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The books of The Lord of the Rings (and of the precursor The Hobbit) are basically a very long hiking trip, undertaken by middle-class people who do not live under a royalty or a nobility system.This proved to be very congenial to youthful Americans in 1965, to whom the cheap paperback editions made the story widely available. The “hippie” movement was just then getting underway, enabled by the interstate highway system that made cheap rapid travel across America feasible to millions.A bit more than 10 years earlier, in 1953 or so, my aunt Laura, born in 1928, had bought a convertible and had driven from Washington D.C. to Santa Barbara to attend a film school (Brooks Institute). She took photos all along the drive, and it was quite an adventure for a young single woman to do. Few would try it.But in 1956, the interstate highway system began construction, and by 1965, it was sufficiently developed that hitch-hiking, and group-cars, made it feasible for young people to go all over the country.Knew this personally: as I recorded in my Quora answer regarding San Francisco “politics correctness,” in summer 1964, my parents bought a 4-wheel-drive British Land Rover to spend a month camping across country, from Rehoboth Beach Delaware to San Diego California. As a nine-year-old I saw New York City (Minas Tirith, or perhaps better, Osgiliath) to visit the Wall Street bankers managing my mother’s assets, and then off we went to Niagara Falls, the Black Hills, the Badlands, the rock-carved faces of Mount Rushmore, the Devil’s Tower, Yellowstone (where we had visited in 1959) with its hot pools and blasting geysers and waterfalls, Tioga Pass through the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, and though California to the Pacific Ocean at San Diego. Each of these scenes later would find echoes in The Lord of the Rings.Below, my family in front of our Land Rover on July 12, 1964, the day we left from Rehoboth Beach for our transcontinental journey (I am the tallest child, in the hat):And a close-up of me, wrestling with our most exciting car:My father was a U.S. Navy officer in submarines. Before this trip, when I was 2, I played in the snows of New London Connecticut; when I was 3, I played in the sands of Waikiki Hawaii; when I was 4, I first visited Yellowstone. When I was not yet 5 (4 and ten months), I saw a nuclear submarine launched in Newport News, Virginia (the Shark, of which my father was reactor control officer); when I was 6, I walked the deck of the new aircraft carrier Enterprise, also nuclear powered, at its commissioning.Travel, new places, and new things were in my blood. These things were in the blood of many young Americans - if not quite at that moment, they soon would be. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings would soon engage with that.Also in 1964, as I was embarked on my cross-country road-trip, singer-songwriter Paul Simon also took a road trip: with his girlfriend. This inspired the later 1968 hit song “America,” presenting the trip as a combination of hitch-hiking and bus from Saginaw Michigan to Pittsburgh to New York City, including lines such as:“We bought a pack of cigarettes … and walked off to look for America … I’ve gone to look for America … They’ve all come to look for America.”But between Paul Simon’s 1964 road trip and Paul Simon’s 1968 song, The Lord of the Rings came to America.The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) came to America in a very accidental way.As my experience shows, the geography of LOTR is much more reflected in America than it is anywhere else. There are many features in LOTR that have no counterpart in the British Isles or in continental Europe - but that do have real-life counterparts in America. Thus we would think that Tolkien, and some American publishers, would have seen the potential for LOTR in America.But J. R. R. Tolkien either made practically no effort to publish in America, or else tried but was rejected by American publishers.Tolkien published LOTR in Britain in hard-cover only, long before 1964, completing publication in 1954. But rather than find an American publisher, Tolkien’s British publisher (George Allen & Unwin) merely printed pages in Britain, bound them, and in 1955 the American company Houghton Mifflin imported these copies into America.This 1955 American “import” hard-cover produced basically no effect inside America. Houghton Mifflin did not offer to perform a U.S. publication itself, but settled merely for importing a limited number of copies from Britain.1955 America was the “Eisenhower years” with no “counter-culture.” Conformity, practicality, making a path in the business world, was the psyche of the times when LOTR appeared in America in imported