimes they would read Russian poetry aloud to each other. Claire
Holt, he writes, was very special to me.
Two other men, in the early days, were close to his heart. Harry Benda was a Czech Jew
whose business career in Java was interrupted by the Japanese occupiers, who put him in an
internment camp that nearly ended his life. Later, Benda made his way to Cornell, where he
wrote a dissertation on the relationship between the Japanese and Muslims in prewar and
wartime Indonesia. John Echols was a perfect American gentleman who knew a dozen
languages and compiled the first English-language Indonesian dictionary. Andersons
adoration of dictionaries derived from Echols: Still today, he writes, the favorite shelf in
my personal library is filled only with dictionaries of many kinds.
Anderson was lucky not only in his mentors, but also in the loose institutional arrangements at
Cornell that cemented his career: Against normal recruitment ruleswhich require
competitive candidacies, extensive interviews, and hostility to nepotismI walked into an
assistant professorship without any interviews and without any outside candidate being
considered.
Kahin, his principal mentor, had urged Anderson to undertake a dissertation on the Japanese
occupation of Indonesia from 1942 to 1945, and the young scholar landed in Jakarta in
December 1961. His first glimpse of the country was unforgettable: I remember vividly the
ride into town with all the taxis windows open. The first thing that hit me was the smellof
fresh trees and bushes, urine, incense, smoky oil lamps, garbage, and, above all, food in the
little stalls that lined most of the main streets. He would remain in Indonesia for almost two
and a half years.
Jakarta was not yet a heaving, smog-filled megacity: There were few cars, and the various
neighborhoods still had a distinct character. Foreigners were scarce. In contrast to the social
hierarchies Anderson had observed in the UK and Ireland, he was immediately struck by the
egalitarianism around him: He lived near a street where, after dark, men would play chess
on the sidewalks, and he noticed that clerks and pedicab drivers would face off against high
government officials and debonair businessmen. For the young Anderson, this was a kind of

social heaven. The language came easily: His Indonesian took flight after four months, and
he found that without self-consciousness, I could talk happily with almost anyonecabinet
ministers, bus drivers, military officers, maids, businessmen, waitresses, schoolteachers,
transvestite prostitutes, minor gangsters and politicians. (His connection to the language
deepened with the years: Anderson told me that he did much of his thinking in Indonesian.)
When Anderson wasnt laboring in Jakartas archives, he got to know Java, wandering
through the old royal palaces; attending performances of shadow plays and spirit possession;
exploring the Borobudur, the Buddhist stupa built in the 10th century (once he slept till dawn
on the stupas highest terrace next to the Enlightened Ones); and visiting tiny villages of the
interior.
From the evidence of this memoir, Anderson, lost in the reveries of fieldwork and leisure, was
largely unaware of the escalating political frictions that would soon cause Java to explode.
***
On October 1, 1965, six Indonesian generals were murdered and their bodies tossed down a
well. The left-wing president, Sukarno, was detained; General Suharto took control and
blamed the coup attempt on the PKI. It was the beginning of what Anderson would call the
catastrophea series of massacres that, according to a CIA study from 1968, were
comparable to the Soviet purges of the 1930s and the Nazi mass murders of World War II.
Anderson and two colleagues (Ruth McVey and Frederick Bunnell) observed these events
from the safety of Ithaca. But they were determined to provide an intellectual response to the
Indonesian calamity, and they immediately set out to prove that the official account was
flawed. Relying on a vast cache of provincial Indonesian newspapers at Cornell, as well as
Indonesian radio transcripts, the trio produced, in January 1966, a 162-page report that
became known as the Cornell Paper.
The document, which took three months to write, insisted that the coup attempt was not a
Communist power grab, but an internal army affair spearheaded by colonels from the
province of Central Java. Kahin, who was always keen to push US foreign policy in a more
humane direction, sent the Cornell Paper to Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, and it
soon found its way to Joseph Kraft, a syndicated columnist who disseminated the conclusions
of the young Cornell scholars.
