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photo by Matt Denci A’15

In an era where generational changes are happening

every few years, academia has not escaped unscathed: The whirlwind of innovation stemming from the computer and the Internet has crept into how we learn. Inevitably, St. John’s has found itself at odds with this rapid shift towards online education. How do we compete in a world where educational resources better conform to our schedules, our locations, and our budgets? What should we do?

It’s a di!cult question, especially since the St. John’s Program, perhaps uniquely anymore, requires the brick-and-mortar college to fulfill its aims.

Where with most institutions the education adheres to the classroom, St. John’s classrooms provoke the discussion, but it thrives elsewhere—everywhere.

If we take this for granted, let us imagine an alternative St. John’s: Year 2112, seminars and tutorials conducted by sophisticated hologram technology. (I’m trying to be generous, here.) During the day, you reside in Kansas City, MO, but in the evening you dissect the Critique of Pure Reason with two tutors and fourteen other students, all physically elsewhere. When the tutors nods to signal the end of the class, everyone logs o" and disappears.

I can’t speak for everyone, but such a bleak scenario unnerves me. How many wonderful moments have we experienced on the walk back to the Quad or the Co"ee Shop? How many times have we knocked on doors, peered into the fishbowl, or marched with determination through the Co"ee Shop seeking human contact and intellectual companionship? How about our intramurals, our choruses, our dances? Can we imagine St. John’s without immersion and the serendipity that makes possible? The answer—I dearly hope—is absolutely not.

I have, however, unceremoniously ignored a second assumption in all this: that people will continue to see the

merits of the Program even as schools and the paradigm for learning evolve. What if students do not? Surely a school that is available from one’s laptop is compelling. But St. John’s has always been a peculiar school for peculiar people—and it will continue to be. Johnnies experience something timeless: We relate to the books we read because we recognize our questions, our struggles, and our whole selves in them. That tension will continue to exist for as long as people are around, and, fortunately, the Program addresses that tension. St. John’s simply needs to market itself properly, which, in my limited opinion, is being done, and as long as we do not deviate from our core beliefs, we will remain relevant in a world so easily impressed and persuaded by newfangled technologies.

So, let us return to the question: What should St. John’s do? My answer: Nothing. Naïve? Perhaps so. But bringing us together into one place is not just a competitive advantage; it is the foundation upon which the whole Program rests. This school can remain an oasis only if it refuses to change. And lest you continue to think that this will somehow become unattractive to future generations, see already how the hurried tempo of the Internet is wearing us down and dragging us along, preventing us from reflecting and acting and taking time for detached, thoughtful inquiry. I am not only confident that the world will push back from that overstimulation and overburdening; I am sure of it. People want to develop close relationships, to be around nature, to embrace the idyllic image of deep discussion with friends before a fireplace.

Those dreams are too much a part of our fabric to disappear.

In this tumultuous time when we are still gaining our bearings on our age’s profound structural changes, I envision St. John’s not only coasting past the crises, but becoming the commonly understood ideal of what a liberal arts education is. You can bet that I believe that, in 2112, when Johnnies are riding their hoverboards to

tutorials and chatting with their friends on Mars from their really cool cellphones, they will still be carrying with them their great-grandfather’s copy of the Republic, boasting about it among friends around a McDowell table, as the same bell kicks o" the timeless discussion that has inflamed our hearts again and again. Let us not be swept up in the transient fads of ever-shinier technologies, but embrace each other and our books in our quest to be better people.

Alumni: Welcome home. For this Homecoming weekend,

which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Program, the Gadfly sta" felt something special was in order. We’re happy, therefore, to present you with a special issue of the Annapolis campus’s weekly newspaper. We hope you enjoy our small contribution and that it makes you feel, well, home. Current students: For the love of Zeus, pick up your room and put the seat down—we have guests! Ahem. Pardon us: Sometimes it feels a little too much like home.

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(((.-*4"6,,7.4,5/#34*/*&-.2Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the student news magazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and sta" of the Annapolis campus.

Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way neces-sary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking news magazine.

The Gadfly meets every Sunday at 7 PM in Room 109 on the first lower level of the BBC.

Nathan Goldman • Editor-in-ChiefIan Tuttle • Editor-in-Chief

Hayden Pendergrass • Layout EditorReza Djalal • Photographer

Sasha Welm • CartoonistJonathan Barone • Sta"

Will Brown • Sta"Andrew Kriehn • Sta"Robert Malka • Sta"

Sarah Meggison • Sta" Kevin Morris • Sta"Charles Zug • Sta"

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Eva BrannNicholas Maistrellis

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TheBeauty of Brick and MortarRobert Malka A’15

[ 02 ] The Gadfly

Articles should be submitted by Friday at 11:59 PM to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

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The Gadfly [ 03 ]

!"#$%&'(%)**+,-%#.%/*&"+$0"+,%12#"&-%34-&#"5In honor of 50 years of intramural sports, our resident sports historian Jon Barone has compiled a special report on the overall successes (and less-than-successes) of St. John’s intramural sports teams since 1963.Jonathan Barone A’13

[ 04 ] The Gadfly

Editors: Where does the liberal arts col-lege fit into the current higher education environment?

