FYP News | Special Edition

SPECIAL EDITION

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The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.

REMEMBERING PROFESSOR ANGUS JOHNSTON

SPECIAL EDITION

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Editor: Dr. Susan Dodd Design: Co. & Co.

The Foundation Year Programme: in itself and for itself.

CONTENTS Front cover: “Triple Portrait of Angus” (James Doull, Angus Johnson, Robert Crouse). Jane Reagh, 2018. Commissioned by Neil Robertson.

Back cover: “Asher and Angus”, photo by Harriet Johnston (Angus’ hat was a gift from Pat Dixon).

1.

Angus’s Notes for the Final FYP Lecture, April 9, 2010

19.

Gary Thorne, King’s Chaplain, 2006–18: Never Say Goodbye

3.

Neil Robertson, fyp 1981–82: Eulogy for Angus Johnston

20.

Patricia Murphy, Ancient Mythology, 1986–87: The Aha Moments

7.

Katy Weatherly, fyp 2014–15: A Confession at Mersey River

21.

Mike Blackwood, fyp 2005–06: A Painting Fit for Angus

8.

Patrick Graham, fyp 1984–85: A Dangerous Person to Know

22.

Susan Dodd, fyp 1983–84: Remember…

9.

Naomi Blackwood, fyp 1996–97: Moment of Moments

23.

Bonita Shepherd, first ever Halifax Humanities student: Remembering Angus

24.

Henry Roper, lifelong colleague of Angus: Angus as Athlete

25.

Walter Kemp, former Director, King’s Chapel Choir: Angus as Musical Soul

10. Colin Starnes, King’s President, 1993–2003: Angus and the fullness of FYP 11.

Terra Bruhm, fyp 2002-03: Good education is painful

12.

Mary Lu Redden, former Director, Halifax Humanities: Angus Gathers the Students 26.

Daniel Brandes, fyp 1989–90: Angus’ Arts of Interruption

13.

Scott McDougall, Coordinator of Clemente Seminar: Kindred Spirits and Strangers

27.

Angus Johnson: Complaint from a Parent: email to Eli Diamond

14.

Timothy Blackwood, fyp 2005–06: Dylan Day

28.

The girls of Alexandra Hall Three East, 1983: Wondering Where the Papers Are

15.

Al Tuck, fyp 1985–86: A circle, drawn by Angus 29.

16.

Jesse Blackwood, fyp 2000–01: To My Mind

Mary Campbell, fyp 1983–84; Cape Breton Spectator: Illustration, Wondering Where the Papers Are

17.

Alex McLean, fyp 1992–93: For the Vision of the Dancers

30.

Colin Starnes, Dennis House, and the Haycock-Johnstons: Obituary

18.

Christopher Snook, fyp 1994–95: Everything Wakes Up

33.

Jesse Blackwood, fyp 2000–01: For the Love of the Faithful Departed

DEAR READER, This special edition of the FYP News is for us: everyone who benefited from the teaching and collegiality of Angus Johnston. That is to say, this is for anyone who has benefited in any way from the Foundation Year Programme, and the University of King’s College generally, since Angus joined the teaching staff early in FYP’s existence, in 1977 (and that would be after his beloved wife Sandra was a student in the first-ever FYP class).

The writings here are eclectic, and limited: many who loved and knew Angus best are not yet ready to write about him, if they ever will be.

A central document here is Angus’ legendary concluding FYP lecture from 2010, on “hands.” His notes include much that is not in the lecture, and his lecture included much that is not here. For instance, in the spoken version, Angus asked: “Do dolphins swim because they have tails, or do they have tails because they swim?”

But Angus would have hated such a “you had to be there” introduction to his notes. That he would have accepted our printing these notes for you, fragmentary and delightful as they are, is evidenced in his having handed them over to Janet Hathaway in the King’s Archives in the first place.

When he gave them over, he knew that one day we would ferret them out, share them, and try to figure them out as a group.

We begin with the first couple of paragraphs of Angus’ notes. Then we present the reflections of his students, friends, and colleagues, from over the years. Angus’ images and cryptic comments buoy us up in a stream that runs beneath our remembrances.

Godspeed, —Susan Dodd, Editor, FYP News

ANGUS JOHNSTON, FINAL FYP LECTURE, APRIL 9, 2010 Notes as Angus provided them to the Archives at the University of King’s College, Halifax

This is the final lecture of The Foundation Year Programme in 2009–10, the year that Professor Johnston retired from King’s. The actual lecture left some of this out and touched on things not in this text.

Angus dedicated this talk to the architect of the “new” academic building, Roy Wilwerth who Angus said: “made thought visible for all of us at King’s and with whom I spent an hour thinking on Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride—a central image for this talk.”

I am so pleased and honoured and see this as a first fruits for the students having completed the course and for me looking back on thirty-two years.

Thanks to Peggy Heller I have come to know many great books courses across North America—through the Association of Core Texts and Courses.

It has struck me that many courses either deny that the medieval leads from ancients to moderns, or want to encourage students to dwell in the medieval. It becomes then a touchstone for dogma: how one treats the second Section.

What Section do you think of when I use the term “secularity”—student response: Spinoza. Lately my reflection has turned to the Fourth section and the way in which some courses assume that secularity is opposed to the spiritual, underestimating what I am calling visible thought.

Aristotle comments on the problematic character of the human hand—a tool? The tool of all tools? Is the hand like the heart for him a turn of externality to will?

Heidegger makes what a hand is problematic. This is especially noteworthy as Hegel divides the history of the West into the dialectical understanding of the whole and the notion or begriff—the gripped (Miller trans. P.121–4).

The dialectical: This division hangs on two different notions of otherness.

The first recognizes the completeness of thought such that any form of incompleteness is not, in truth. This is the platonic problem and is best expressed in Plotinus’ notion of matter.

The notion: The second notion of otherness stems more from Aristotle and

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FYP – In itself and for itself

(CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS)

finds in the recognition of the objects of thought an otherness which has the unity and truth—the substance in Aristotle’s terms—to make the first principle clear. In the other as notion is the whole.

Whether one can take the other into thought should be one of the large questions remaining at the end of this course.

For Heidegger the hand, the handy, the present to hand stem from the always already which precedes thinking in the form of western metaphysics.

And human being, Dasein, is related to the hand in a way that is more primordial than biology or race. The truth of the hand allows one to think a human group—the Germans for instance—which is both particular and yet whose special character does not depend upon the biologist and racist policies of the National Socialists.

Derrida’s critique of Heidegger—an essay in Deconstruction and Philosophy—allows this as a profound point concerning humanity but makes problematic the relation to bodies as conceived in the European enlightenment—Heidegger allows a dogmatic moment concerning nature as a whole in marking off the hand and its relation to Dasein.

This could be interpreted to be about whether monkeys have thumbs and so on concerning other animals but following Hegel it seems to be an argument about things themselves, things more generally. To accept that the thumb is already always in a way which the tail is not, or the moon, seems to be adopting certain enlightenment distinctions dogmatically.

Perhaps so but that takes in the whole question especially of Hegel’s Phenomenology. I find myself just beginning to approach that. I understand you had an exhortation to make that attempt last week by visiting prof Russon.

I find art a way of approaching this central moment of western thought.

In this paper then I have accepted a hand—a series of gifts in art—in understanding the line between thought and its other. And i hope to share with you a few images concerning what early modern secular hands, especially, make clear about that question and take some images of that great friend of foundation year, Alex Colville, as engaging with this secular enlightenment. I hope in doing this to remind you and myself of what this course allows us, indeed demands of us all to do—to think in an ever richer context.

I hope this can be an enjoyable oral, the first fruits of a course like this.

[Editor’s Note: We have put the remainder of Angus’ final FYP lecture in sections along the bottom of each page in this booklet. The eccentric presentation is, of course, Angus’ own.

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

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EULOGY FOR ANGUS JOHNSTON NEIL ROBERTSON

For here the lover will turn, in his boundless love of wisdom, to gaze upon the vast ocean of beauty and, intent on this, he will give birth to countless beautiful ideas and speeches.

—Plato Symposium 210d2-5 In the very midst of life Angus Munroe Johnston left us.

It was so sudden that I know many of us were simply unable to get our minds around it. As I am sure many of you know, he had been out with friends the night of his death, listening to a musician he delighted in, whose career began here at King’s.

The day before, he had had a long conversation with his daughter Phoebe—and, after his evening of song, he watched a movie with his other beloved daughter Harriet. And of course always there was Sandra.

“In the midst of life, we are in death.” That last evening, in fact, Angus was talking about architecture, and he spoke of exactly this—the need for all of us to face mortality. What a College can hope for, or a life can hope for, he said, is “an odd hope”— that “in the midst of life…we are crafting also a beautiful ruin.” His family shared with me a letter Angus wrote as a young man from Germany, to his mother and uncle: “Last night I read a delightful story by Dylan Thomas about a boy and his grandfather who sets off periodically to be buried where he wants to be. He goes on foot and the village people always catch up and tell him he is not dead yet. That is what it is all about—we roam the world in order to get to the place we want to be buried.”

Angus found that place.

In his obituary we read these words: “He always said he was the happiest person he knew, and we believe this to be true.” In our grief on this Easter Monday,

Angus and Neil Robertson

I want to talk about just this: the happiness, the eudaimonia, the blessedness, of the life of Angus Johnston. In what did it consist? We could say in many things: in his family, in his deep friendships, in thought, in art, in teaching and reading, in his College, in his final work of Halifax Humanities, in the conversation of life.

All of this—and more—is true.

But to honour Angus, I want to try to put this more obscurely.

Ancient hands.

Ancient hands are not natural. Two thoughts come into play here: the first is the notion of Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics that early art is symbolic in the sense that it always points to a whole which is beyond itself.

It is never a reproduction of nature because of course there is no nature yet.

The second thought is that I hope that you have learned to avoid ‘subtraction stories’ as Charles Taylor puts it in A Secular Age p.22. (the same point is expressed in a different way in the introduction to Section Four in the Foundation Year Handbook)

He loved living thought, and thoughtful life: the life of dogs as much as the thought of gods…

The history of the west as 1. t he popping of a series of balloons 2. a s some balloons disappear others are discovered 3. there is one large balloon —AJ

(I did not use this image in the talk):

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FYP – In itself and for itself

Borrowing from Aristotle, and from faith, I want to say that Angus’s happiness arose from his recognition of what I will call “the actuality of grace.”