hard-cover in 1955.On the fringe there were the “beatniks,” and they had a book, Jack Kerouac’s 1957 “On the Road,” based on travels across America by Kerouac and his friends in the late 1940s, written mostly in 1951. But it did not find a culture of youth primed to accept it, or to find a world within it that engaged their own.Neither Tolkien nor Houghton Muffin took out copyright registration in America - and in 1955, registration with the U.S. copyright office was essential to preserve copyright in America.And Tolkien, intellectual British “don” that he was, and rather elderly too, would have nothing to do with any paperback printing.Nine years after the importation of British LOTR copies, when those had all sold out and no more were being sold in America, in 1964, an American paperback publisher, Donald Wollheim, of “Ace Books,” sensed the developing American youth culture, and saw potential in selling a cheap paperback edition of LOTR that young people could afford and carry-about with them easily.Wollheim called Tolkien for permission to publish a paperback edition in America. Tolkien refused. Tolkien’s response, Wollheim reported to his daughter Betsy, was:“he would never allow his great works to appear in so ‘degenerate a form’ as the paperback book.”But Wollheim believed that Tolkien, by authorizing importation into America in 1955 but yet ignoring copyright registration, inadvertently had placed LOTR into the “public domain” in America, such that Tolkien had no power under U.S. law to prevent Wollheim from “copying” LOTR in the form of American paperback books.And so Wollheim’s “Ace Books” went ahead and published LOTR in paperback in May 1965 in America - without Tolkien’s approval. These Ace “Vintage” paperbacks, originally priced at 75 cents, now are offered for 100 times that value: 75 dollars:Ace’s copies sold well, and Tolkien now realized that he was at battle on the fields of Dagorlad, grim as they were (meaning: he had to fight in the paperback battlefield, “degenerate” as it was). Tolkien struck a deal with Ballantine Books to publish “authorized” paperbacks - and coupled this with a call for allegiance to himself, as the author, denouncing Wollheim’s edition. The Authorized Edition in paperback came out in October 1965:The controversy of “Unauthorized Ace vs. Authorized Ballantine” created publicity. In October 1965, Tolkien wrote his son:“I am getting such an advt. [advertisement] from the rumpus that I expect my 'authorized' paper-back will in fact sell more copies than it would, if there had been no trouble or competition.”In July 1966, two years after our camping-across-the continent Land Rover drive, my father, before driving north from Menlo Park (where the Navy had sent him to get a master’s in political science from Stanford) to pick me up from my Sierra Nevada summer camp, Grizzly Lodge, bought the set of three authorized Ballantine LOTR paperbacks, with the plan that he would read them aloud to his three sons (me 11, brother not yet 10, another brother not yet 7) at Mount Lassen National Park, where our family would camp before going back south.Mount Lassen has a volcanic cinder-cone.And thus I, who had seen so many of the wonders of America before, and who had just spent a Sierra Nevada summer camping and horseback riding in America’s highest mountains, first heard The Lord of the Rings read aloud to me, in my father’s voice, over evening campfires outdoors under woods, nearby a volcanic mountain - a cinder-cone that I climbed during our stay.My father continued reading after we returned home to 20 Barney Court, Menlo Park, a chapter per night. Here is where that was; my parents were the first owners of that house:It appears the house has been expanded since our days.My father’s energy, drained by the disinterest of my brothers, failed him somewhere in the third volume, “Return of the King.” So I picked-up the copy and read to the end, and in the next several years read the trilogy some nine times more.Those tedious scenes of nobles after the destruction of the Ring evidently “did-in” my brothers’ attention, and my father’s - and recently I learned from my youngest brother that the whole experience had done nothing for him; he was too young when we started, it seems.But for me, I see now, it had a powerful effect.I recall a vivid moment, when I was 12, in 1967, riding my bicycle along Monterey Ave. towards our Barney Court house, when I stopped suddenly, right about where the parked car is in white, and I had a realization about myself.I thought, there are three basic path-goals in life: to be happy, wealthy, or wise. Which was I? And I discovered in that moment, that what I wanted was to be wise. It was not a decision; it was a realization of what I was.And though I have not been free to make all