the gadfly
Homecoming Issue
St. John’s College Annapolis, MD Vol. XXXIV Issue 06 Sept. 28, 2012
photo by Matt Denci A’15
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n an era where generational merits of the Program even as schools and the paradigm for changes are happening learning evolve. What if students do not? Surely a school that every few years, academia is available from one’s laptop is compelling. But St. John’s has not escaped unscathed: has always been a peculiar school for peculiar people—and it The whirlwind of innovation will continue to be. Johnnies experience something timeless: stemming from the computer and We relate to the books we read because we recognize our the Internet has crept into how questions, our struggles, and our whole selves in them. That we learn. Inevitably, St. John’s tension will continue to exist for as long as people are around, has found itself at odds with and, fortunately, the Program addresses that tension. St. John’s this rapid shift towards online simply needs to market itself properly, which, in my limited education. How do we compete opinion, is being done, and as long as we do not deviate from in a world where educational our core beliefs, we will remain relevant in a world so easily resources better conform to our impressed and persuaded by newfangled technologies. schedules, our locations, and our So, let us return to the question: What should St. John’s budgets? What should we do? do? My answer: Nothing. Naïve? Perhaps so. But bringing us It’s a difficult question, together into one place is not just a competitive advantage; it especially since the St. John’s is the foundation upon which the whole Program rests. This Program, perhaps uniquely school can remain an oasis only if it refuses to change. And anymore, requires the brick-and- lest you continue to think that this will somehow become Robert Malka A’15 mortar college to fulfill its aims. unattractive to future generations, see already how the hurried Where with most institutions the education adheres to the tempo of the Internet is wearing us down and dragging us classroom, St. John’s classrooms provoke the discussion, but along, preventing us from reflecting and acting and taking it thrives elsewhere—everywhere. time for detached, thoughtful inquiry. I am not only confident If we take this for granted, let us imagine an alternative that the world will push back from that overstimulation and St. John’s: Year 2112, seminars and tutorials conducted by overburdening; I am sure of it. People want to develop close sophisticated hologram technology. (I’m trying to be generous, relationships, to be around nature, to embrace the idyllic here.) During the day, you reside in Kansas City, MO, but in image of deep discussion with friends before a fireplace. the evening you dissect the Critique of Pure Those dreams are too much a part of our Reason with two tutors and fourteen other fabric to disappear. People want to develop students, all physically elsewhere. When In this tumultuous time when we are close relationships, to be still gaining our bearings on our age’s the tutors nods to signal the end of the class, everyone logs off and disappears. profound structural changes, I envision St. around nature, to emI can’t speak for everyone, but such a John’s not only coasting past the crises, but brace the idyllic image bleak scenario unnerves me. How many becoming the commonly understood ideal of deep discussion with wonderful moments have we experienced of what a liberal arts education is. You friends before a fireplace. can bet that I believe that, in 2112, when on the walk back to the Quad or the Coffee Shop? How many times have we Johnnies are riding their hoverboards to knocked on doors, peered into the fishbowl, or marched tutorials and chatting with their friends on Mars from their with determination through the Coffee Shop seeking human really cool cellphones, they will still be carrying with them contact and intellectual companionship? How about our their great-grandfather’s copy of the Republic, boasting about intramurals, our choruses, our dances? Can we imagine St. it among friends around a McDowell table, as the same bell John’s without immersion and the serendipity that makes kicks off the timeless discussion that has inflamed our hearts possible? The answer—I dearly hope—is absolutely not. again and again. Let us not be swept up in the transient fads I have, however, unceremoniously ignored a second of ever-shinier technologies, but embrace each other and our assumption in all this: that people will continue to see the books in our quest to be better people.
The Beauty of Brick and Mortar
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The student newspaper of St. John’s College 60 College Avenue Annapolis, Maryland 21401 sjca.gadfly@gmail.com www.issuu.com/sjcgadfly www.facebook.com/sjcagadfly Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student news magazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and staff of the Annapolis campus. Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gadfly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking news magazine. The Gadfly meets every Sunday at 7 PM in Room 109 on the first lower level of the BBC.