Grace, gratia, meaning both thanks and gift—both the gratitude itself, and that for which we are grateful.

much on the first page; with 15 minutes to go, we were at page 98. I was also co-ordinator of the section—I had invited this guy to give the lecture!

And then…and then, he completely departed from the text, and told us in a story, a story that had nothing to do with the novel, everything we needed to know to understand Northanger Abbey. The novel Last Monday, before the final lecture in the is about a seventeen-year-old—like so many of our Foundation Year Programme, I said just one thing students—trying to find out who she is as she faces about Angus to the last group of FYP students to the world. Angus recounted a time when he was know him in person—that he loved life and he in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium, waiting for a loved thought with a joy and gratitude unequaled. concert to begin, and a former student came along, He loved life in all its givenness, its immediacy, someone who had graduated and gone on to do its glowing presence; and he loved thought in its well. He sat down beside Angus, turned to him and deepest, most obscure, speculative freedom. simply asked, “I just want to know: what did you see in me?” And, as Angus said to the class, because he He loved living thought, and thoughtful life: the asked that question, in the way that he asked it, the life of dogs as much as the thought of gods—and question was answered. above all, those stranger beings between dogs and gods, both dog and god: we humans. And so he But this is not just a one-off thing. Continually loved stories: that mixing of life and thought in colleagues asked Angus, what did you see in me? which our lives become thought. And all of this I Or how did you see that in me? I can remember want to call his recognition of the actuality of grace. when I was a Junior Fellow in FYP and feeling pretty much out of my league, what it meant to me that Now one can speak of this actuality of grace in Angus saw something in a lecture I gave. And I do many ways: as the wonder that Aristotle tells us is remember thinking: what an excellent thought, the beginning of philosophy, in the philia of friend- I only wish I had had it. But Angus recognized ship, in the insight of faith, in what Hegel calls it, and was able to see in it “something rich and “the living good” of institutional life that meant strange.” This is the love of the beautiful, this actuso much to Angus. But here I am going to focus ality of grace that I am trying to describe in Angus. on one particular way of seeing this actuality of grace—in the love of the beautiful.

For Angus this love of the beautiful was a full-time occupation, and it was so multi-faceted. His love of Angus found, saw, and loved the beautiful. He art, his love of music—perhaps especially opera. loved the beautiful in his family and his friends, in His house is a kind of catch-all for this magnificent, strangers and acquaintances of a day. He loved the multi-dimensional love, as the strangest array of beautiful in the souls of his students—and even of beautiful things all sit together in splendid profusion. his colleagues. He saw all of them not as people to be taught or “administered,” but as fellow travelers His family was very long-suffering. You could come in the life of thought and wonder. in and there would be a branch or a rock or yet another piece of leather work he had picked up.

This year he gave a lecture in FYP on Jane Austen’s They told me that after his death they needed to Northanger Abbey—and, as Director, I can tell you find his wallet—and they actually found six wallets, it had all the marks of a disaster. The novel is 238 picked up for their workmanship from Value pages long, and by the break we were still pretty Village—but the one with his driver’s licence? No

The Egyptian and Mesopotamian hands point to a total reality, we would perhaps say including gods, nature, human, and whatever else there is. They indicate a place in the whole where it is not clear if these are simply human hands, and where the relation to the whole runs from the powerless to the point of the power of creation—in our two examples here. —AJ

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such luck. Jane Reagh Bruce-Robertson, told me what it could be. He endlessly called us simply to about the time Angus was faced with a dilemma: have the courage to be that actuality. he could only afford either to have a hole in the kitchen floor fixed, or to buy one of her paintings— We can speak about what his obituary recounts of which he already owned several. Well, you know so well, and all that he built—certainly the New where the money went.

Academic Building—but also, with Colin Starnes, our curriculum, the upper year programmes of But perhaps it was, as in the quotation I began Contemporary Studies, Early Modern Studies, and with from Plato, in “countless beautiful ideas and the History of Science and Technology. Certainly speeches” that Angus was most profligate. Angus many others had important roles, but it was the was famously obscure, and this is in a way true. clarity of Angus’s curricular vision, the beautiful But one always had the sense that the cause of in that vision, that made it into a whole. the obscurity was not in him, but in us. He gave us wonderful metaphors and images: the problem was The beginning of that vision was earlier than his somehow in seeing the fullness of these thoughts, vice-presidency. It was there in the Foundation Year catching hold of the beauty he discerned. I think Programme under his direction—though again part of the challenge is that Angus sought to be with others, always with others. That vision finds both present to “the things themselves” and to see its final form in Halifax Humanities. I recommend in those things visibly before us all that is invisible to you the chapter he contributed to Susan Dodd’s in that visibility. collection for Halifax Humanities, Each Book A Drum. There Angus quotes one of his teachers, Eli Diamond told me that he had sent Angus some Robert Crouse: “Teaching is not showing students chapters from his thesis before it was finished, and what sun they should orbit, but rather what sun they met at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia where they are orbiting.” Angus expands and develops there was a special exhibit of Egyptian, Greek, and this image: “Our work may bring out the “center” Roman art. As they went around the gallery and for students but we do not turn them towards it. looked at each work, Angus brought forth from these We leave that to them.” Dennis House wrote to me, works a marvellous commentary on Eli’s thinking “Angus has a wonderful way of leading one to the about Aristotle on the soul. This was the demand of door but leaving you to find your own way in.” This Angus: to think what is before us in its beauty and is just what I mean by Angus’ recognition of the reality, without dissolving it into abstractions. actuality, not just the possibility or potentiality of grace. Our task as teachers is to do nothing more Angus always perceived the beautiful that exists than illuminate what has been given, the beauty of within finite time. He saw it in family and friends, that given, and the gratitude for the gift. in the Lake Centre Canoe Club, in a game of golf, in watching the World Cup with friends, in orga- In my time at King’s, I have heard Angus lecture nizing a concert trip, in going to New York City to on an astonishing array of topics, always with wonsee operas. derful insight and freshness of vision, but I think above all I have heard him lecture most often on But I especially want to speak of his love of the Homer’s Odyssey. For me there was always a sense beautiful in institutional life, above all, in King’s, that he was revealing himself more directly here. his college. Angus was a beloved and generous Angus delighted in the delight that Athena felt in friend, a teacher of staggering gifts, “Mentor”— Odysseus—“Two of a kind are we,” she tells him. not in the contemporary sense, but as the goddess Athena in human form, guiding this College to be (Continued next page)

What I want to recall from your thinking through Greek texts and images is simply that in Plato the elements of this whole are first clearly distinguished in the West.

The platonic cave allows you to think for the first time of the natural, the visible moving aspect of the real, the

caused rather than the cause. And by looking to nature one can think the supernatural (this is by no means a subtraction story: a new sense of the divine and the human accompany this nature, we are coming to see more of the true balloon)—nature reveals the whole so art can call forth the whole

…their remarkable coming together of mind and “monde” becomes the truth of social life.

by the most beautiful portraits of nature and especially human nature.

Hands are for the first time hands and reveal the highest things—not as symbols of power or lack of power but as hands themselves—this is true in Hegel’s view especially in Greek sculpture. –AJ

Marathon boy—self contemplation of hands. References to Antigone and Oedipus—human hands but are they not divine deeds?

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FYP – In itself and for itself

(Continued from previous)

A week ago, as a small tribute to Angus before the final lecture in Foundation Year Programme, we played Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young.” Angus told me he listened to this song while working in seclusion on his doctoral dissertation, and that it always spoke to him of the spirit of ancient Greece.

But it surely speaks of Angus’s spirit also—forever young. And perhaps it can also speak to us, even as our hearts are broken:

But I always felt that there was also something at work in the relationship of Odysseus to Penelope that spoke to him. The story of the Odyssey is the story of a home-coming, the story of travelling in the wide world, but also of being at home: the circle and the center, as Angus put it. This is Angus: he was always at home—I never knew anyone so at home in his own skin—and always in the circle, always active and developing. He was in both places May God bless and keep you always, at once.

May your wishes all come true, May you always do for others This is the actuality of grace—he was the happiest And let others do for you. person he knew. This is the beauty he saw and May you build a ladder to the stars loved in his family, among his friends, in the stu- And climb on every rung, [—And, when he read it, dents he taught and who taught him to see things Angus always emphasized that “every”.] in new ways, with his colleagues, and with those May you stay forever young, who helped build worlds of wonder at King’s and Forever young, forever young, in Halifax Humanities.

May you stay forever young.

I know too that he knew himself to have lived a blessed life.

❧

Angus, George (the collie mix), and Sandra

The root of my thoughts today came from a passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology about reading palms.

(Observing reason; physiognomy section).

Hegel argues that we become aware of an inner and an outer—motivation and deed let’s say. Our first observation is that the two fall apart and yet should be one.

What each of you is—your hands just as they are—and as Sophocles puts it, your whole life lived. What we are it seems cannot be either. But we observe that we do not simply leave things at that state.

For what we are externally—the hand here—is not the whole and yet is

external—not internal and yet (the second and difficult step in Hegel’s argument here) this external is an internal for the external whole—of fate. The hand becomes a middle term. Q p 189 so the hand becomes one of the key ways we signify that we are both internal and the whole of our externality.

Third we recognize that there is this relation of external moments which embody the internal and this recognition becomes alive in the moments: the hand becomes the individual reflection on the action as a whole which is our life or our fate—they are the “expression in the sense of a

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

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reflection on the actual expression” (Miller translation of the Phenomenology p.190).

Hands reveal the person. They and the person know that, so that hands become authoritative akin to speech and thought—I raise my hand in lecture for attention; for Asher my border collie and he drops to the ground—the peace sign from a school bus in Lunenberg county—if I hold up a finger—the koan tale of the zen master who cut the students finger off—learning “loser” from my daughters. Still another level when they speak as hands. —AJ

A Confession at Mersey River KATY WEATHERLY Water be still I speak oh soul to you Like rushing river an indistinguishable roar

Splash be sad Why do you leap at your freedom?