President Nelson: It’s very hard to say exactly what’s going on in higher educa-tion, but there’s no question that with the growth and sophistication of tech-nology, more and more general educa-tion courses—lecture courses and the like—are going to be delivered online [and] that the large lecture hall is going to become more and more of an antique. I can imagine, therefore, that the whole notion of a four-year residential college will undergo some shift. We know that [online] education is very di!cult to square with a liberal education, the kind we do here. And it can’t replace the resi-dential experience….On the one hand, it seems to me, this puts St. John’s in an extremely good position, because dis-tance learning for us looks more like five to ten feet apart. But it does mean that the message about what a liberal edu-cation is becomes harder to get out. On the one hand, what we have to o"er will become more distinctive, more needed, and more appreciated than ever. But we have to make sure that the message is heard.

Dean Kraus: One positive e"ect is that many colleges and universities have tak-en on programs for which one just needs credentials, rather than education, and much of that may be moved out of the university proper and moved to other educational institutions that can do it more e!ciently. This may refocus the university and college, away from being a marketplace of ideas, to more tradi-tionally what ought to be going on.

ED: Going forward, will St. John’s need to alter the ways it presents itself to pro-spective students and the outside world?

P: We always have to find language that is suitable to the ear of people we’re try-ing to reach. It may be that one uses a di"erent language to communicate the same message….But the one thing we could never do is try to tell one story and be something else. The thing that makes the College glorious, in my mind, is that we actually practice what we preach: we do in the classroom what we say we intend to do. We hope our students come to say, “Hey, they actually told us the truth!” I would never want to de-part from a word of that. Now, the other question is more interesting: how does the College’s Program evolve? I thought maybe the dean could speak to some of the questions that are on the minds of faculty.

D: We’ve had this Program for 75 years, and we attempt to study, especially in the laboratory part of our curriculum,

some recent revolutions in thought....We’re looking right now at the entire math and lab sequence, just to make sure that we have in place what needs to be in place, and we are refining the curricu-lum there, so that not only are we having our students and tutors read and study the material that is most important for us to be doing, but also so that we are al-lowing our students to have a better ex-perience with it.

In the case of the language program, I don’t know if there’s such a thing as keeping pace with developments. But we are thinking seriously about the claim that we have a trivium. We do a minimum amount of logic—and for years we’ve fretted over how we’re go-ing to do that—we do a minimal amount of rhetorical analysis, and we know from our own experiences as tutors, but also from the Student Committee on Instruc-tion, that the writing aspect of the Pro-gram is not as strong as it should be. To stay as excellent and true to our aim as possible, we have to have those areas of the Program very strong, because it’s not going to be just timely or occasionally that we need the ability to speak well, to write well, and to think well. Those abil-ities, if honed well, and if we can come up with the best way to go about im-proving that curriculum—that’s going to serve our students so much better than certain courses in certain disciplines at a university.

ED: How do you evaluate on what to lend emphasis in a math or lab curricu-lum?

D: It’s a matter of discerning and choos-ing, from among a lot of wonderful pos-sibilities, which are the ones we think are the most worth concentrating on….We’re always balancing the emphasis on competence with a need to go deeply into fundamental assumptions—an eval-uation of what that science is undertak-ing, where the technical and competence component is necessary to know about [and where it is] not so necessary to be accomplished in. That’s mainly our fo-cus in all of our programs: to try to think deeply about fundamental assumptions and perplexities, and unearth them. There are now fewer texts to study that we know about by scientists who are re-flecting in a radical way. When you read texts of Leibniz, whatever his technical genius, he’s thinking more widely than his technical competence. And with the need for specialization, that became less and less practiced.

ED: How might emerging technologies a"ect the St. John’s classroom?

D: I think we ought to be looking into these in a very serious way. I see no rea-

!"#$%&#'()*(+,An exclusive interview with President Chris Nelson and Dean Pamela Kraus about the future of the New Program after 75 years.

son why students preparing for the algebra exam aren’t using online programs. The same for juniors practicing calculus problem sets. There may be comparable programs in language. There are many things, too, we could import into the lab that wouldn’t sacrifice the vital work of the laboratory, but might enhance it. I think it’s important that we identify those things.

I also think it’s important for us to reflect on the phenomenon of this kind of medium—negative and positive. Like the Inter-net. It’s omnipresent, it’s not going to go away. And large orga-nizations are in charge of the content, and we are not reflect-ing on our assumptions, or theirs.

ED: With study abroad programs now ubiquitous, does St. John’s have a future abroad?

D: If we had a year-abroad program, what would we do with the community? We want students all to be talking to each other, and that we’d have to sacrifice. But neither do we feel that we want to have a summer program abroad that we would give credit for; it’s unclear how we would do that. What we’re pursuing now is to find outside funding, analogous to the Hod-son Internship Program, that would allow students to make a proposal for some kind of summer study connected to a pos-sible career choice, and we could have grants. And that could include study abroad.

ED: Do you foresee any future studies in the visual arts?

