That was supposed to be the title of this blog. But I decided that I couldn't bear to look at the word "Cheesecake" every time I went here to write something, so I decided on the more obnoxious "French Augmented Sixths."

The original title hides a utopian dream that has yet to be realized. It started on an early June afternoon: Sabato, Catherine, Monty, myself, and several others gathered in the bucolic pastoral paradise known to a select Amherst few as "Narnia." For the unacquainted, Narnia refers to a small estate and grounds behind Amherst College's co-op, the Zu. Although it is barely a half-mile outside the town center, hardly anyone knows of its existence. It is almost entirely surrounded by hedges and woods. The only reason Zu alumni know it is because of its location directly behind Zu-quarters. A gravel path leads directly back into the woods. After ten meters (and, appropriately, a lamppost), one suddenly bursts into what might as well be the grounds of a 19th century manor. One is entirely removed from the preceding place and time: hence, "Narnia."

Narnia encompasses no more than two acres, at the center of which is an abandoned two-story mansion. The college half-heartedly boards up most first-story windows, but if you stand on tip-toes you can see the old ballroom and its decaying chandelier. The result is something out of Grey Gardens or Psycho - although somehow the building manages to convince visitors that a murderous schizophrenic is the last thing you'd find inside. To the immediate west is another boarded-up complex: this time, the stables, or, in more traditional times, perhaps the servants' quarters.

In back of the mansion two tall rows of Italian pine trees separate two smaller yards. The spring dots the north end with tiny blue flowers, and in the warm months Zu beings lounge beneath New England's version of a baobab: a twenty foot high, thick, warty trunk punctuated by the occasional knot and thick, elm-like leaves. Descend fifteen feet to the south, and you'll get a crop circle in the middle of the resulting yard - no doubt the product of an old fountain or aliens - and a stack of mysterious, ten-foot-high, Stonehenge-like building fragments.

Narnia's crown jewel is its front meadow - a bounding, downhill stretch of field divided by a gown-like pine and weeping willow at its center. The mansion's brick steps still run down to its western end. A prim, eerily well-kept stone path bisects the field's two halves and lends a queer sense of order to something so rolling and seemingly ungoverned. I can stand in the middle, point to different spots in the meadow, and note their various significances. Each corresponds to different frolicks friends, lovers, and I had in years past: wiffleball games, camp outs, outdoor sex and the like.

[caption id="attachment_72" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Narnia's front meadow in early May"]

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That lovely June afternoon, we gathered after graduation and laid out a checkered picnic blanket on the front lawn. We languished in the shade for thirty minutes or so, whereupon Scott arrived, carrying a fourteen-inch cheesecake lavished with sugar-glazed blackberries. Devoid of plates or utensils, we joyously tore at the cheesecake carcass with our bare hands. Having permanently left the concrete latrine known as New York City only days before, I was in a sheer state of bliss. Urban claustrophobia tends to fade in life's rear-view mirror when replaced by blackberry-studded pastoral symphonies such as that Sunday afternoon.

I might add that all of it came at a low cost. This gave us the idea of creating a workers' paradise through fatty desserts. The key, we decided, is to eliminate the accumulation of unearned wealth: inheritances, trusts, etc. The first part of the solution is to set a cap on the amount of private property an individual or business can own: anything frivolous and unjustified, such as a third country house or poodle, would be returned to the public domain. This is insufficient, however: wealth in monetary form would still remain in the hands of the wealthiest and their armies of investment bankers. The final solution? Eliminate the accumulation of capital in banked form and replace the dollar with the cheesecake. A cheesecake's value would be based on freshness and overall quality: hence, the fact that Frederick Doucherton's great grandfather earned millions more than a hundred years before he was born would be moot. The figurative and literal cheesecake would be long-decayed and therefore worthless. Mr. Doucherton would have to earn, or, in this case, bake his own keep.

Some say the "cheesecake solution" would cause the US to descend into anarchy and lead to a dictatorship of the bakeries. Given the way things are going, is that really so bad? At least we'd have something filling to eat. Don't even try to tell me that in the long run, a delicious cheesecake adorned with gooey berries and sugary glaze isn't worth more than a few dollar bills.