In my discussions with Anderson in 2001, he defended the main thrust of the Cornell Paper
that an intra-military dispute triggered the violenceand he spoke with immense passion, and
in fascinating detail, about the events of 196566. Alas, much of what he related to me is
absent from A Life Beyond Boundaries.
The PKI, he explained, had a parliamentary orientation that resembled the Italian Communist
Partys. In the early 1960s, he admired its nationalism, its incorruptibility, and its opposition
to the Vietnam War. But the years had given him a clear-eyed sense of the PKIs errors. It was
completely unarmed, but it embraced the rhetoric of Maoism: That was a huge mistake. It
created fear and anxiety about the Communist Party. It wasnt a guerrilla army. Thats why
they were massacred; they were all out in the open.
When the Indonesian government permitted Anderson to return to the country in 1999, he
attended a meeting of those who had survived the terror of the 1960s. The meeting took place

in a nondescript Jakarta building owned by the Ministry of Manpower; most of the attendees
were elderly. He recalled it as an incredibly overwhelming experience, akin to a Quaker
meeting, where people talked about their lives and experiences. When he took his seat, a buzz
went around the room; the foreign scholar was persuaded to speak. Afterward, a dignified
Chinese man who was around 50 approached him. Anderson realized that before him was the
kid who, 32 years earlier, had challenged the judge at Sudismans trial in 1967. They spent a
day together and Anderson heard his tale, which he related to me:
Many of the Communists, when they were trying to escape the sweeps on them, fled into the
Chinese ghettos, partly because the Chinese are much more closemouthed than the
Indonesians are, partly because these ghettos are accustomed to a certain level of
clandestinity. And this kid, who was a radical kid, was somehow recruited by Sudisman to be
his personal courier in terms of contacting other people who were hiding underground.
Is the Cornell Paper a work of lasting scholarship? Anderson insisted in 2001 that the events
of October 1, 1965, were manipulated from the top by General Suharto, whom he
considered the puppet master of the conspiracy. Contemporary scholars of the September 30th
Movementor G30S, as the plotters were knownhave a different view. In a recent e-mail
to me, University of British Columbia historian John Roosa, the author of the 2006 study
Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suhartos Coup Dtat in
Indonesia, noted:
I argued that Suharto knew about the plot beforehand but was not involved in it. From what is
known I think it is clear that Suharto was not the mastermind. All Ben had was speculation.
He speculated that Suharto, if not the mastermind, played the role of spoiler: Suharto had
planted double-agents in the G30S groupwho then sabotaged the plot, making sure that it
committed an atrocity (killing the generals) and then collapsed. I think this is overreaching.
Ben also wanted to acquit the PKI of any involvement. The argument of the Cornell Paper
Javanese officers acting on their ownis completely wrong.
According to Roosa, top PKI leaders, including the chairman, D.N. Aidit, were deeply
involved in the plot: Aidits idea was to use military personnel who were loyal to the PKI to
get rid of the army generals they suspected of being the key right-wing generals who were
promoting anticommunism. But matters went awry: The initial plan seems to have been to
capture the generals alive and present them to Sukarno, but the plotters didnt carry out the
plan with much concern for keeping the generals alivethree were shot or stabbed when they
resisted being abducted.
Given Andersons emotional connection to these events, one would expect that a memoir by
him would contain a great deal about the catastrophe. But the carnage is evoked fleetingly
and from a peculiar angle, in a brief passage about his comrade Pipit Rochijat Kartawidjaja,
an Indonesian exile and eternal student in Berlin who, during the long Suharto dictatorship,
clashed frequently and successfully with the small, corrupt Indonesian consulate in Berlin,
effectively headed by an intelligence officer. Pipit, Anderson writes, is an amazingly gifted
and fearless satirical writer whose articles are distinguished by a mixture of formal
Indonesian, Jakarta slang and Low Javanese, a style that incorporated Javanese wayanglore, Sino-Indonesian kung-fu comic books, scatology and brazenly sexual jokes to make his
friends laugh their heads off.