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Articles should be submitted by Friday at 11:59 PM to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com. Staff Nathan Goldman • Editor-in-Chief Ian Tuttle • Editor-in-Chief Hayden Pendergrass • Layout Editor Reza Djalal • Photographer Sasha Welm • Cartoonist Jonathan Barone • Staff Will Brown • Staff Andrew Kriehn • Staff Robert Malka • Staff Sarah Meggison • Staff Kevin Morris • Staff Charles Zug • Staff Contributors Eva Brann Nicholas Maistrellis
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lumni: Welcome home. For this Homecoming weekend, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Program, the Gadfly staff felt something special was in order. We’re happy, therefore, to present you with a special issue of the Annapolis campus’s weekly newspaper. We hope you enjoy our small contribution and that it makes you feel, well, home. Current students: For the love of Zeus, pick up your room and put the seat down—we have guests! Ahem. Pardon us: Sometimes it feels a little too much like home.
!"#$%&'(%)**+,-%#.%/*&"+$0"+,%12#"&-%34-&#"5 In honor of 50 years of intramural sports, our resident sports historian Jon Barone has compiled a special report on the overall successes (and less-thansuccesses) of St. John’s intramural sports teams since 1963. Jonathan Barone
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Editors: Where does the liberal arts college fit into the current higher education environment?
!"#$%&# '()*(+, An exclusive interview with President Chris Nelson and Dean Pamela Kraus about the future of the New Program after 75 years.
President Nelson: It’s very hard to say exactly what’s going on in higher education, but there’s no question that with the growth and sophistication of technology, more and more general education courses—lecture courses and the like—are going to be delivered online [and] that the large lecture hall is going to become more and more of an antique. I can imagine, therefore, that the whole notion of a four-year residential college will undergo some shift. We know that [online] education is very difficult to square with a liberal education, the kind we do here. And it can’t replace the residential experience….On the one hand, it seems to me, this puts St. John’s in an extremely good position, because distance learning for us looks more like five to ten feet apart. But it does mean that the message about what a liberal education is becomes harder to get out. On the one hand, what we have to offer will become more distinctive, more needed, and more appreciated than ever. But we have to make sure that the message is heard. Dean Kraus: One positive effect is that many colleges and universities have taken on programs for which one just needs credentials, rather than education, and much of that may be moved out of the university proper and moved to other educational institutions that can do it more efficiently. This may refocus the university and college, away from being a marketplace of ideas, to more traditionally what ought to be going on. ED: Going forward, will St. John’s need to alter the ways it presents itself to prospective students and the outside world? P: We always have to find language that is suitable to the ear of people we’re trying to reach. It may be that one uses a different language to communicate the same message….But the one thing we could never do is try to tell one story and be something else. The thing that makes the College glorious, in my mind, is that we actually practice what we preach: we do in the classroom what we say we intend to do. We hope our students come to say, “Hey, they actually told us the truth!” I would never want to depart from a word of that. Now, the other question is more interesting: how does the College’s Program evolve? I thought maybe the dean could speak to some of the questions that are on the minds of faculty. D: We’ve had this Program for 75 years, and we attempt to study, especially in the laboratory part of our curriculum,
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some recent revolutions in thought.... We’re looking right now at the entire math and lab sequence, just to make sure that we have in place what needs to be in place, and we are refining the curriculum there, so that not only are we having our students and tutors read and study the material that is most important for us to be doing, but also so that we are allowing our students to have a better experience with it. In the case of the language program, I don’t know if there’s such a thing as keeping pace with developments. But we are thinking seriously about the claim that we have a trivium. We do a minimum amount of logic—and for years we’ve fretted over how we’re going to do that—we do a minimal amount of rhetorical analysis, and we know from our own experiences as tutors, but also from the Student Committee on Instruction, that