The expense of your freedom was the loss of the stone I loved

Bend of bank be straight My tongue carves scars upon your rock But, the marks I cannot read

Surface be silent With closed eyes I do not see the river I do not see the mud But, your sound still it provokes me

Edge be vanished Eager feet jump landing in the absence of ground defiance

Water be given Your bubbling taunts me with the quench of my thirst

Rapids be touched My hands are curious What lies beneath your incessant sound

Canoe be sturdy I wish to drink But, the rapids they are many

Current be slow You are mine to hold Let my love wash, as you do, the muddy depths

Island be sunken Your mud it forks the river Each path my own reflection

Water Be Mine Hands draw droplets from the deep But, when they emerge I see My hands they grasp at nothing

Waves be gentle My paddle longs to bend the rivers weight But, the river it will not bend

Light be fractured Break at water’s surface shatter as I have shattered Let your rainbows entertain me

Tears be received Wiping salt from eye Dipping muddy hand in water like My paddle is forgotten

Reflection be released I see not myself though I wandered here The water is stained with mud I throw a stone to rid the river’s murkiness

The water says be still It takes my paddle It tips my canoe My weight it rests in the Mersey river

❧ Katy wrote this in response to Neil Robertson’s Augustine talks during a King’s Chapel retreat and it was a comfort to Angus and Sandra when Sandra was in hospital with a terrible fever.

The natural hands of the Greeks gave way to the middle stage—No longer Aristotle’s tool of all tools this hand is clearly about thought and its object and their possible unity. —AJ

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FYP – In itself and for itself

A DANGEROUS PERSON TO KNOW PATRICK GRAHAM Angus mentored a lot of students. But it still surprises me that decades after he unsettled me in my first oral exam, he mentored me in the arts of parenting. Of course, it helped that he was so fond of my wife. Naomi had been one of the only graduates to write a thesis under him, perhaps the only one. She really delighted him.

His parental wisdom was no less obscure, or wonderful, than what he gave his students.

He referenced Wagner and Dylan (unexpected songs, of course, like All The Tired Horses—because ‘how’s I suppose to get any ridin’ done...’) and his advice was geared to joy and fear. Angus advised me to stare into my daughter’s eyes after she was born, a Valky r ie reference no doubt. You knew how much love and awe he had for his wife and daughters.

Angus advised me to stare into my daughter’s eyes after she was born…

You knew how much love and awe he had for his wife and daughters.

He loved the idea of ‘One Day s’, what we ca l l t he stories we tell our daughter.

Draw n to his beard and laugh, and of course his dog Asher’s frisbee catching, Audrey ca st A ng us in a leading role in her two-year old imagination. There was something about Angus that seemed at home there.

Still, his pedagogical charisma was double edged, warm but not as cuddly as the beard might suggest. He could find the most hardnosed insight in the most sentimental line.

As an undergraduate, I went to see him one time about a tragedy class he was teaching. I had some questions. Was I trying to impress him— one tried do that— or was I just

confused? Maybe both. I’m not sure I asked much. Angus led me down an intellectual path into the gloom. He was like a charismatic gnome. I followed. Then he seemed to vanish and I was looking around, far more confused than when I arrived. I still remember the feeling, the jungly shadows of the mind, and no Angus. But I left there with the unshakeable sense that whatever my confusion, there as underlying connection to the text however difficult. It was reassuring in an unreassuring way.

Another time I went to him for advice. He didn’t give it. For all the poetry and sweetness he didn’t let you off the hook. You were alone with your choices. A Socratic trick learned at Delphi. A dangerous person to know.

Later, again thanks to Naomi, we became friends. We hung out in art galleries.

Or wandered around and talked, often waiting for Naomi or watching Audrey play. Angus and de Kooning in New York, and Hart mann, and Rot hko. He saw things in paintings you would not have.

Representations of ‘unseen things,’ and movements or processes or dialectic, call it what you will.

One day out near Sambro we watched as Naomi and one of her brothers went swimming in the cold water below us. It was sunny. Angus talked about love and bad self-consciousness in Jane Austen. Tears were coming to his eyes as he described how the sisters loved each other. Looking out across the water it seemed to me as if Angus had revealed a glimpse of those unseen things, some hidden structure. It was a strange feeling. Later in an email, he called the day “a Greek helmet under a Trojan sun.” ❧

Moment of moments NAOMI BLACKWOOD

on a rock perched above the sea you observed through tears friendship the sister-gift where silence speaks it’s all understood to be forgiven into the sea below I slipped out swimming my brother and laughter for this reason warmer than air more telling than truth a fragment dances the whole sound of the story begins I am a song made buoyant for all your glistening ❧

The Romanesque hand is both symbolic and part of the narrative—poked by an angel (Autun).

—AJ

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Naomi Blackwood and Angus at the Lincoln Centre, N.Y.C. for Wagner.

Hildesheim. The hands of Adam and Eve are denying their internality and making it undeniable. —AJ

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FYP – In itself and for itself

[The general tutorial] hasn’t always been there and we only have it because of Angus.

Angus with bus tickets at the Halifax Humanities 101 graduation

ANGUS AND THE FULLNESS OF FYP COLIN STARNES There are all sorts of things about the Foundation Year Programme that are great and wonderful but I think that the greatest and most wonderful of all is the general tutorial. It hasn’t always been there and we only have it because of Angus.

For the first ten years or so the Foundation Year Programme was simply an experimental course in the Dalhousie Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. If you were admissible to Dalhousie you could sign up for it just as you could for any other first

$1 books at the Strand, Photo by Georgia Sachs, FYP 2016–17

year course. For many years, while F Y P was establishing a track record, King’s was mostly concerned with the academic “rigor” of its new programme. It had to be because we needed to ward of the criticism that FYP had no depth and was only providing students with “cocktail-party chatter.” We worked hard to get rigor and we got it just fine. But Angus alone realized that something was still missing. All by himself, with a quietly unswerving will, he created the general tutorial, showed us how it worked and brought it into being.

week’s tutorial but that little number is where the wonder starts. It shows you that if you are there, you are only there because you want to be. For you, today, this conversation is the most important, the most interesting, and the most exciting thing on earth and there the rigorous distinctions that are so fundamental to the university and the classroom simply dissolve The general tutorial opened a window—for students and teachers alike—and gave us a glimpse of what true teaching and true learning was like.

There is really nothing quite like it. At the end of each week anyone who has been at the lectures or gone to regular tutorials—students, teachers or visitors can get together, on a completely voluntary basis, to ask anything of anyone about any part of what’s gone on. Maybe a fifth of the students and professors will go to any particular

After he retired Angus took this marvellous insight and with the same unwavering will gave it a much wider and freer application in the Halifax Humanities Society. Angus showed us how to bring grace to necessity. ❧

Life is becoming both symbolic and narrative.

Huizinga’s description of cutting up an apple.

—AJ

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GOOD EDUCATION IS PAINFUL. THAT’S WHY IT’S A GROUP ACTIVITY TERRA BRUHM I sat on the library steps with my blue guitar in my lap. It was mid-October and the quad was blanketed in red, yellow and brown leaves. I was lost in thought, trying to think of a new sentence to add to my song.

All the leaves are brown Midterms on the way Baffled by these books Only got one day If I’m not successful They’re hiring at The Bay I took a small sip of my herbal tea.

Kyle must be dreaming If he thinks I’ll get an A A hearty chortle broke my concentration. I looked over my shoulder and found Socrates towering over me.

“I think we need to talk,” he said, and began walking down the library steps toward the New Academic Building. It was around 7:00 p.m. and the sun was setting in the west.

He must have wandered out of the library.

Was he angry that I wrote FYP Director Kyle Fraser’s name into my song? Was I about to be expelled for treason?

He sat down in his wooden desk chair and closed his eyes for several minutes. I helped myself to a cushy chair on the opposite side of his desk and waited for him to start. Just when I was certain he had fallen asleep, he finally spoke.

friends and let them enrich you by sharing your fears and frustrations. That’s how you grow as a scholar.”

“I don’t know where to start,” I confessed.

“Well,” he chuckled. “Why don’t we start by finishing that song about Kyle?”

“What is this all about?”

“The song?” I asked.

“All of the songs.”

I had been changing the words to popular songs for weeks. Having come from an improv background, I learned to use comedy to vent my insecurities. I would perform these song on the library steps at night when the quad was calm and empty.

Little did I know, Angus Johnston was in the library, listening.

“I’m from a small town in New Brunswick,” I began. “I didn’t go to a private school. Plato was a putty I played with as a child. I don’t understand what any of these philosophers are saying. I don’t know if I belong here.”

“Are you coming?” he asked.

He sat in silence for several second, nodding slowly as he processed my words.

I stood up and shuffled behind him. Like a majestic, harvest moon Virgil, Angus Johnston led me to his sanctuary.

“Did you come here to be good as you are, or did you come to grow into the best you can be?”

Angus’ office was a delightful mixture of chaos and wonder. Piles of books and papers were tucked around pieces of art. He had a small collection of Sodexo water glasses stashed in various nooks and crannies and the air was perfumed by old books and dry oil paint. If Brian Froud were to design a professor’s office for a Jim Henson production, Angus Johnston’s office would have been the result.

I pondered his words. School had always come easy to me and I had always been the best at the things I was good at.

“Good education is painful,” he added.

“And that’s why it’s a group activity. This is not a competition. It’s an evolutionary process and it can be enjoyable if you learn to put your ego away and accept there are things you don’t know yet. Enrich your

Over the span of an hour, we finished the song. It got me through my mid-term, which got me through the first semester. Armed with a new outlook on education, I asked more questions in tutorial and learned that everyone was struggling in their own way.

Strong friendships blossomed as we tried to wrap our heads around Hegel and Hume.

To this day, there is still a good chunk of us who hold firm that Pocahontas was the Pre-Socratic who said, “You can never step in the same river twice.”

“Did you come here to be good as you are, or did you come to grow into the best you can be?”

Angus continued to be my educational guide. Acting as a shining example of what a scholar from a Maritime family can achieve, he pushed me to continue to grow by reading and studying things that scared me every day. That’s ultimately what inspired me to declare a combined honours degree in Journalism and Early Modern Studies, and what drove me to become a degree advisor. If it weren’t for Angus Johnston, I wouldn’t be who I am today. ❧

Hands become related to the possibility of incarnation— they are the unity of the individual and the cosmic. —AJ

[ 11 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

ANGUS GATHERS THE STUDENTS MARY LU REDDEN When I was hired to be director of Halifax Humanities 101 in the late summer of 2006, I looked at the curriculum (which is modelled on FYP) and concluded that in my own time as a student and teacher I had read about 1/3 of the texts listed. I was excited as I contemplated that a large part of my job would be to study the class material along with the students. What a wonderful perk!