Anderson, who credits Pipit with teaching him how to write fluently in Indonesian, translated
one of his articles into English, an essay entitled Am I PKI or Non-PKI?, which was

based on incidents that Pipit had witnessed, as a young man, on a sugar estate in East Java in
1965. Pipits essay was full of black humor, but, Anderson says, the horror haunted him:
In his article he described how regular customers at the local brothel stopped going there
when they saw the genitals of communists nailed to the door, and he recalled rafts piled high
with mutilated corpses which floated down the Brantas river through the town of Kediri
where he lived.
Writing at the end of his life, in a memoir that feels post-ideological, Anderson chose to
accentuate the halcyon days in Javathe motorcycle trips through the interior, the sidewalk
chess games, the full moon over Borobudurinstead of the ruination of a country he loved.
***
Andersons early work on Indonesias independence struggle of the 1940s led him to think
seriously about nationalism: He saw how a skilled nationalist intelligentsia, based in Jakarta,
had summoned not only a nation called Indonesia but also a new language, Indonesian, which
became the language of resistance to the Dutch colonial rulers. Imagined Communities also
grew out of the political realities in Southeast Asia following the Vietnam War. The book
emerged from what Anderson viewed, in the early 1980s, as a fundamental transformation in
the history of Marxism and Marxist movements: the wars between Vietnam, Cambodia, and
China in 197879. Anderson simply couldnt understand why Marxist regimes were fighting
each other instead of the Western imperialists. It was a worrying spectacle: I was haunted by
the prospect of further full-scale wars between the socialist states.
Anderson began a comprehensive study of nationalism, a force whose power and complexity
were not explained by his sort of Marxist theory. In writing Imagined Communities, he was
partly inspired by Tom Nairns The Break-up of Britain (1977), which, in Andersons words,
had described the UK as the decrepit relic of a pre-national, pre-republican age and thus
doomed to share the fate of Austro-Hungary. But Anderson strongly disagreed with Nairns
contention that nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history, as
inescapable as neurosis in the individual. Anderson argued that nationalism was neither a
pathology nor a fixed, immutable force. Instead, he wrote, it is an imagined political
communitybecause the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their
fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of
their communion.
In an afterword to the 2006 edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson reflected on the
books enormous success: In the 1980s it was the only comparative study of nationalisms
history intended to combat Eurocentrism, and making use of non-European language sources.
It was also the only one with a marked prejudice in favor of small countriesHungary,
Thailand, Switzerland, Vietnam, Scotland, and the Philippines. Imagined Communities also
broadly coincided with the rise of theory in the academy: It attempted to combine, he wrote in
2006, a kind of historical materialism with what later on came to be called discourse
analysis; Marxist modernism married to postmodernism avant la lettre.
Anderson says in the memoir that he wanted to provoke his fellow scholars: I deliberately
brought together Tsarist Russia with British India, Hungary with Siam and Japan, Indonesia
with Switzerland, and Vietnam with French West Africa. These comparisons were intended
to surprise and shock, but also to globalize the study of the history of nationalism.

What enabled him, in a learned fashion, to compare Hungary with Japan was a cast of mind
that was always wide-ranging, endlessly curious, and interdisciplinary. When he surveys
academic life, he sees thick disciplinary walls that breed narrow, provincial thinking. He tells
us that, in his seminars on nationalism, he took pleasure in making students look outside their
cubby holes:
I forced the young anthropologists to read Rousseau, political scientists a nineteenth-century
Cuban novel, historians Listian economics, and sociologists and literary comparativists
Maruyama Masao. I picked Maruyama because he was a political scientist, an Asian/Japanese,
and a very intelligent man who read in many fields and had a fine sense of humour and
history. It was plain to me that the students had been so professionally trained that they did
not really understand each others scholarly terminology, ideology or theory.