decisions affecting my life, when I have been free to make decisions on what I would choose to do, or choose not to do, this moment on Monterey Avenue has guided every single decision I have made. All of them.I would not say that the Lord of Rings affected who I was. What I do say is that it gave me concrete individual human characters to have in-mind, to enable me to understand what I was.I had at that moment no conscious connection with LOTR. But looking back on this, I now conjecture, today in 2019, concerning what was in my mind in 1967: that without concrete imagery in mind, of other human beings, it is less possible for any of us to form an effective, useful, guiding image of who we are, or of who we can be.This is the great benefit that literature can bring us, that nothing else can.And the Lord of the Rings presents us with Gandalf: a person who not just is wise, but who wants to be wise. He wants to be wise, even if it costs him comfort (wealth) and happiness.Gandalf is contrasted with Saruman, another wizard, who, as it turns out, wanted wealth (meaning comfort and power) more than he wanted wisdom. Saruman took Isengard, a prominent, comfortable place, in which to live: this showed what he most deeply wanted.Gandalf never took any home at all.There are a great many human beings who want to be wealthy; and there are a great many human beings who want to be happy. Taking these two groups together, they encompass practically all of the human species. In no way does our species need yet just another one of either of them. We suffer under many Saurons - and we suffer under many Sarumans.This is what I thought about when I was at Pomona College, in 1975, when I confronted the fact that I was rather different from other students, and felt myself driving myself to become one of them, and it was not working. I rejected this, during a moment in the still-undeveloped lands north of Foothill Blvd., on my conscious reasoning, that the world, the human species, did not need yet another one to add to the millions and billions. Here is where that thought occurred, in February 1975, just a bit left of the H in Harvey Mudd Mathematics, when the region was riddled with muddy puddles, and I was in the midst of folding a paper boat to float in one of them, and it struck me how juvenile I still was, to be floating paper boats in puddles when I was 19 years old:This was when I decided to transfer to MIT, to study architecture, because it is an art-form in which there are objective criteria of performance and excellence (the functional obligations of buildings to keep-out cold, heat, wet, pests, etc.), that do not shift with the changing fashions of one’s times, that render one decade’s popularity all later decades’ foolishness.Naturally everyone would like to be wealthy, happy, and wise. What matters is: which would you pick, if it cost you both of the other two? There are precious few who actually want to be wise, if the cost of that is to be neither wealthy nor happy.Those were my moments, at age 12 on Monterey Avenue in Menlo Park, in summer 1967, and again, at age 19, north of Foothill Blvd. in winter 1975, that subconsciously were shaped by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.And in fact, I have just mostly re-read LOTR again, in preparing this Quora answer - holding the identical three paperback copies that my father bought and read from in summer 1966, 53 years ago, which I have saved all these decades.In 1966, at the same time as my father was reading to us under the tree-boughs at Mount Lassen, and as young Americans some years older than myself were taking to the highways and beginning the “counter-culture,” beginning in 1965 to 1968, was the television show “Lost in Space,” which featured a fellowship - in this case a family - that traveled to new lands, new worlds, encountering the cultures thereon. This modeled the basic structure of LOTR. And it featured a very smart 12-year-old, Will Robinson, who was catnip for me.And a year later, in 1966, through 1969, and then on amazingly much more popular re-run showings, was the television show “Star Trek,” which also featured a fellowship - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, aided by Sulu, Uhura, and Chekov - that traveled to new lands, new worlds, encountering the cultures thereon. This too modeled the basic structure of LOTR. And because I was older, it gave me a more mature model than Will Robinson: Mr. Spock, the observant, ever-learning, never-judging, highly-intelligent science officer of the star-traveling fellowship.Above, I mentioned Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 song “America.”Another song from 1968, in addition to Paul Simon’s “America,” was James Taylor’s “Carolina in my Mind,” which includes:“I'm gone to Carolina