the writing aspect of the Program is not as strong as it should be. To stay as excellent and true to our aim as possible, we have to have those areas of the Program very strong, because it’s not going to be just timely or occasionally that we need the ability to speak well, to write well, and to think well. Those abilities, if honed well, and if we can come up with the best way to go about improving that curriculum—that’s going to serve our students so much better than certain courses in certain disciplines at a university. ED: How do you evaluate on what to lend emphasis in a math or lab curriculum? D: It’s a matter of discerning and choosing, from among a lot of wonderful possibilities, which are the ones we think are the most worth concentrating on…. We’re always balancing the emphasis on competence with a need to go deeply into fundamental assumptions—an evaluation of what that science is undertaking, where the technical and competence component is necessary to know about [and where it is] not so necessary to be accomplished in. That’s mainly our focus in all of our programs: to try to think deeply about fundamental assumptions and perplexities, and unearth them. There are now fewer texts to study that we know about by scientists who are reflecting in a radical way. When you read texts of Leibniz, whatever his technical genius, he’s thinking more widely than his technical competence. And with the need for specialization, that became less and less practiced. ED: How might emerging technologies affect the St. John’s classroom? D: I think we ought to be looking into these in a very serious way. I see no rea-
son why students preparing for the algebra exam aren’t using online programs. The same for juniors practicing calculus problem sets. There may be comparable programs in language. There are many things, too, we could import into the lab that wouldn’t sacrifice the vital work of the laboratory, but might enhance it. I think it’s important that we identify those things. I also think it’s important for us to reflect on the phenomenon of this kind of medium—negative and positive. Like the Internet. It’s omnipresent, it’s not going to go away. And large organizations are in charge of the content, and we are not reflecting on our assumptions, or theirs. ED: With study abroad programs now ubiquitous, does St. John’s have a future abroad? D: If we had a year-abroad program, what would we do with the community? We want students all to be talking to each other, and that we’d have to sacrifice. But neither do we feel that we want to have a summer program abroad that we would give credit for; it’s unclear how we would do that. What we’re pursuing now is to find outside funding, analogous to the Hodson Internship Program, that would allow students to make a proposal for some kind of summer study connected to a possible career choice, and we could have grants. And that could include study abroad. ED: Do you foresee any future studies in the visual arts? P: When I came to the College, we did have seminars on paintings, so we might look at that again. It’s the question of perspective. That’s a deep question that goes beyond the fine art: How do you look at something? How do you gain and how do you bring perspective into a painting? I’ve been having an ongoing electronic conversation with an art critic in Boston over one of the three Wounded Eurydice paintings by Corot. It’s my favorite painting ever….It was very funny to try to figure out what it was about that painting, and what I was seeing, and what I wasn’t. It isn’t until you start to talk about what you’re seeing that you actually see it. The first time I said this someone said, “Well, tell me about the painting. I don’t know about it,” and I couldn’t even remember whether Eurydice was standing or seated, and I had looked at this painting for 20 years! So I thought, “I’m obviously not looking at the painting in the same way that I’m feeling the painting.” So then I went to work on it a little bit, and I could imagine such a thing where you can see that those three paintings of Corot’s might be, literally, three different moments in the discovery of Eurydice: that she’s wounded, and that she’s mortal, and that she’s dying, and everything in the painting reflects those moments. In that sense it starts to open up like a good book does. I think it could be quite exciting, though I think it is true that in a certain sense you can have the book handy in a way that a reproduction of a painting is not quite the same. ED: Any possibility of studies in film? P: Yes. I’ve advised a couple of senior essays on films, and I’ve learned a lot. There are films and there are films. Some of these are really quite extraordinary. ED: Ignoring the logistics of adding and subtracting texts, are there any books written in the second half of the twentieth century that you could foresee ending up on the Program someday?