Angus was their bard, able to tell them stories that might just deeply affect their lives.

For some reason, I had never up to that point attempted to read The Odyssey. I had the notion that somehow it was too difficult a book to tackle on one’s own and so it was always on my “to read” list but never checked off.

So here, as part of my job was my chance to f inally read the great book with the guidance of a very capable professor.

that first class, Angus got us to the point in the book where Odysseus washes up on the island of the Phaecians: A man in a distant field, no hearthfires near, will hide a fresh brand in his bed of embers to keep a spark alive for the next day; so in the leaves Odysseus hid himself, while over him Athena showered sleep that his distress should end, and soon, soon.

In quiet sleep she sealed his cherished eyes.

Angus ended the class by just mentioning in a tone of awe and respect how much that image meant to him. Then our (and

my) first class on Homer’s Odyssey was over.

We would pick up from that image on Thursday. But the students weren’t ready to leave it there. A group of them crowded around Angus, wanting him to tell them more about his beloved Homeric friends. A few sat on the floor at his feet and the image was beautiful. Angus was their bard, able to tell them stories that might just deeply affect their lives.

That was the moment when I knew that Halifax Humanities was very special and that being its director would become a great labour of love. ❧

I will never forget that first class early on in the course, that Angus Johnston lead on The Odyssey. He just sat in front of our class and began talking about Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus and a host of others as if they were his neighbours whom he had been observing with interest for years. He had no notes, just an old battered copy of the Odyssey and a small piece of artwork whose significance he would explain as the class unfolded.

Angus told the class about the strength of Penelope, whom I had heard described by some as “a typical wife in the background, pat ient ly w a it ing for t he w ander ing, unfaithful husband ”. A ng us admired Penelope and saw in her the only “ f it partner” for the clever, brave Odysseus. In Kathleen Higney and Angus photo by Kathleen Higney (Halifax Humanities and Clemente Seminar)

There are three miracles going on in this portrait of Saint Francis. The stigmata themselves. A narrative of symbolic and yet real hands. And the birth of the natural in Giotto Ancient, medieval and early modern hands—our three steps?

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 12 ]

So what then: a new nature a new sign and a new reflection? The enlightenment, the contemporary and what is to come?

Antonin Artaud: culture in action culture growing within us like a new organ —AJ

KINDRED SPIRITS AND STRANGERS SCOTT MACDOUGALL In many ways we were kindred spirits, in many ways strangers.

Baseball was a mutual passion. As players we were ardent minor leaguers, as spectators ardent fanatics. We romanced the names from our pasts — Red Schoendienst and Carl Furillo; Mantle and Maris; Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Vada Pinson. I had once played on the grand old diamond adjacent to the MacDonald bridge. Angus marvelled at that.

But I could not arouse his interest in horseracing, neither in thoroughbreds or in my beloved standardbreds. He knew that Secretariat and Seattle Slew had won the triple crown but had never heard of Riva Ridge. For Angus rich horse associations ran though Harriet. My relative indifference to English football dismayed him equally.

I knew the names but could not close my eyes and visualize the balletic moves of Pele and Ronaldo. (Angus’s perfect sojourn — two World Cup weeks in Berlin, alternating soccer with Wagner.)

Similarly with philosophy. There were wonderful tracts that kindled our conversational spirits. Mostly they were on the border where aesthetics touches ethics. We sharpened each other’s sense of representation and narrative. He listened attentively to my questioning of Arthur Danto; I helped him get clearer on Rothko and Twombly.

But I never won him over to Nehamas’s take on beauty, perhaps because Nehamas’s Plato was not Angus’s Plato. But he did have the patience to read Rosalind Krauss and made it clear that my gift of Passages in

Angus and Scott, photo Kathleen Higney

Modern Sculpture was one of his cherished possessions.

But there were divides, if not divisiveness.

He tried but could not help me fathom much of Heidegger. I was forever perplexed by how alien he found Wittgenstein.

Hannah Arendt proved a welcome middle ground. He loved to hear my account of how I first met her in Mount Allison’s periodical section. He could picture the chair and my absorption in her New Yorker reporting of the Eichmann trial.

Mou nt A l l ison w a s a not her bond ing element f rom ou r pa st s. My Mu r r ay Tolmie was his Cyril Welsh. Angus knew what the Mary Mellish Collection signified, he knew the marsh-redeemed soccer field behind St. Paul’s Anglican Church, he knew the Colville mural in the gymnasium. He knew long walks out on the railway tracks, their evocations of vicissitude and joy.

Class of ‘65, Class of ‘71 — Angus and I first met in 1983. We grew old together, strangers and brothers. ❧

Bosch has god think creation in the upper left. —AJ

[ 13 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

DYLAN DAY TIMOTHY BLACKWOOD Bob Dylan Day is a day that many love and remember.

It’s hard to summarize how the day came to be, but like with most things Angus was a part of, he was the radiant center, he was the heart of it.

It was 8 years ago and an unprecedented year of music on K ing’s Campus. I had help start a music society called The King’s Concert Collective (KCC) which brought hundreds of King’s students together every week to perform concerts, open mic, and promote non-profits that helped marginalized communities in Halifax.

I had heard that Angus would be giving the final F Y P lecture on Bob Dylan and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for students to perform Bob Dylan and for them to learn about the Halifax Humanities 101 program, the students of which Angus magnificently championed.

I did not know the Bob Dylan lecture would be Angus’ final lecture until I met with him.

I was shocked. Angus was going to retire in just ten days and nothing had been planned

to recognize him. But in that conversation with Angus the question entered my mind: why not create a whole day of Bob Dylan to honor Angus and to celebrate the musician he loved so much?

So with the help of many students (in particular my friend Ted Williams and my brother Mike), we began announcing the forthcoming Bob Dylan Day. We promoted the lecture and an entire day of events all throughout the campus. We made sign up sheets to audition to perform in the ward-

When Angus finally took the lectern it felt like a rock concert, students were spilling into the isles and even out the doors. room. Students got busy practicing their acts as we rented microphones, speakers, and lights, and placed 4 foot size movie posters of the event around K ing’s and then we made hundreds of Bob Dylan Day T-shirts.

On the morning of March 3, 2009, hundreds of students woke to No Direction Home playing in Prince Hall. Hundreds more poured into the F Y P lecture hall wearing their Bob Dylan Day T-shirts. When Angus finally took the lectern it felt like a rock concert, students were spilling into the isles and even out the doors. Angus’s words on Dylan equaled the depth of his lectures on Odysseus coming home to Penelope or Beatrice leading Dante to paradise. When the lecture came to a close there was a group of students and professors standing

in front of the massive crowd with instruments in hand. Written on the chalk board suspended above our heads was the chorus: “I see my light come shining/From the west down to the east/Any day now, any day now/I shall be released.” Everyone rose and sang and the song overflowed the aisles and poured out into the halls.

Later that day, Dylan was everywhere. No Direction Home was on the screen and Angus gave the intro. Dylan even made it into King’s Chapel mid-day prayer. And that night the wardroom was packed with students, faculty, and alumni performing Dylan’s songs with Angus giving anecdotes in between acts. And there we paid tribute to the organization he loved so much, Halifax Humanities 101.

But the moment that stood out to me was at the end of the year at the graduation dinner. I was asked to be the mace bearer, to wear the squire cap and carry the college mace. But because I had fallen short by one credit, I was not able to graduate in time for Encaenia. As I followed the bagpiper into Prince Hall for the graduation dinner, I was thinking that if I had spent less time I organizing concerts and events I too would be graduating with everyone there. Then Angus took the lectern and said: “Here at King’s there is a kind of possible that you just don’t find anywhere else and for me the moment that spoke most to that was Bob Dylan Day. And for that I’d like to thank Tim Blackwood.”

Everyone stood up and clapped. But I have to set the record straight. It was not me they had to thank, it was you, Angus, because you saw the possible in me. And in that grace I see your light shining, from the west down to the east. You have been released into the Eternal light. ❧

If you take away the hand all of the natural becomes the ‘point of contact’ or perhaps not any of it? —AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 14 ]

A CIRCLE, DRAWN BY ANGUS AL TUCK The first thing Angus Johnston did for me was give me a job. And on that job he gave me a lot of rope. When the job was over, he thanked me with the very timely gift of a Django Reinhart record, Hot Club of Jazz, Paris 1936. He told me Django was the greatest guitarist, and that he did it with only three good fingers.

Angus began that year with a lecture on the Odyssey and ended it with a lecture on Bob Dylan, which served first to inform my sensibility and then validate my interest.

Through the years that followed, Angus would not be a stranger at my shows. Not uncommonly he was there, and I knew I would have to try and sing properly to someone who knew. Not often enough did I reciprocate this attention with attendance at his appearances, but when I did, I realized again this is someone who knows. He spoke of Cleopatra like he’d seen her last week.

I knew I would have to try and sing properly to someone who knew.

Al Tuck and Angus in the Quad, photo by Tyler Messick, FYP 1998–99

I’m glad Dr. Johnston lived to hear the news of Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize, as that served to validate his interest too, but I’m sad Dylan dallied so long in the delivery of his acceptance speech, and Angus most likely didn’t get to hear it.

Bob wrapped up his speech with a full-scale meditation on the plot of the Odyssey, completing for me at least a circle first drawn by Angus back in 1984.

Dr. Johnston always seemed quite certain of who was the best at anything. His verdict

near the end of his life was still that, among singers, Billie Holiday had to be the “smartest”. If we had had the chance to have dinner at Edna’s, like we planned, I might have brought up Nina Simone, as I’d never heard Angus’ take on her.

There are a lot of such things I’m curious about, so I guess I’ll have to go try and find another oracle like Angus.