in my mind. Dark and silent, late last night, I think I might have heard the highway call; and geese in flight and dogs that bite. The signs that might be omens say I'm goin', I'm going' I'm gone to Carolina in my mind. With a holy host of others standin' around me, still I'm on the dark side of the moon. And it seems like it goes on like this forever - you must forgive me, if I’m and gone to Carolina in my mind.”These songs, like Lord of the Rings, evoked in young Americans the desire to explore the world they lived in. The ethos then was personal exploration, not, as appears to be the case today, the desire for popular attention and fame; not, as was the time before then, the desire to have careers, to be a success in some prominent institution, or in business.In 1970 came Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock,” which begins:“I came upon a child of God; he was walking along the road. And I asked him, where are you going, and this he told me: ‘I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm, I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band, I'm going to camp out on the land, I'm going to try and get my soul free.’ …“Then can I walk beside you? I have come here to lose the smog, and I feel to be a cog in something turning. Well maybe it is just the time of year, or maybe it's the time of man; I don't know who l am, but you know life is for learning … and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.”Also in 1970 came James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James,” with lines such as:“There is a young cowboy, he lives on the range. His horse and his cattle are his only companions. He works in the saddle and sleeps in the canyons, waiting for summer, his pastures to change … Now the first of December was covered with snow; so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston. The Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frosting, with ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go. There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway; a song that they sing when they take to the sea; a song that they sing of their home in the sky …”The books of The Lord of the Rings are filled with songs, songs of travelers “when they take to the highway … when they take to the sea … that they sing of their home in the sky.”Anyone who picks-up the LOTR books today and starts reading will see, as I have just done, that they are basically the story of a long hike through a continent: discovering what it is, what natural features it has, and who lives in it in different places, and what kind of people they are, and what societies they have.The question asks, “Why did the Lord of the Rings become successful?” I hope I have shown that it became successful in America, because it caught the tenor of times, in America.I hope that I have also shown that the “tenor” it caught was a “good” tenor: travel as exploration, without conquest. Travel for learning, without domination.And here comes the relevance of the kind of people who did the traveling: the hobbits. Unlike every other people in LOTR, the hobbits have no royals - no kings or queens. The hobbits have no nobles. They have merely a kind of figurehead mayor - their highest official is elected, and has little power at that.Thus the hobbits respond to everyone with a calmness and inquiry born from being a free, un-hierarchied people. This especially makes the Lord of the Rings very congenial to Americans. LOTR presents us with travel by people who have in them their own sense of dignity - people who do not come from a land of royals and nobles, and thus, people who have neither subservience in them towards anyone, nor desire for domination in them over anyone.Gandalf is the same kind of character. He neither gives deference nor demands subservience.Indeed, as I have found on re-reading, so too it was in past decades, that the other characters, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, Elrond, etc., are all in a way shallow or flat: they play the figures of nobles as seen by those who have just encountered such people, and who see only their surface. The hobbits and Gandalf are real, developed people; the rest are figures.The Lord of the Rings is unsatisfying for adults, and fails to grapple with adult concerns, adult lives, adult emotions; I had not re-read it in 40 years, until deciding to offer an answer here, because it has almost nothing to offer to adults, in my opinion.But it is suitable for the young, and very valuable, in terms of encouraging the young to set their lives upon fruitful, beneficial paths. And in 1966, when it first appeared in America, there was a burgeoning vast population of the young, just ready to begin their adult lives. This is why the Lord of the Rings became