He was also determined to steer them clear of jargon-filled writing, self-importance, and a
reluctance (among American scholars) to learn difficult foreign languages. On the whole, he
finds academia much too solemn, and likens professors to medieval monks determined to
eradicate frivolity. As a student at Cambridge, he filled his papers with jokes, digressions,
and sarcasm. In his early days at Cornell, he was immediately informed that scholarship is a
serious enterprisewhich made him reflect: Now I understand what traditional Chinese
foot-binding must have felt like.
***
Anderson survived a heart attack in 1996 and retired from Cornell in 2001, after which he
spent half of each year at his apartment in a lower-middle-class district of Bangkoka zone,
he told me, full of small businesspeople, schoolteachers, mistresses of policemen, this sort of
thing. Liberated from his teaching and administrative duties, he threw himself into a number
of projects: a book about anarchism and anticolonial nationalisms, Under Three Flags (which,
he says, has mystified many readers); a literary-political biography of Kwee Thiam Tjing,
the Sino-Indonesian journalist and columnist whose work, Anderson believed, embodied the
finest qualities of humanism and cosmopolitanism in early-20th-century Indonesia; and an
effort of amateurish anthropology, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in
Buddhist Thailand. He never lost his passion for literature, and helped to translate Man Tiger
by the young Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan, whose novels and short stories are in a class
of their own, far above all authors in Southeast Asia that I know, and whose sensibility he
compared to that of Gabriel Garca Mrquez.
He continued to think about nationalism, which is a powerful tool of the state and the
institutions attached to it, and which, in nations ranging from China to Pakistan to Sri Lanka,
is easily harnessed by repressive and conservative forces, which, unlike earlier anti- dynastic
nationalisms, have little interest in cross-national solidarities. He continued to reflect, too, on
the fate of the left:
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For a long time, different forms of socialismanarchist, Leninist, New Leftist, socialdemocraticprovided a global framework in which a progressive, emancipationist
nationalism could flourish. Since the fall of communism there has been a global vacuum,
partially filled by feminism, environmentalism, neo-anarchism and various other isms,
fighting in different and not always cooperative ways against the barrenness of neoliberalism

and hypocritical human rights interventionism. But a lot of work, over a long period of time,
will be needed to fill the vacuum.
Anderson tells us that A Life Beyond Boundaries has two principal themes: The first is the
importance of translation for individuals and societies. The second is the danger of arrogant
provincialism, or of forgetting that serious nationalism is tied to internationalism. He was
heartened by the fact that, in area studies, many young Japanese are now learning Burmese;
young Thais, Vietnamese; and Filipinos, Korean. Such students, he says, are beginning to see
a huge sky above them:
It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic
means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who
speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture
underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.
His memoir concludes with a coda about memory, technology, and poetry, in which his prime
target is Google: Google is an extraordinary research engine, says Google, without irony in
its use of the word engine, which in Old English meant trickery (as is reflected in the verb
to engineer) or even an engine of torture. Anderson frets that future generations may
never know the actual feel of a book: Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books
another. Groupthink rules: The faith students have in Google is almost religious.
As a student, he was enthralled by the cadence and rhymes of poems he had memorized, such
as Rimbauds dizzying Le Bateau ivre. Today, search has supplanted memorization: One
effect of easy access to everything is the acceleration of a trend that I had already noticed
long before Google was born: there is no reason to remember anything, because we can
retrieve anything by other means.
The poems he memorized in his youth stayed with him always. In 2007, he was invited to
Leningrad to assist with a class on nationalism for young teachers in Russian provincial
universities. Addressing them, he remembered some Russian from his days at Eton and
proceeded to recite the final stanza of a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who perished, amid
murky circumstances, in Moscow in 1930. To his astonishment, all of the students joined with
him:
Shine always,
Shine everywhere,
To the depth of the last day!
Shine
And to hell with everything else!
Thats my motto
And the suns!
I was in tears by the end, recalls Anderson. Some of the students, too.