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brilliantine. I had never seen hair like that. He was very appealing to me, but he hadn’t a feminist thought in his brain. I doubt he ever suspected that he was telling us about a matrilinear society, not to mention, a non-patriarchal one. Had Evans suspected this, for that matter?
    Evans, the excavator of Knossos, was later accused of having faked the famous small sculpture of a woman-goddess with naked breasts, holding a snake in each hand of her outstretched arms, from fragments he found that may not have gone together. Later scholars disagreed with this, and looking at that sculpture, I can’t believe that it was faked. Her gestures, her dress, her expression, the designs on the snakes go together with such complete harmony, to the last detail, that I believe his presentation is accurate.
    My love of archaeology has continued until this day, though I doubt the professor (what was his name?) imagined I was his star pupil. He looked with friendliness at the more stylishly dressed students there, but I was sure I was getting the message he was giving about Crete more than most.
    I was certainly spending more time in the library doing the assignments with the original Evans’ books (valuable antique editions with marvellous full colour reproductions) than anyone else! After all I never had any trouble getting the only copies in the library delivered to my seat in the library at once. I read almost every word at least twice, sometimes three or four times, meanwhile staring at the elegantly detailed, engraved colour illustrations of the artifacts Evans had excavated, as if by peering at them more intensely, they would begin to unfold their secrets to me. Sometimes I thought they did. (Quite a few years later, I discovered the books of Marija Gimbutas and her remarkable excavations in quite the same way.)
    At the same time, I was studying piano and music composition. No one seemed to have any idea how to ‘teach’ composition. They would always put me in counterpoint classes when I asked for composition – valuable, but nineteenth-and twentieth-century romantic works went far beyond counterpoint, dealing with orchestration and the effects of sounds. Clearly, the elements needed were: melody or themes, counterpoint, harmony and orchestration. Even later when I went to Columbia University, which had a prestigious music school, their idea of a composition class was to tell me about the huge new synthesizer the school had bought (for a billion dollars, i.e., it had to be good), and that one should work on it. (There was a several years’ queue, however, so one shouldn’t get one’s hopes up.)
    Their computer, they announced arrogantly, was the composition of the future, since music of the futurewould all be done by computer! Therefore it followed, I suppose, that there was no point in my (a girl anyway), studying something called composition. This put an end to our conversation, from their point of view. I attended one or two supposedly very avant-garde Sessions and Cage concerts, but beyond being supposed to admire the guys for their cleverness and manipulation of assorted machines and gadgets on stage, there wasn’t much to get involved with. Beauty in sound, a sheer wall of sound, such as in Strauss, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev or others I loved, was not to be heard on those stages. It’s fortunate that records exist in this century, otherwise I might never have known, especially from an early age, the beauty of true symphonic music, and the heights it can reach.
    I also studied piano with a professor at Columbia University as part of my courses, and hung around with students at the Julliard School of Music. The piano lessons, aside from brief discussions of fingering and interpretation, mainly consisted of being told what kind of stage presence I should have. The stuffy, elderly male professior was clearly trying to work out for himself whether or not he thought a woman could ever really be