successful.I will append here something I wrote a few weeks ago, before discovering that there was this Quora Lord of the Rings question to answer, in response to a request from my MIT class of 1977 secretary for alumni to relate a memorable MIT experience. I include it because his response was: “This is quite a story. Speaks to something about MIT in all of us, but also very 1970s.”I had not thought of it as “very 1970s” but on hearing this from him, I realized that it is. And on seeing this Quora question, I realized that it was the Lord of the Rings that made it “very 1970s.” You will see that I was unconsciously applying the attitude of the Lord of the Rings as a vast, long hiking-trip, to my own movements around America: in this case, my August 1975 journey to MIT.Here is what I looked like at the time of this story (I have omitted my student-number):And here is the story. Though it concludes with a reference to Mr. Spock of Star Trek, it could as easily have concluded with a reference to the hobbits Merry and Pippin encountering Fangorn Forest, or any number of other encounters by the hobbits of new places throughout the volumes of the Lord of the Rings:The theme of today’s youth appears to be getting famous, made possible by the technology of video and internet; but in our youthful times the theme was individual exploration, made possible by the technology of the interstate highway system and jet air liners (think Simon & Garfunkle’s “America,” including hitchhiking from Saginaw Michigan over 4 days to get to Pittsburg, then a bus trip from Pittsburgh to New York City through New Jersey: “We walked off to look for America,” “They’ve all come to look for America.”)Reinforcing this was the original “Star Trek,” with Lt. Commander Spock treating each new planet and society as an object to be observed and studied, as he wandered through the galaxy on different missions.I applied this to myself – by nature I was sort of a Spock. As a child of a Navy officer in nuclear submarines, I had been all over America already, up and down both coasts, and in Idaho (the Navy nuclear reactor training center) and in Hawaii twice. Repeatedly I had been the new kid entering a new school, in a new town in a new state, so it had been my habit from earliest childhood to observe each new society I was entering. My childhood was like being born on the Enterprise, traveling every year or so to a new “planet,” a new society, to participate in it for about a year or two, and then leave to go to a new one.And one of my mother’s close childhood friends was a Mercury and then Apollo engineer (James P. Nolan, MIT 1951). His career was the exploration of physical space.By contrast, my uncle (married to my mother’s sister) was a theater and early rock & roll promoter in New York City (Roger Euster, who in 1967 presented The Doors, The Who, and other groups in the Village Theater before Bill Graham took it over to be the Fillmore East). In February 1970, his daughter, my first-cousin, took me there to see and hear Eric Clapton, Delaney & Bonnie, Seals & Crofts, and Wilbert Harrison in concert. My uncle's career was also exploration, not of physical space, but of psychological and emotional space.I went to high school in Washington D.C., and having chosen Pomona College to study literature and film, as a freshman in fall 1973 I chose to go across to Los Angeles by train (three days). For Christmas break, I would fly from Ontario Airport to Washington, but chose to walk from Pomona to the airport (6 miles) to catch the plane.On transferring to MIT when I decided to study architecture, in August 1975 I decided that I would bicycle to MIT – not all the way from Washington, however. I flew (with my ten-speed) to JFK airport, and bicycled from there.I wore my ever-present pith helmet to ward-off sun and rain, which I had bought in Florida in May 1971 when I saw the Apollo 15 Saturn V “roll-out” and then watched from the deck of a destroyer as my father, a nuclear submarine commander, launched two test-missiles off Cape Canaveral.I wore a cast-off pair of my father’s khaki uniform pants, and in case of rain, I had a lightweight rain jacket, also a cast-off from my father, which was camouflage-patterned (he used it for duck hunting) in green and brown patches.On my back I had the small rucksack that my great-uncle had used when he was in the Norwegian Army in 1919-1920. I brought a small pup-tent, and instead of a sleeping-bag, just a white bedsheet (the weather being so hot), and the usual hikers’ insulite pad to sleep on.My plan was to bicycle on little-used smaller roads and, when darkness fell, to just pull over into the most accommodating clump of trees, where I could set-up shop hidden from view. Food was oatmeal cookies, peanut butter, and raisins, which I would