P: It’s hard to say. There are authors we’ve taken much more seriously in the last 20 years than we did before. Virginia Woolf is a very good example. That would occasionally come up in a preceptorial before 1990, but it’s now regularly read in language tutorials—at least many of them, not universally. I can’t help but think that Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a seminal kind of work that’s important in the history of ideas, as well as an extraordinary piece of its own. There’s some original thought there on the power of a personal God to determine the course of action. That’s an interesting thing to explore, and it’s had an enormous effect over the last half-century. Flannery O’Connor has come and gone, come and gone. I can imagine more being done with Faulkner, because of the power, again, of the rhetorical force. ED: Is there something about literature, specifically, that makes it hard to know what could end up on the Program? D: No, I think it’s all works. If it’s so contemporary, you might not have the distance from it. Some people are very good at that. Others of us find it more difficult, because we care a lot about certain things they’re writing about. You need a certain kind of distance. Sometimes you can get it by talking it through with others. P: I was just reading some Julian Barnes lately. I can imagine somebody like that could outlive his time, [but] it’s hard for me to see [why] right now. What I’m seeing is something that is every bit worthy of a serious seminar discussion. But I don’t know whether it’s got the depth and the greatness of some of the others, because I haven’t lived with it long enough, tested it long enough. So it’s not just the test of time and its effect on others, but somehow the test of time within the community. Lots of the books that are coming forward in the community have been around for a while, so you can look at what are the things that people keep coming back to. Some of them are big books by authors that are on the Program and we just don’t get to them too often—Emile, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick— but others are I guess I’d call them underground classics that made their way around, sometimes with students and faculty together, sometimes with just faculty—somehow they’re present, but they’re not yet on the Program. ED: Is there a possibility of the Program incorporating nonWestern works? P: Going to the way St. John’s approaches so many things, we’re looking at our tradition in order to understand the world we’ve moved into. The world we’re moving into is more international, but our tradition isn’t yet. It may be for some, but there’s something about what it means to know oneself first which is much harder than to learn something about the rest of the world. In a certain sense, it’s more difficult to learn the things you can’t see that are familiar than the things that are strange. When the familiar becomes strange, now you’re in a world of learning that’s really powerful. But when you move into the strange, you haven’t yet had the chance for what I would call a kind of “radical conversion,” which takes you outside of yourself and asks you to question. So somehow it would seem to me that if we were to do more from other traditions, we would somehow have to find the bridge in the foundation.
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!"#$%&'(%)&*+' ,-.,/.0,. Nicholas Maistrellis
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urtis Wilson died recently, on August 24, 2012. He was College, under his guidance and after much anguished disone of the most important members of the generation cussion and disagreement, decided to reduce the offerings of tutors who shaped the Program in its present form. I have in laboratory science from four years to three. It had by then been asked to write this short remembrance for our alumni, so become clear that five classes in the sophomore year—semimany of whom were fortunate to have known Mr. Wilson, but nar, language, mathematics, laboratory, and music—were too I also write to those alumni and current students who never many, and that students were not able to prepare properly for had a chance to know this remarkable man. all. I was present at those discussions, and was filled with adCurtis Wilson graduated from UCLA in 1945, and received miration for the deep thoughtfulness of the faculty, but also his doctorate from Columbia in 1952. He was an eminent his- for the way Mr. Wilson guided us. He made it possible for evtorian of science. He became a tutor at St. John’s in 1948, elev- eryone to feel that his or her point of view had been heard. In en years after the founding of the New Program, and one year his “Dean’s Statement of Educational Policy and Program for before the beginning of Jacob Klein’s deanship. He was a tutor 1976” he articulated a view of our way of approaching science at the College in Annapolis from 1948-1964, and in Santa Fe that still seems