Wish me luck with that, dear reader. ❧

Nature, an inner dynamism and the power of the divine have come together in art in truly self conscious and perhaps more simply conscious hands. —AJ

[ 15 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

To my mind JESSE BLACKWOOD

Time Is just the beginning The first perspective On the nature of things Already forgotten Like beauty, A flower in Spring A bell ringing from Some unseen tower Or a walk along the ocean With an old friend A way of remembering That life is not a loop of days Constantly repeating But an image of truth To begin Living. ❧

Angus reflecting

Caravaggio was asked why the horse’s ass and he answered because that is God’s light. When asked the students found it difficult to say what his hands are showing—the key to the painting. Jane Reagh Bruce-Robertson has argued that this is the first painting of empty space in the history of the west.

—AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 16 ]

FOR THE VISION OF THE DANCERS ALEX MCLEAN, ZUPPA THEATRE Like so many, I was very saddened to learn of Angus Johnston’s unexpected death in April. He had been my teacher nearly twenty-five years ago and, though our paths only periodically crossed in the subsequent decades, I was always better for it when they did.

In 1992 I was the quintessential F YP day student, navigating the transition from a public school in which Barometer Rising and a Shakespearean tragedy might be the reading for a year, to a curriculum that covered an equivalent page count in a week. In FYP I was very aware of being outschooled, out-styled and outclassed by my come-from-away classmates. Fortunately, by whatever formula determines these things, Angus was my tutor two or three times in that school year. I lucked out with all of my tutors, but I was particularly grateful for the generosity that Angus exuded. I still cringe when I think of things I said and semi-believed at the time, but Angus was ever willing to hear a person out. He was one of those teachers who knew how to leave space for silence, to patiently nod his head and mull over a proposition or question, and then meticulously respond. As a learned person, he conveyed delight in the learning of others. Without taking refuge in pomposity or condescension he conversed with us and, in so doing, brought us a little closer to the works he cherished.

This was all taking place during the last great era of the Toronto Blue Jays. October 1992 was when the Jays won the World Series for the first time, and I followed the events as closely as anything on the FYP reading list. Angus’ description of baseball as ‘a very Greek game’ helped me to reconcile my parallel lives. When we bumped into each

…some spirit of Antiquity persisted for Angus in the present. other over the decades to follow, I noticed that some spirit of Antiquity persisted for Angus in the present. My Zuppa Theatre colleagues and I consulted him while creating Pop-Up Love Party and it was apparent that his reverence for Plato infused his appraisal of contemporary politics, as well as his appreciation of artists like Bob Dylan and Gillian Welch. In fact, I last communicated with Angus while expressing regrets for missing the ‘Bob Dylan: American Love Songs’ evening that he hosted with the singer/songwriter Al Tuck. In his response, he raved about Tuck’s performance.

As a former student, I appreciated the interest he took in my artistic work, even if he disapproved of certain aesthetic choices.

Because I work in a medium partly devoted to storytelling, I took his input seriously, for Angus was a consummate storyteller.

Some of my favorite recollections from FYP are of his lectures on Homer. I think my first pseudo-reading of the Iliad was almost

totally fruitless, and then Angus’ recounting of the story was a kind of revelation. I am still moved when I recall his description of the meeting, at the poem’s end, between Achilles and Priam. I took even more, I think, from his exegesis of Book 18, in which the rings of Achilles’ shield are described. If I’m not mistaken, he placed a considerable emphasis on the floor of dancing men and women, enveloped by the raging ocean of the shield’s outer rim. As I remember it, Angus’ conviction was that those dancers on the ocean’s edge embodied something essential to the project of civilization. This I took to heart.

There are many conversations I regret not having with Angus Johnston, and I wish I had sought him out more often. For the kindness, the silence, the provocations and that vision of the dancers, I thank him very much. ❧

Narcissus and Descartes. —AJ

[ 17 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

NEVER SAY GOODBYE GARY THORNE

Dr Angus Johnston: King’s, FYP, Halifax Humanities 101, and the Clemente Seminar.

Everything wakes up

The following described the day of Angus’ retirement from King’s:

CHRISTOPHER SNOOK

“Alumni Hall is packed. Students have poured into the hall’s two radial staircases, arms hooked around neighbour’s knees, notebooks closed and some squirreled away. Last minute arrivals are leaning against pillars, eyes peering around corners and bodies tucked politely, not to block anyone’s view. Faculty and staff populate the extra chairs in the back, and alumni are scattered amongst the tight crowd. And Bob Dylan’s music is filling up any gap left in the room. …

The crowd belts out,

There is a grave conspiracy between sleep and death — those little deaths each night that we call slumber, and those long sleeps at the end of days that we call death.

So when she asked if the black dragonfly on the edge of the civic fountain was dead or only sleeping (in much the same way she might have asked if the waving-man were drowning or the drowning-man waving) I could recall only this — from years of sleep-like-death overtaking me each night and death-like-sleep claiming those I love from the stillborn child at dawn and the vigil at bedsides and the quick, violent deaths and the slow painful losses — When together we looked at the dragonfly dark against the edge of the fountain and she asked still a child is it dead or only sleeping?

I recalled only this: Everything wakes up. ❧

I see my light coming shining, from the west unto the east, Any day now, any day now, I shall be released.”1 Dr. Angus Johnston began in 1977 as a junior fellow with F YP, and later became the programme’s director between 1984 and 1988. He then took on the role of Vice President of the College until 2001, and was FYP Director from 2005-8.

Johnston is credited with a teaching method that favours asking questions and opening students to further thinking over supplying clear explanations and absolute answers.

He did not see pupils as empty vessels in which w isdom and knowledge can be poured. Rather, as one of his colleagues once explained: “Everyone in the room is equally full. It is about coming to clarity, explication or articulation of what is already there. Truth and wisdom are always there.

The question is to get access to that.”

This approach to teaching would give Johnston heroic status among the students in Halifax Humanities 101 and the Clemente Seminar. He carried with him an endearing

What is the subject matter of these hands? —AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 18 ]

Angus with the King’s flag

1960s hippy mentality that rejected the 1950s culture of “usefulness” with a commitment to a profound and contemplative ‘uselessness.’ Thus Angus was able to give HH 101 students what is generally denied to them: moments of freedom that are ‘useless’ in that the students come to know that their beauty and usefulness depends only upon their being true to who they are.

On the day his retirement from K ing’s, Angus quoted from Dylan’s ‘Never Say Goodbye’: My dreams are made of iron and steel, with a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground, Angus concluded, “That’s been so real for me. Thirty-two years in the Foundation Year Programme has been a little bit like a day in paradise.”

Indeed. Now Angus knows an eternal FYP. ❧ Reprinted from the bulletin for Angus’ funeral in the King’s Chapel.

“Asher and Angus.” Anne Barrett, 2017. On loan to the FYP Office from Susan Dodd.

1

From an article written on Angus’ retirement from King’s, Nadine LaRoche, Tidings, 2009.

A great tutorial or the worst? If one could become one with the world itself—not blind, not other—if one could unite thinking and extension. Not that the older sense of the divine has been subtracted—again to use Taylor’s image— but a new world or a new substantiality has become evident. —AJ

[ 19 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

THE AHA MOMENTS PATRICIA MURPHY A ng us Johnston was the teacher who inspired the most “Ah Ha!” moments of my student experience. According to Professor Phillip Carey, this “A h Ha!” moment Augustine of Hippo equates to entering, for those heartbreakingly few milliseconds, the Mind of God. That flash of Truth, of Wisdom that does not linger in this life— although we live in hope that it will last an Eternity in the next.

The actuality of potentiality qua potentiality.

even when I think I understand some of the premises.

“For knowledge also has its own good measure, if that in it which puffs up, or is wont to puff up, is conquered by love of eternal things, which does not puff up, but, as we know, edifies.

Certainly, without knowledge the virtues themselves, by which one lives rightly, cannot be possessed, by which this miserable life may be so governed, that we may attain to that eternal life which is truly blessed.

That said, these few lines (Section VII.1.17) made me think of Angus: “We must, therefore, know both the cause and effect, and the relation between them. But do we pretend to be acquainted with the nature of the human soul and the nature of an idea, or the aptitude of the one to produce the other? This is a real creation; a production of something out of nothing: Which implies a power so great, that it may seem, at first sight, beyond the reach of any being, less than infinite.”

The New Standard Revised Version of the Holy Bible translates Paul’s letter: 1 Corinthians 8:1 as “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up…”

It seems to me that Angus, who has proven against wishes and expectations, to belong to that set of beings “less than infinite”, was able regularly to produce “something out of nothing”. In the classroom for me, and in the world, for those with whom he travelled, he seemed to demonstrate a close “acquaintance with the nature of the human soul and the nature of an idea.”

I can only imagine what it would be like to be his good friend, his comrade, as you have been. How many times, in an art gallery, driving the road to the swimming hole, a museum, a staff meeting, an opera house, a lecture hall at King’s College, enjoying a shared dinner at Angus and Sandra’s home, a live-band café did you experience the Mind of God with Angus over the years?

More, he inspired his students to think about these things. In his classroom, he made the head hurt with the ideas he teased out of us, the connections he led us to recognize. Then, often, there followed the “Ah Ha! I get it! I understand!!” Those moments were glorious, and precious, and all too rare for me. Yet I feel certain these were not so rare for Angus.

I’ve been trying to read (and partially understand) David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and I realise that when I get to the end of a sentence, and sometimes a paragraph, I understand the gist of it. But when I get to the end of a section (like Section IV Of Probability) I have no bloody idea what conclusion he’s argued;

Having done some reading in Augustine’s Confessions, as well as taken in another Phillip Carey lecture on him (Augustine; Philosopher and Saint) I wanted to find what Augustine said about Wisdom and Divine Love. So, like any teacher well taught by her teenage students…I trolled the Web.

What I read here forms in my mind a beautifully crafted reflection on Angus Johnson and what he taught by his life. He seemed astoundingly “ordinary” and modest. He did not “puff up”; his vast store of knowledge, gleaned in a lifetime of reading, analyzing, digesting, debating, creating, was “conquered by love of eternal things”.

And in each exchange with family, friend, colleague, student, I expect it is fair to say that edification generally ensued. Those whose joy it was to love Angus were built up by the love he shared so generously.

Even without the help of the internet I can now paraphrase Augustine to have reminded us that those whom we love “in God” we never lose. That grief comes from loving what is temporal, but solace comes from knowing that our friend we love in God is united to us, and to Him, in His eternal love. He is not lost to us. ❧

Isaac and Rebekah? 1666. My first thoughts on this work owe a good deal to Detlef Stefan retired from the German department.