replenish at convenience stores; I would use gas stations for restrooms. We of course had no cell-phones in those days.I cycled east from JFK along the south coast of Long Island, getting as far as about Moriches, Terrell River County Park, by nightfall, where I set-out my tent behind some trees.The next day, I took a look at the Hamptons to see the world of the posh-people, then went through Sag Harbor, Shelter Island (taking the little ferries that connect it south and north), and up to the Orient Point Ferry. I steamed through Long Island Sound across to New London, where I had the most delicious and memorable ripe peaches ever. Cycling north along small back-roads towards Worcester, by nightfall I had reached Woodstock Connecticut, happening unexpectedly upon the beautiful Victorian large summer home, Roseland Cottage, which I mistakenly thought was Mark Twain’s beautiful Victorian Connecticut home (later I learned Twain’s home was in Hartford, and thus for decades I have been puzzled about what this cottage was, until I went online just now to find out). I set-up my tent on the grounds of the Woodstock Academy school, across the street from the Victorian “cottage,” and munched-up another batch of oatmeal cookies and peanut-butter. It had been a beautiful, wonderful day.I was running vastly ahead of schedule, so I decided the next day I would spend wandering around central Massachusetts, going west instead of east, including a visit to the Old Sturbridge Village recreation/re-enactor site.However, soon after I started northwest at sunrise, dark rainclouds began to gather, and I decided: “better head to Cambridge fast.”Pith helmet on, camouflage jacket on, rucksack on, I cycled as fast as I could go to the east, when a sedan pulled up beside me and flagged me. The driver was a businessman who had noticed the disaster of rain about to deluge me, and asked where I was going.Cambridge, I said, I’m going to enter MIT.“I’m going to Watertown, I’ll take you that far,” he said. So I loaded the bicycle into his trunk (which wouldn’t close due to the bicycle being too big, so he tied down the lid) and off we drove through the rain, which let-up by the time we got to Watertown. I cycled along the north bank of the Charles River – and that’s how I arrived at Mass Ave and MIT.I checked-in at the arrival center, and for students like me, not yet having permanent accommodations, they gave me a cot in the armory-type brick building across Mass Ave. from the No. 77 entrance (the Du Pont Gym, bldg. W31).The next day, I decided to bicycle up Mass Ave and take a look at Harvard. I had several high school classmates enrolled there, including Henry Richardson, who would have recognized my pith helmet; he was also a hiker, and we had gone together on a fairly rigorous three-day hiking trip in West Virginia in 1972.But for some reason it never occurred to me to contact him or anyone else from my high school days who was at Harvard. I had never felt at home during my four years at St. Albans, which regularly sent several students to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc., but almost never to MIT, because St. Albans students never saw MIT as a prestigious place to go. The students there were so focused on their prestigious and flattering social lives, and on building-up their own prestige, which was something I never understood or even comprehended. I wanted to explore, to learn, and to make things – first by writing, then by film, and then by architecture. There were traces of a bit of this in some of the St. Albans students, but it seemed that for all of them, those aspects of their characters were flooded-over by a focus on their social life – not meaning partying, but meaning: being an ever-more-prestigious person. I never considered going to any Ivy League college, because I felt it would just mean four more years of being surrounded by the same kind of people, them finding no reason to pay attention to or get to know me, and me finding no reason to pay attention to or get to know them.I didn’t know it at that moment, but in entering MIT, I was entering the first place I ever felt really at home – because everyone there was like me: focused on studies, driven to learn, wanting to make things, and it never occurring to anyone that it was important to develop a flattering and pleasing social life. Who could bother with that, when there was more to learn, and more to imagine and to design and to make?And thus I rolled on my bicycle into Harvard Yard, and leaned my bicycle against a tree, and went walking around – in my pith helmet, camouflage rain-jacket, and khaki uniform pants.Harvard Yard was deserted. I looked at the various buildings, looked at the bronze seated statue, and then went up the broad sweep of steps to the terrace of Widener Library. I walked out onto the extended high platform flanking the stairs, the one on the left as you are facing the building, and stood looking out over the Yard, with Emerson Hall to my right, and then Sever Hall.