to me fundamentally true. He wrote: from 1964-1966. He went to Santa Fe as part of the group of tutors that founded the Santa Fe branch. He served as dean of One aim, and surely a primary one, is to learn something the College in Annapolis from 1958-1962. In 1966 he decided about Nature and Nature’s laws. Another aim, also an imto devote himself to his research in the history of science, and portant one, is to learn something about our knowing of Nawent to the University of San Diego, first as a visiting profesture’s ways. If we are to speak of a “liberal dimension” of sor from 1966-1968, and then as a professor from 1968-1973. In the Laboratory, then I think it must mean some cognizance 1973 he returned to St. John’s. He was, of course, received with of, some reflection on, the processes—conceptual, observaopen arms. There was a joke going around at the time that he tional, logical, experimental—whereby we come to know would not be allowed to return unless he agreed to again be about Nature. dean. He did, in fact, agree to return as dean, and he held that position until 1977. He retired from teaching in 1988. I served with Mr. Wilson on the Instruction Committee During his early years he was deeply involved in thinking during the first three years of his 1973-1977 deanship. He was about the place of science and mathematics in the St. John’s to a large extent like the philosopher-king in the Republic. He Program. St. John’s was, I think, the only college at the time was an intensely private man who would, on the whole, have giving serious thought to the integration of science and math- preferred to be left alone with his family, his studies, and his ematics into a liberal arts education. Mr. students. But when duty called, he did Wilson worked long and hard on this isnot shirk the call. This was true for both He was a model for me of sue, and, among other things, produced deanships. He took on, without comquiet but firm virtue. He was plaint, all the duties of a dean, including essays describing and defending our approach to these matters, as well as a numalso extraordinarily learned, making alone difficult decisions when ber of laboratory and mathematics manuthe Instruction Committee couldn’t although it was hard to know agree. I admired him a lot, and was even als. this—he was so modest. Mr. Wilson was responsible, during his a little intimidated by him, because I two deanships, for shepherding the Colcared what he thought of me. He was a lege through two major revisions of the curriculum. In 1961- model for me of quiet but firm virtue. He was also extraordi62 he proposed the institution of preceptorials. He reasoned narily learned, although it was hard to know this—he was so that students, as they progressed in the Program, needed time modest. to study something in detail. He felt that the relatively quick An anecdote comes to mind that illustrates both his intelreading of books in the seminars needed to be supplemented lectual and moral virtues. There was some dissatisfaction, by opportunities to study some one thing closely. However, he after we went from four to three years of laboratory science, also thought that this was just as important for the faculty. It about how we were studying electricity and magnetism in juis interesting to imagine those faculty meetings in which the nior lab. This issue came up for discussion in the Instruction faculty discussed and then decided on which 28 readings to Committee. A month later Mr. Wilson came to the meeting remove from junior and senior seminars. Continued On Pg. 07 In 1976-77, during his second deanship, the faculty of the
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with a complete electricity and magnetism manual he had written while he a tutor in the class. He could be dean and scholar at the same time. I would like to end this essay with two final examples of Mr. Wilson’s wide-ranging gifts. He gave beautiful eulogies at memorial services. I once asked him half-joking if he would do it for me. He answered that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He also gave wonderful Friday Night Lectures, both as dean and later as a tutor, frequently illuminating some interesting topic in science or mathematics, or some other branch of learning. His talks were a model of how to speak about technical and difficult subjects to a mixed audience, making things clear without talking down to one’s listeners: “The Archimedean Point and the Liberal Arts,” Dynamical Chaos; some implications of a recent discovery,” “Formalism in Logic and Mathematics,” and “Homo Loquens from a biological standpoint”—that is just a sample of his lecture titles. Many are available in the bookstore and the library. Read one. You will be glad you did. For further information on Curtis Wilson, go to the St. John’s College website page “News and Publications.” A memorial service for Mr. Wilson will held be at St. John’s on September 30 at 10:30 a.m. in the Great Hall.