I want to compare four major images from the age of reason—the conversion of Saint Paul, the Jewish bride, Vermeer’s woman with the balance and Goya’s massacre of May 3,1808, with a few images of the twentieth century.

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

Augustine of Hippo’s On the Trinity (XII, 14):

Student response was that the man’s hands indicated possession, care—they go from the outward protection to the intimately inward—the woman’s hands go to the deeper inwardness they argued of childbirth and the other hand indicated uncertainty concerning a free spiritual unity. —AJ

[ 20 ]

A PAINTING FIT FOR ANGUS MIKE BLACKWOOD I first met Canadian landscape artist John Hartman when he came to talk in Dr. Angus Johnston’s class “The Nature of Time.”

Angus introduced Hartman and he presented the idea of what it was like to “see from above” –– to open one’s mind to new ways of looking at an idea, a point of view that characterizes Hartman’s work. When Hartman spoke about time and place in his paintings I noticed that his work was able to connect with the viewer in the same way that Johnston could convey ideas for this class.

A year later, I was contemplating, The Record, The K ing’s 2008 – 09 yearbook. A s the editor, I wanted to celebrate the hundredth year anniversary of the student publication; I hoped to honor Angus Johnston’s career at King’s (this was the year of his retirement); and I wanted to catch the vision and the beauty that King’s inspires. I thought it would be wonderful to have one of Hartman’s paintings on the cover. So I sent Hartman an email, and he agreed to allow me to use one of his paintings published in his book CITIES. John also invited me to an art show he was holding at Studio 21 on the Halifax waterfront where some of his CITIES paintings were being sold.

So my twin brother Tim and I went to the art show. There we ran into King’s President Bill Barker. He was surprised to see us and said, “What are you doing here?” Perhaps wondering why two King’s students were in the midst of oil paintings that were being purchased for thousands of dollars. Or perhaps he thought we had come for the fine wine and cheese. But instead we were there with the hopes of commissioning John Hartman to do a painting of King’s.

Little did Bill Barker know that in less than 12 hours Tim and I would meet John in the King’s Quad with his easel. There Hartman would ask me to take him into the highest room on campus. We went to

“Angus Johnston Lectures on Bob Dylan over King’s College.” John Hartman, 2009.

He continued the lecture repeating the same words slower and tenderly, “our heart is restless until it rests in thee.”

Rogues Roust and climbed out the window onto the roof of the A&A Building. Where Hartman would rest on the Cupola looking down on King’s Quad. Then he would sit and paint Angus from that place lecturing on Bob Dylan.

John Hartman created two other watercolor paintings of the campus that day. I used these paintings and illustrations throughout the yearbook dedicated to Angus. I wanted desperately to buy the painting of Angus lecturing for Angus. Being broke I asked the college to buy it for him. Fortunately they were able to.

Three years pr ior while lectur ing on Confessions Angus quoted Augustine saying: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” He continued the lecture repeating the same words slower and tenderly, “our heart is restless until it rests in thee.”

I can still hear his voice repeat those words.

May our hearts too find that rest. ❧

Now the hand connecting the globe of the stars was a human hand. (the astronomer) —AJ

[ 21 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

REMEMBER… SUSAN DODD “Remember, I did not give you any advice.”

After he retired from King’s, Angus took to ending our conversations with this claim.

I’d wrack my brains: what didn’t he say that I should be able to figure out?

dow n a st reet in New York Cit y. He felt himself walking in step with someone, he turned and realized that he was strolling along with Tom Cruise. Only then did he notice the film crew.

“I’m not supposed to be here, am I?” Angus said to Tom Cruise.

I didn’t understand Angus. Maybe nobody did.

Nobody, that is, except 18 year olds, artists, strangers, dogs, cats, guinea pigs, and donkeys.

“No. No. I don’t suppose you are,” Cruise replied with a big smile, and Angus ambled off the set.

During my undergraduate degree, I did a reading course on Sophocles with Angus. His amazing wife, Sandra, had a family cottage near my home in Ber wick. Through that summer, the birds and trees of the South Mountain of the Annapolis Valley heard our conversation about every Sophoclean tragedy that remains, as we ambled along the shady back roads around Lake George.

Untitled photo

by Angus

Angus was my main tutor in FYP. Angus and his wife Sandra came to the FYP Halloween party as Odysseus and Penelope, and they brought their beautiful collie mix, George.

We students were thrilled…until we realized that if Angus and Sandra were Odysseus and Penelope, that meant George was Argos, the faithful old dog who waits for his master’s return only to recognize him even in his disguise, thump his tail happily, and die right then of an over-filled heart.

Angus didn’t give advice but he did live in a world filled with gods, and to hang out with Angus was to spend time in an enchanted world of benevolent intelligences and happy coincidences. One day, Angus was walking

When I came back for the job competition for the F YP tutor position, I had been away from King’s for a decade, and I had fallen out of touch w ith ever ybody there. The King’s boardroom table was ringed, shoulder-to-shoulder with my former professors.

One Oxbridge scholar sniffed (as it seemed) that he would very much like to know how a sociological doctoral study about a coal mine disaster in rural Nova Scotia could possibly prepare me to teach in F YP. Without having even raised his eyes to greet me, I heard a low chuckle from Angus’ downturned beard, and I was off.

When I became his Associate Director of FYP for the first time, he took me to Chebucto Head to play fetch with his border collie, Lady, and brief me about my role. He said, “The grounds for extension are laid out clearly in the Handbook. And that’s O.K. That’s fine.

I just… I just… I just would hate for us to rule out heartbreak as grounds for extension.

The weighing of maat in the Egyptian book of the dead; the last judgement on the wall; the empty scales. there was little student response partly because I think the actual scales were hard to see.

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There will be heartbreak. This programme demands such thoughts of us.”

When the folk group the Be Good Tanyas played at the Evolve Festival in Antigonish, Angus insisted on showing up three hours early, while all the young festival goers were sleeping off the all nighter in their tents.

Angus planted his lawn chair front and centre and dispatched me to get him a burger, fries and root beer. By the time I got back, the lawn around Angus was strewn with King’s students swapping concert yarns with Angus. We drove a few of them home, and when they insisted on asking questions about philosophy, Angus nodded silently a couple of times and then turned up the volume on his new Be Good Tanyas c.d.

Angus ridiculed snobbery and guarded against what he saw as false economies of value: intellectual vanity was a slippery slope into a total loss of self. When Laura Penny gave him a copy of her best-selling book, he threw it in a high arc into a waste bin with a resounding crash. When I gave him a copy of my book, he nodded and said, “I will never open this book.” When Neil and I got a book contract with the University of Toronto Press, Angus said, “I don’t believe in it.” “The contract?” I asked. “No. The book. I don’t believe it will happen.” Of course, he fished Laura’s book out and kept it stacked by his reading chair for reference along with Hegel, and Romanesque art until it was as cigar infused as the rest, he did read mine, and he commented on drafts of the Hegel book.

Many of Angus’ closest friends and colleagues learned of his death just as we sat down to hear the King’s chapel choir sing Saint John’s Passion. There we sat, in public, stunned to the core, with the music and words of Good Friday coursing through us. We had Easter week to do our best to gather ourselves before the funeral.

Who times their death with such flair?

the simple letting be of these wonderful hands expresses our thinking care of space, time, and mass— our unity with them. —AJ

REMEMBERING ANGUS BONITA SHEPHERD

One last image: at the opera in New York, I turned to see Angus opening a big pirate’s spy glass to watch the stage. At the intermission, he pulled a duffle bag out from under his chair and showed me two old pairs of binoculars, and an old camera alongside his spyglass. As he explained:

If ever a man was entitled to be called “hero”, in my eyes, it was Angus. He fit that description per fectly, for me. He was always willing to help me if he could.

Personal problems, finances, filling out applications, getting to interviews, going out having fun and grabbing a bite to eat.

He was amazing. Shopping. He was a great guy.

“I just like to see things through many lenses.”

Angus didn’t give advice…or at least, none that any of us could understand, but he lived such an extraordinarily wonder-filled life that he invited everyone he met to see the world anew, and to rejoice. ❧

I loved the way when he was with one daughter he’d tell the other one she was his favourite, I loved that. Sometimes you couldn’t tell when he was joking and when he wasn’t.

We used to go on Saturdays to the Opera.

During one of the operas one day, I asked him what mead was, and he said, “Hang on I’ll tell you during the intermission.” So, I had to sit there and wait for the intermission. He made me wait while they used the word over and over and over.

always wished he could take us to the opera in New York.

If you thought you knew a topic well, he would still challenge you on it. He’d always tease you. He taught a lot of the professors who are there now…

I remember one night, late, we were at McDonalds, and I was trying to explain to him why I loved the course so much, and I just couldn’t do it. I just love that course, and I can’t explain why. I try to explain to people, and I just can’t.

He was a great man and I’m lucky to have had him in my life. He was very strong. His inner strength was so strong that he gave you confidence just by being around him.

He had such inner confidence that he made me stronger. He was so open and he shared his openness with others. ❧

One of my favourite things would be to go to the opera and then go to get something to eat. He’d do that with the whole class sometimes. He was very big hearted, very generous.

Ed. Neil Robertson and I dedicate this book to Dr. Johntson, and our students and teachers in the Foundation Year Programme. This book includes essays by Susan Dodd, Neil Robertson, Daniel Brandes, and Ken Kierans. The cover is a painting

by John Hartman, “The Narrows”.

He always wanted me to be reading. He’d push me to learn. And you could ask him all kinds of questions.

I don’t remember when I met him, it just felt like I knew him forever. He just blended into your heart and stayed. One day he arrived in your heart and it just felt like he’d always been there.

When I tried to read his obituary I just couldn’t do it, I was blinded by my tears.

Angus always loved opera and he loved introducing us to opera. I liked it here at Park Lane because we could understand what was going on with the subtitles. He Georgia Sachs, Shari Clarke, Angus, Laura Penny

Students argued that the thought in these hands was of a common humanity. (bravo) —AJ

[ 23 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

ANGUS AS ATHLETE HENRY ROPER Angus had more diverse interests than any person I have known. “Interests” is not the right word; “passions” or “loves” would be more appropriate. When visiting New York he would buy cheap tickets giving the holder the dubious privilege of standing during performances (most operas are long) at the Metropolitan. Afterwards, none the worse for wear, he would go to a jazz club to hear a favourite performer. Probably prior to the opera he had attended a play or visited one or more galleries—you get the idea of Angus’ idea of a day in New York.