[Insert for Quora: Here is the location. The spot I was on is the one lighted corner of the terrace in front of the library in the top image; the same spot is the platform to the left of the second image (although at the time I was there, no people were on the steps or in the yard):Still there was no one there but me – standing high-up on the platform, in pith helmet, camouflage rain-jacket, and khaki pants. I was completely oblivious to how odd I must look – to me, this was merely the right gear for a rainy day. And there was no one there to see me in Harvard Yard anyway – not that I thought about that.And then I saw coming along in my direction from the far right, between Emerson Hall and Sever Hall, about to enter Harvard Yard, a man in a tweed suit, who by physical race was African (the term “African American" did not exist then). He looked to me like a young professor, or a graduate student, or visiting scholar – from Africa.And then he happened to look up at me – and he stopped dead in his tracks.Instantly, for the first time, I felt self-conscious about how I looked – because I knew what must be going through his mind, based on how startled he was, and his stopping so immediately abruptly:“I’ve gotten out of Africa,” I thought he must be thinking, “and I’ve gotten away from the arrogant white colonial explorers in their pith helmets, treating me and my people as just objects for them to study, judge, control, and rule – I have become a scholar in America’s bastion of the prestigious intellect, Harvard – and now here is one of them, right here in Harvard Yard, looking down on me? How can this be? In Harvard Yard? A pith-helmet white explorer, wearing jungle camouflage, coming into Harvard Yard? And instantly assuming the position of high power on the upraised platform, looking down on us all? How can this be?”The politest thing I could think of doing was to just stay in position, but turn my gaze elsewhere across Harvard Yard. Anything from me acknowledging his startlement would just aggravate the moment. After a pause, he continued on course through Harvard Yard, while I made sure always to be looking elsewhere than at him.After he exited the main central square of Harvard Yard, between University and Weld, towards the Johnston Gate, I went down the Widener steps, got my bicycle, and rode back to MIT. I certainly did not want to startle another Harvardite, after that.I felt very sorry and guilty that I had caused the man discomfort, which I certainly had not intended.I had been in pith helmet and camouflage all the way during my bicycle trip: in JFK airport; in the posh-people Hamptons; across the Sound on the ferry from Orient Point to New London; outside the grand Victorian cottage; it was how I would have looked while touring Old Sturbridge Village, had the rainstorm not changed my plans; it was how I looked on the road when the businessman picked me up; and it was how I looked on entering MIT – where, I must say, not one MIT person gave any notice whatsoever of feeling any oddness about my clothing, or about my pith helmet or my 57-year-old Norwegian Army rucksack (FYI: I still have the pith helmet and the rucksack).This moment in Harvard Yard was just me being me, as I had been in all these other places. It caused no comment at MIT – but it did at Harvard Yard. These were just the best practical clothes I had in my house, for the bicycle trip I planned to take; nothing new need be bought, when I already had these in-hand. And so, off I went.A little more than two years later, in December 1977, this would be the same outfit I would wear, when hiking up the California coast from Carmel to Stanford University, to visit my brother attending there. I don’t recall any odd looks at Stanford, either (although en route, in a McDonald’s outside Santa Cruz, probably the one on Route 1 between Laurent and Trescony, I was mistaken for a penniless hobo, by a father behind me in line, who offered to buy me a meal).If I was an arrogant white explorer in a pith helmet and camouflage, well, it was the arrogant upper-class white world itself that I was treating in this way.And because this encounter brought home to me how I looked, which otherwise I never would have noticed, I reflected during my ride back down Mass Ave to MIT, and it occurred to me: I did think that this was exactly the right way to treat Harvard: as yet another village, with its own peculiar culture, a thing to be studied but not to become part of – just the way in “Star Trek” that Mr. Spock treats each culture he comes across in his travels.