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Exploring Curtis Wilson’s Legacy for the Program Hayden Pendergrass
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A’14
n the winter of 1962, then-dean Curtis Wilson submitted to the Instruction Committee “An Unofficial Proposal Concerning the Program” to address an unintended consequence of the Program on upperclassmen: “Too often in senior year,” he wrote, “the work seems to take the aspect of a disagreeable chore which has unfortunately to be completed for the sake of a degree.” Confronting Great Books, he realized, can be a disheartening experience. “Too infrequently does the Program succeed in inducing a continuing process of independent investigation and thoughtful reflection, leading outward from the student’s natural and initial standpoint,” he wrote. Further, he wrote: The inevitable frustrations involved in confronting, one after another, great or important works which are never adequately understood, and the unavoidable distress involved in finding oneself, again and again, on uncertain ground— these effects appear to be insufficiently balanced by a positive sense of achievement and of independent, on-going inquiry. Mr. Wilson proposed a solution: biweekly meetings with a tutor “for the close reading and analysis of a text or of a series of texts, or the investigation of a problem,” which would replace one-quarter of regularly scheduled seminars in the last two years. Mr. Wilson considered the propsal a part of the College’s natural progression: I view the original rejection of the elective system at St. John’s not as in itself establishing a principle, but as a defiant call for new exploration in education. What the elective system endangers in many of its embodiments is the community and liberality of learning; but a non-elective system also tends to have serious defects, particularly insofar as it can hardly fail to present itself as the one right program of study, however frequent the warnings to the contrary. Like a natural Johnnie, Mr. Wilson framed his conclusion as a question: The question I am asking here is whether there is not a better balance of requirement and choice than we have so far achieved, one which would lead
the student beyond his freshman state of shock or enthusiasm or piety into a more profound assumption of responsibility for his own education as he, a modern, confronts the problems of modern thoughts. The committee added preceptorials to the Program in the spring of 1962. Jump forward 50 years: Has the student experience changed? How has this sustained, elected form of inquiry improved the College? What is the effect of an elective feature on the Program? Susan Paalman, who, as the current assistant dean, organizes each year’s preceptorial list, has found that students enjoy the unique opportunity. “I’ve never had a bad preceptorial. It’s almost always been full of students who are really excited to be doing something they choose only, and are really ready to dig into something a little deeper than they get the chance to in seminar.” Current dean Pamela Kraus values the enthusiasm coupled with the chance for sustained inquiry. “We do give many opportunities to students to concentrate, but not in a sustained way, in many aspects of the Program,” Kraus says. “The preceptorial can reinforce some of the strengths of the Program, both the speculative strengths, but also the detailed analytic strengths, in digging into the meat of a book and getting to the deepest levels of it.” Additionally, preceptorials are unique in allowing students to study non-Program texts. As a student, current Annapolis president Chris Nelson read Frege and Gauss; as President, he has led a preceptorial on morality in Japanese fiction. “[It] is another opportunity the preceptorial offers: either to go into greater depth with a particular text on the Program, or to take a step outside and see what it might look like to do the same thing with a book that’s much more unfamiliar,” he says. As for Mr. Wilson’s concern about finding the balance between an all-required curriculum and freedom of choice, President Nelson says the question has disappeared: “What I have heard is there’s a need for close reading, and there’s something about honing the skills in the liberal arts and the skills of reading that can be done in a preceptorial, and that can’t be nearly as well done in the other kinds of classes.”
The Gadfly
[ 07 ]
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/0#"#%&12 Sarah Meggison
I
t’s how you’re thrown into freshman chorus, terribly self-conscious about your own singing abilities or lack thereof, and then a few months later you’re singing “Sicut Cervus” alongside your classmates, as well as the rest of the Polity. It’s how you begin to join in during the chorus of some Irish drinking song during New Year’s until you know the whole thing by heart. It’s how you put everything you’ve got into the “Introitus” of Mozart’s Requiem at St. John’s Chorus and feel like a lightning bolt is going through your veins. That’s how it is for me, anyway. See, I consider music my first and truest love (it’s consensual and mutual, I promise). But my time at St. John’s thus far has seen a development and growth in that love. It’s obvious that music has a firm place at the school, but the extent of that musicality has made an incredibly profound impact on me. It’s one of the things to which I’ve attached myself, and one of the things that in turn makes me feel attached to St. John’s. Of course we are a talking college, and thus music and singing fit quite well with what we do here. Singing songs or playing music with or for others makes us part of a larger conversation. Several conversations, actually, between us and our listeners, us and the writers or original musicians of the song, us and ourselves. And an intricate and passionate community is formed. Freshman chorus, “Sicut Cervus” flash mobs, New Year’s/impromptu Quad-singing, playing piano by myself, St. John’s Chorus, sophomore music, and finding new bands to love through my friends have all shaped who I am quite a bit. I enjoy and appreciate a wider variety of music than I did before. I’ll sing in public now. I compose things for my music tutorial that I’m actually proud of. Perhaps most importantly, I have this thing with which I am hopelessly infatuated. There’s something fulfilling about chasing an insatiable passion. I’m aligning my soul with the divine or something like that, right? Cool.