But I digress. I told Susan Dodd I would write about Angus as athlete, for in his youth he was an excellent soccer player. I can’t recall whether it was at school or Mount

Allison, where he played for the university team, that he was known as “magic feet” Johnston. In or around 1981 the tutors organized a softball game (this only happened once). Angus was the star. I can see him in my mind’s eye hitting the ball hard down the third base line and tearing around the bases; even then he was somewhat bulky but he could really move.

Angus and I both joined FYP in 1977 and had adjacent offices in the basement of Alexandra Hall. It was a long time since I had read either classical philosophy (or any philosophy) and literature. Among my happiest memories of K ing’s are my discussions with Angus, which were really tutorials which enabled me to cope with my

Angus, Panda, Pi, and Asher

Giacometti. —AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 24 ]

own tutorials in sections 1 and 2. After our discussions we would play ping pong on a table set up in the laundry room along the corridor from our offices. We had legendary battles and many laughs.

What I learned from Angus stood me in good stead for the rest of my years teaching in FYP and I shall always be grateful to him for the trouble he took to give me a (very) basic classical education. But Angus always believed that FYP is or should be as much about the education of the staff as well as the students, and that both staff and students participate in a common enterprise.

Although he is no longer with us I hope that his vision will continue to animate the programme to which he gave so much. ❧

ANGUS, A GREAT MUSICAL SOUL WALTER KEMP

Now his spirit remains to enwrap all who are associated with the college, on campus and in community outreach, with his sincere, simple humanity.

Angus first came to my attention through our daughter Dora, whom he turned on to Classical mythology and ancient worlds during her K ing’s undergraduate days.

Her admiration for him was great, as, it turned out, was his for her lovely solo voice in Chapel Choir. I am convinced that his lectures helped shape her career choice for museology and editing of Archeology publications at Cambridge. Learning of his passion for opera, when I became Artistic Director of Opera Nova Scotia I reached out to him when forming my Board of Directors.

His willing response, and faithful, imaginative contribution during his term of service were the firm support I needed to energize the Association. Together we created an annual Study Day, preparatory to the ONS Spring Production. For Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurdice he delivered a lucid exposition of the Orpheus figure and music. For Mozart’s Idomeneo he pulled together a session on Minoan Crete. I brought in the local Greek folk dance troupe, and he ended the day lovingly narrating an aerial overflight on video of his favorite Greek islands. We quickly became Saturday morning breakfast buddies, after my radio show chugging out in his car to the Esquire Restaurant on the Bedford Highway to share light thoughts on opera and lyrics from Baez to the Beatles

while searching for the elusive Platonic ideal of runny poached eggs. I always apologized for disappointing him in that a lack of adequate theatre space prevented us from staging his favorite L’elisir d’amore. Still a prized desk souvenir is the cigarette lighter he brought me from the Berlin Opera: “some Magic Fire” from Wagner’s homeland. My warmest memory of Angus, the keenly perceptive and compassionate academic colleague was the day when, already overstressed, I was chairing a certain King’s Committee, became unfortunately petulant and stamped out in tired frustration. It was Chapel Thursday, and after Service there was Angus, walking up the aisle to me with a brown NSLC bag. “I thought you needed something like this”, he whispered as he handed me the bag, and then he gave me a blessing which I would come to know as his highest accolade to a friend; “You are a great soul”. And how remarkable, that unknowingly he had picked the Kemps’ favorite Bergerac!

At his retirement Encaenia, Angus was wrapped in a King’s f lag. Now his spirit remains to enwrap all who are associated with the college, on campus and in community outreach, with his sincere, simple humanity. How happy to be at Elysian rest and hear the Great Soul of all Music. ❧

These hands are forming the truest notes of the twentieth century. —AJ

[ 25 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

ANGUS’ ARTS OF INTERRUPTION (EVEN OF THE SUPERBOWL) DANIEL BRANDES I suppose that any personal recollection of time spent with Angus Johnston must begin with the overriding fact of his joyfulness, and how infectious it was for anyone lucky enough to spend an hour, a day, a week, or, in my case, many years with him. One of the many points that struck me as exactly right in Neil’s wonderful eulogy for Angus was his recollection that Angus was always the happiest person in any room—and that he (Angus) knew it. What a very rare gift that was—not only the joy in life, which seemed to radiate from him, but his awareness of it, and his gratitude for it.

I am sure that for those of us who came to know Angus first as a teacher (and here I include myself, as he was my main tutor in FYP), it will be tempting to focus almost exclusively on what a brilliant and inspiring teacher he was. Indeed, so gifted was Angus in the classroom (so unhurried and generous with his insights, so patient and humane and sly and profound) that his example in this arena risks crowding out everything else. This would be a great shame, for Angus was much more than an incomparable teacher.

For instance, he was also—and I count myself lucky to have discovered this early in my time back at King’s—an exemplary football fan.

The twinkle in his eye (always accompanied by a slow, pensive nod) betrayed him. He delighted in my impatience…

To clar if y, I am not speak ing here of European football, a life-sapping exercise in nil-nillery that is commonly approved by sniffling scholars; on the contrary, I am refer r ing to t he Nort h A mer ican game, whose rougher and more visceral pleasures have regularly elicited the scorn

of scholars. In this, as in so much else, Angus was the exception. Although he did, for reasons passing understanding, also enjoy soccer, he had a deep and enduring appreciation for the new world variation of the game. I loved this about him. Not only because we shared this decidedly unfashionable taste (and any judgment of taste shared by Angus had the effect of affirming and elevating it), but because it offered the pretext for an annual ritual that began shortly after I returned to King’s in 2004: watching (or rather, failing to watch) the Superbowl together at Angus’s place.

I cannot say with certainty that we ever managed to watch a game from beginning to end. Because Angus had a PVR system, he was able to pause the game whenever it suited him… and it very often suited him.

For although Angus loved the game and was genuinely interested in its outcome, he was much more interested in all the tiny details surrounding the game—an individual player’s origin story, the hardships he had had to overcome to get to the big leagues, the tell-tale signs of his body language (which, Angus would argue, betrayed an aloofness that threatened team unity, or hinted at a tendency to hot-dog it, or suggested a fluidity and athleticism that did not show up in the player’s statistics). These seemingly extrinsic details were, to Angus’ mind (as he liked to say), all essential to a full appreciation of the game. This did not come as a surprise to me. As a reader and scholar, Angus was always attentive to the tiny, overlooked details of a text, inviting them to cast unsuspected light on the larger work; and as a football fan, I discovered, he was just as sensitive to what escaped the notice of less discriminating, more pedestrian viewers.

Both he and I acknowledged that I belonged

in this second group. My fandom was a pretty low-level affair—it was partisan and results-oriented. And in those first few years, I found Angus’s liberal use of the pause function… exasperating. Especially if I had a strong rooting interest in one of the teams playing, I would sometimes wonder whether it was absolutely necessary—say, with 15 seconds remaining in the half and my team threatening to score and take a decisive lead—to freeze the game, halt the proceedings, in order to consider whether the full potentiality of our third-string running back was being actualized in the formations arranged by his coach. I should note here that Angus was inclined to introduce Aristotelian categories in his assessment of the game: he loathed the elitist conceit that prevents some academics from attending to popular forms of culture with care and curiosity, and he had a regal disdain for the philistine distinction between high and low culture. It was one of the paradoxical—but absolutely characteristic—effects of Angus’s thoroughly democratizing spirit that he wound up referring a good tackle or an effective play-call to De Anima or the Poetics.

In any case, he would bring all of his lear ning— from Bob D ylan to t he Phenomenolog y —to bear on the matter at hand. He was, of course, unfailingly insight ful. A ng us cast light whenever he spoke. At the time, though, I was less impressed by his insight than I was exquisitely pained by it. What was wrong with this madman?! This was the Superbowl, the final game of the year, toward which the entire season had been leading, and we were frozen for a half hour on a Tostitos commercial, debating signs of the dominance of the vegetative soul in a slow-moving linebacker.

Looking back, I wonder whether I ever contemplated seizing the converter and

Enlightenment hands are turned to a more primordial subject, Colville’s call is similar in some ways to Heidegger, our hands can think a true subject matter if it allows us. —AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 26 ]

returning us to the game. Perhaps. Even though I was a guest in the home of the man who had, in his reading of Homer (and by his own example) taught me more about the meaning of hospitality than anyone outside my own family, I must have been tempted. I knew—again, from Angus— that education and suffering were deeply intertwined, but was it necessary to rehearse this fact on Superbowl Sunday? This must sound like ingratitude from an unappreciative student. But please consider: Angus’ wide-ranging mid-game observations were not simply the disinterested reflections of a supreme educator. The twinkle in his eye (always accompanied by a slow, pensive nod) betrayed him. He delighted in my impatience, my temporary indifference to the larger questions, and he made no effort to hide his delight while holding forth on the modes of potentiality. This side of Angus—let’s call it his impish or rascally side—was essential to the man, and it might be the thing I miss most of all. In time, I came to understand that I would not know the final score of the game until I got home. But this was a very small price to pay for the pleasures of such company.

I might one day forget his thoughts on the balletic powers of his favorite wide receivers (although I have not yet). But every year, on the day of the championship game, I will think of Angus and his arts of interruption. I will remember the twinkle and the pensive nod that marked the dawning of a new observation, the start of a new conversation. I will remember, above all, the sovereign indifference to the boorish game-clock from which Angus—a scholar of time—had absolutely liberated himself.

He was a consummate fan who neither knew nor cared about the score. He saw better than anyone what was worth seeing. Man, I loved him. ❧

Phoebe Johnston (FYP 2005-06) “playing statue” during a day at the museum with her dad. Photo

by Angus.

Complaint from a Parent: Email to Eli Diamond lecture was shin ing thou ght and i hea rd that the aristophanes of a fyper thou gh i underst and ent wondrous. as a former par encouraged to read outrageous that the students were forced/ urer adm itted he cou ld not lect passages - passages that the com fort ably read aloud!

to increase futu re enrollment this i take to be yet another ploy child is not in the prog ram me but i am just glad that my darling s! und abo when such corr uption is it true that the lecturer actu the second half ?

ally wore an ancient pha llus for

hru mpff ff —an gus

The student’s strong response was to stop—elements of the Romanesque symbolic narrative. What is necessary and what is at stake? Here she shares the uncertainty of the Jewish bride but with the overwhelming power of her gesture—perhaps what the young—you young persons—have to put together.