[ 08 ]
The Gadfly
Living an Articulated Life
A’15
Eva Brann
W
Tutor
photo by Matt Denci A’15
hen the editors of the Gadfly gra- against “Awesome” with a freshman in ciously asked me to write some- a seminar I’d gotten very fond of—he thing for their Homecoming issue, this used to assist my elderly incompetence little homily came to mind. Not that our by finding our place in the book for alumni, our nurslings, need it. (For those me—was won, sort of, when he told me whose Latin lags behind their Greek, this fall that he’d be using “Glorious” in“alumni” are people who have taken “al- stead.) iment,” nourishment, from their school.) But upper-class students have gained They, we hope, need it less than most. I the articulateness that impresses visiwrote since I really wanted to articulate tors. It’s almost the opposite from talkwhat follows to myself, its very theme ativeness, which is practically de-linked being articulateness. from inner speech. Articulateness seems I want to claim (returning alumni and to me to have some articulable marks: present students are welcome to accost Descriptive precision replaces evalume on this when they see me on campus) ative vagueness, brisk clarity lengthy that sixty-six-and-two-thirds percent of maundering, so that saying your say the world’s despondency stems from doesn’t take ages. (My simile for talkword-poverty—not to speak of much of without-end is squeezing a tube of glue: its mayhem: think of Larry in Of Mice You’ve got quite enough out to do the and Men, or Cain, or job and then there’s anAjax, or the Cyclops, or other unneeded dribble Speak to yourself someone in your life. and yet another.) and illustrate your My theme here is But the main feature words with inner ordinary, prolonged, of articulate speech is unassuaged—and unpictures. Re-search, that it comes from the necessary—misery, the inside out: The world re-view, re-vision: mildly grey sort. I think pierces us with experire-live to have lived ences and we project that Socrates means at all. Like a Homeric them, transmogrified this grey misery when he says—not really “the being, live in similes. into ours, back into the unexamined life is not world. Which means worth living” but actually—“the un- that inner speech is the pivot. That’s searched-out life is not livable,” or sim- where things eventuate, take permanent ply, “not lived.” He’s saying that unless shape, and make meaning-fraught conyou lead a double life, once as just a hap- nections, or, to shift the sensory analogy, pening and a second time re-viewed as a resonate—each with all. Telling, you’re not all there; you’re a grey So here’s the homily: Speak to yourself shade, in Hades before your time. What and illustrate your words with inner piche says seems to me extensible into tures. Re-search, re-view, re-vision: reimagining; you can re-view and search live to have lived at all. Like a Homeric out in pictures as well as in words. It is being, live in similes: Try to see your aca sort of internal myth-making, in which tivities projected on a large likeness, as mere occurrences become Events. the campfires in the Trojan plain appear So our alumni are wandering around like stars in the cosmic vault. the campus meeting their ghosts, even To come down to earth: Get a thewhere new buildings block the venues of saurus, a dictionary of synonyms. Not, their past. How much happier a stay for Hermes help you, to find fancy alternathose who learned to articulate them- tives to plain language. But to remind selves to themselves and to their friends, you of the words available to you for to compose their speech, as my favorite picking the one that most precisely ardictionary (the Heritage) says, of “dis- ticulates your soul’s presentiments. tinct, meaningful words”! Warning label: This is a tendentious Freshmen often haven’t got enough of little preaching. Read, say the sayings of those yet. They revel in vague unmean- Zen masters, and you’ll be told the oping expectorations. (Last year’s battle posite—to achieve silence.
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