—AJ

[ 27 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

Wondering Where the Papers Are By the girls of Alexandra Hall Three East, 1983 (with apologies to Bruce Cockburn)

Sun’s up, uuh huh, looks okay FYP survives into another day And I’m thinking about eternity Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me I had another dream about lions at the door They weren’t half as frightening as they were before But I’m thinking about eternity Some kind of ecstasy got a hold on me…

And I’m wondering where the papers are Wondering where the papers are Yes, I’m wondering where the papers are… ❧

A few of the students in the class knew this man and there were brief discussions of going home to the valley and what he meant to them. When asked why he waves the most articulate student said that she did not know—a very fine answer in my view. —AJ

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

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“Wondering Where the Papers Are”, Mary Campbell, 2017.

I ended with the thought that we have only begun to understand the thoughts and the matters that our hands may be able to make visible but that we can know that at stake are deeply spiritual issues.

Any simplistic opposition between the secular and the religious is a lie. —AJ

[ 29 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

JOH NSTON, A NGUS M U N ROE — Halifax, Nova Scotia, died peacefully at home on Sunday, April 9th, 2017. Angus is survived by his wife Sandra Haycock, his daughters, Harriet and Phoebe, his sister, Margibel (Wilson) Jones and numerous nieces, nephews and members of the extended family. He is also survived by his beloved Asher, the family border collie.

Although Angus was born in Montreal, Quebec, the Cape Breton blood that he received from his parents, Munroe and Sarah (MacDonald), and his beloved Unc defined his character.

Angus received his primary and secondary education in Dartmouth where his mother taught mathematics at Dartmouth High School. Angus’ post-secondary education began at Mount Allison where he received his BA (Honours Philosophy) in 1970.

In order to further develop his interest in Continental Philosophy, he went to Heidelberg University, where he audited German language classes and attended lectures on Kant and Heidegger in 1970–71. As a result of his study, Angus determined that he must go back to the Greeks. During the summer of 1972, in a rundown farm house in Lunenburg County, which he bought with a friend, Dennis House, Angus rapidly advanced in his knowledge of the Greek language and in the fall began his graduate studies in the MA program in the Dalhousie Classics Department. Having completed his MA in 1974, he continued on to receive his PhD in the fall of 1985.

His thirty-two year association with the Universit y of K ing’s College began in September 1977 A ngus was appointed Junior Fellow in the Foundation Year Programme (FYP). Angus was promoted to

Associate Director of FYP in 1981 and continued in this role until he became Director (1984–88). In 1988 President Marion Fry appointed Angus Vice-President. His term as Vice-President lasted 12 years, one of the longest, if not the longest, vice presidential terms in King’s history. His final term appointment, made by President Colin Starnes, was from 1995 –2000. In 2003, Angus began teaching in the History of Science and Technology (HOST) and, in the following year, was appointed Adjunct Professor of Graduate Studies in the Dalhousie Classics Department. During this time he served two terms on the Board of the Atlantic School of Theology. Angus continued on teaching in the Foundation Year Programme year after year until his retirement in 2009. But before he retired, he once again took on the challenge of being Director of F YP (2005–09). Angus stands out as one of the most influential and devoted people to the outstanding success of the Foundation Year Programme.

During Colin Starnes’ presidency, Angus worked closely with his dear friend, architect Roy Willwerth, on the design and construction of the New Academic Building.

The project was for Angus a labour of love, whether it was fund raising or down to the most detailed consideration of the colour of paint for each room.

On April 3, 2009, Angus gave the Final F Y P lecture. A lecture on Bob Dylan, which turned out to be much more than a lecture. “Oh, the glory of an Angus lecture,” a student commented. It became an event, a celebration of students and faculty for a man who embodied the best in the life and spirit of King’s College.

Angus was instrumental in taking the FYP to the outside world. In October 2005, with the cooperation of the city’s universities, the Halifax North Memorial Library and the Saint George’s Friends of Clemente Society led by organizer Rev. Gary Thorne, Angus helped launch an eight-month pilot project called Halifax Humanities 101.

Since then 110 students have graduated from the course, which is similar in content to the King’s Foundation Year Programme and many continue on in the seminar programme. Humanities 101 is offered to Haligonians living on low incomes. Angus was passionate about his involvement in this programme, both in teaching and administration from its inception until his death.

Angus and Dennis House

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

[ 30 ]

The list of topics that Angus taught or published on runs from the ancient world to the contemporary with all the steps in between.

His interests encompassed the whole history of philosophy, poetry, art and architecture.

The teachers who influenced him most profoundly were Professors Cyril Welch, James Doull and Robert Crouse. He was Doull’s true successor both in the breadth of his knowledge and in its depth and originality.

Angus, as a collector of paintings and sculptures, might reasonably be thought of as out of control. All manner of art from the ancient to the contemporary from the

primitive to the most refined found its way into his house. He would f ly off to New York to sit through 16 hours of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and with equal passion go to an Amelia Curran concert. When the World Cup was in Berlin, Angus was there and when the Blue Jays were in the World Series he was watching. He could see the sun poking through the clouds where others only saw the clouds. Where Plato viewed our earthly domain as a falling away from the pure forms of beauty and truth, Angus, like his friend Aristotle, saw this world positively as the displaying and showing forth of the realm of eternal verities and beauty. Angus

had the finest mind of his generation and the kindest of hearts but above all he was a compass pointing ever to the good in all things.

Angus and Sandra’s 40th wedding anniversary, would have taken place this coming June. Angus used to say that ‘to the good, the good will come.’ If that statement is tested by their experience, it is proven true.

Harriet came and then Phoebe and again their beloved collies demand a mention, George, Lady, Queen, and now Asher. He always said he was the happiest person he knew, and we believe this to be true. ❧

Angus, Sandra, Phoebe, Harriet

[ 31 ]

FYP – In itself and for itself

IMAGES USED IN ANGUS’S NOTES 3. Cave of Hands, Argentina. c 7300 BCE. 4. Left: Votive Statues, Mesopotamia. c 2900–2350 BCE. Right: Egyptian Royal Stela. c 1279–1213 BCE. 5. Marathon Boy, Athens. c 340–330 BCE. 6. Mourning Athena, Athens. c 460 BCE. 7. Christ as Antiphonetes, “the guarantor,” Greece. c 1350.

8. A ngel Appears to the Three Magi in a Dream, Autun. Gislebertus c 1125-1135.

9. The Expulsion, Hildesheim Cathedral Door. c 1015.

10. Creation. Illuminated Manuscript. c 1220–1230.

Girl with Doves. Funeral Stele c 440-430 BCE. Reproduction from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Acquired for FYP by Angus in 2006.

11. Creation. Bartolo di Fredi. c 1356.

12. Stigmatization of St Francis, Giotto. c 1325.

13. G arden of Earthly Delights (Exterior Shutters), Hieronymous Bosch c 1480–1490.

14. David, Michaelangelo. c 1501.

ANGUS JOHNSTON BIBLIOGRAPHY “A Commentary on the Meno” (M.A. Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1974) “A Commentary on the First Two Books of Aristotle’s Physics” (PhD. Thesis, Dalhousie University, 1986) “Response to Eva Kushner” in Kathleen Jaeger (ed.) The Idea of the University: 1789-1989 (Halifax, 1990) 54-7.

15. Left: Genesis (detail) Michaelangelo. 1508–12.

Right: Mona Lisa (detail). c 1503.

16. Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, Caravaggio. 1601.

17. Narcissus, Caravaggio. c 1599.

18. Left: Calling of Matthew, Caravaggio. c 1601.

Right: Incredulity of Saint Thomas. c 1601.

19. Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus, Caravaggio. 1601.

“Natural Science and Christian Teaching” in Susan Harris (ed.) Replenish the Earth (Charlottetown, 1991) 61-71.

“Response to Dr. House’s Paper” in Susan Harris (ed.)

Christian Anthropology: The Trinitarian Theology of Man (Charlottetown, 1997) 141-6.

20. Jewish Bride, Vermeer. c 1667.

21. Left: Geographer, Vermeer. c 1668.

Right: Astronomer, Vermeer. c 1668.

22. Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer. c 1662.

“The Origin of Constitutions in the Republic” in David G. Peddle and Neil G. Robertson Philosophy and Freedom: The Legacy of James Doull (Toronto, 2003) 73-82.

23. Massacre of May 3, 1808, Goya. 1814.

24. Caught Hand, Giacometti. 1932.

“The Simple Bodies as Unities of Quantity and Quality in Aristotle’s On Generation and Corruption” in Michael Treschow, Willemien Otten and Walter Hannam (eds.)

Divine Creation in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Thought: Essays Presented to the Rev’d Dr Robert Crouse” (Leiden, 2007) 73-84.

“Earl Shorris: Sophos and Agape in Halifax Humanities” in Susan Dodd et al. (eds.) Each Book a Drum: Ten Years of Halifax Humanities (Halifax, 2015) 171-80.

FYP News – Remembering Angus Johnston

25. L eft: Billie Holiday Centre: Card Players, Cezanne. 1894.

Right: Billie Holiday, Herman Leonard. 1949.

26. Prize Cow, Alex Colville. 1977.

27. Stop For Cows, Alex Colville. 1989.

28. West Brooklyn Road, Alex Colville. 1967.

[ 32 ]

For the Love of the Faithful Departed, May Light Perpetual Shine Upon Them JESSE BLACKWOOD

How Can your night Be my day?

Your day’s end My morning?

Do the corners fold Up from the center And the lines of every circle Form a square?

Does sunlight vanishing In the treetops Search the heavy soil and roots Blossoming in springs of darkness?

One and one Is not a sum Of perfect numbers Or compounded parts Found in double But an infinite expression Of the universal truth.

There is no double No part of part No half of whole No sum or single Mine or other Before and later Further—higher.

Not many dividing Obscuring or extoling To make all distance, Differentiation, and dimension Exist in one Unspeaking love. ❧

Angus and Asher

“It is not possible for a good man to have a bad dog.”—AJ