P: When I came to the College, we did have seminars on paint-ings, so we might look at that again. It’s the question of per-spective. That’s a deep question that goes beyond the fine art: How do you look at something? How do you gain and how do you bring perspective into a painting?

I’ve been having an ongoing electronic conversation with an art critic in Boston over one of the three Wounded Eurydice paintings by Corot. It’s my favorite painting ever….It was very funny to try to figure out what it was about that painting, and what I was seeing, and what I wasn’t. It isn’t until you start to talk about what you’re seeing that you actually see it. The first time I said this someone said, “Well, tell me about the painting. I don’t know about it,” and I couldn’t even remember whether Eurydice was standing or seated, and I had looked at this painting for 20 years! So I thought, “I’m obviously not looking at the painting in the same way that I’m feeling the painting.” So then I went to work on it a little bit, and I could imagine such a thing where you can see that those three paint-ings of Corot’s might be, literally, three di!erent moments in the discovery of Eurydice: that she’s wounded, and that she’s mortal, and that she’s dying, and everything in the painting re-flects those moments. In that sense it starts to open up like a good book does. I think it could be quite exciting, though I think it is true that in a certain sense you can have the book handy in a way that a reproduction of a painting is not quite the same.

ED: Any possibility of studies in film?

P: Yes. I’ve advised a couple of senior essays on films, and I’ve learned a lot. There are films and there are films. Some of these are really quite extraordinary.

ED: Ignoring the logistics of add-ing and subtracting texts, are there any books written in the second half of the twentieth century that you could foresee ending up on the Program someday?

P: It’s hard to say. There are authors we’ve taken much more seriously in the last 20 years than we did before. Virginia Woolf is a very good example. That would occasionally come up in a preceptorial before 1990, but it’s now regularly read in language tutorials—at least many of them, not universally. I can’t help but think that Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a seminal kind of work that’s important in the history of ideas, as well as an extraordinary piece of its own. There’s some original thought there on the power of a personal God to determine the course of action. That’s an in-teresting thing to explore, and it’s had an enormous e!ect over the last half-century. Flannery O’Connor has come and gone, come and gone. I can imagine more being done with Faulkner, because of the power, again, of the rhetorical force.

ED: Is there something about literature, specifically, that makes it hard to know what could end up on the Program?

D: No, I think it’s all works. If it’s so contemporary, you might not have the distance from it. Some people are very good at that. Others of us find it more di"cult, because we care a lot about certain things they’re writing about. You need a certain kind of distance. Sometimes you can get it by talking it through with others.

P: I was just reading some Julian Barnes lately. I can imagine somebody like that could outlive his time, [but] it’s hard for me to see [why] right now. What I’m seeing is something that is every bit worthy of a serious seminar discussion. But I don’t know whether it’s got the depth and the greatness of some of the others, because I haven’t lived with it long enough, tested it long enough. So it’s not just the test of time and its e!ect on others, but somehow the test of time within the community. Lots of the books that are coming forward in the community have been around for a while, so you can look at what are the things that people keep coming back to. Some of them are big books by authors that are on the Program and we just don’t get to them too often—Emile, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick—but others are I guess I’d call them underground classics that made their way around, sometimes with students and faculty together, sometimes with just faculty—somehow they’re pres-ent, but they’re not yet on the Program.

ED: Is there a possibility of the Program incorporating non-Western works?

P: Going to the way St. John’s approaches so many things, we’re looking at our tradition in order to understand the world we’ve moved into. The world we’re moving into is more interna- tional, but our tradition isn’t yet. It may be for some, but there’s something about

what it means to know oneself first which is much harder than to learn something about the rest of the world. In a certain sense, it’s more dif-

ficult to learn the things you can’t see that are familiar than the things that

are strange. When the familiar becomes strange, now you’re in a world of learning that’s really powerful. But when you move into the strange, you haven’t yet

had the chance for what I would call a kind of “radical conver-sion,” which takes you outside of yourself and asks you to question. So somehow it would seem to me that if we were to do more from other traditions, we would some-how have to find the bridge in the

foundation.

The Gadfly [ 05 ]

Curtis Wilson died recently, on August 24, 2012. He was one of the most important members of the generation

of tutors who shaped the Program in its present form. I have been asked to write this short remembrance for our alumni, so many of whom were fortunate to have known Mr. Wilson, but I also write to those alumni and current students who never had a chance to know this remarkable man.

Curtis Wilson graduated from UCLA in 1945, and received his doctorate from Columbia in 1952. He was an eminent his-torian of science. He became a tutor at St. John’s in 1948, elev-en years after the founding of the New Program, and one year before the beginning of Jacob Klein’s deanship. He was a tutor at the College in Annapolis from 1948-1964, and in Santa Fe from 1964-1966. He went to Santa Fe as part of the group of tutors that founded the Santa Fe branch. He served as dean of the College in Annapolis from 1958-1962. In 1966 he decided to devote himself to his research in the history of science, and went to the University of San Diego, first as a visiting profes-sor from 1966-1968, and then as a professor from 1968-1973. In 1973 he returned to St. John’s. He was, of course, received with open arms. There was a joke going around at the time that he would not be allowed to return unless he agreed to again be dean. He did, in fact, agree to return as dean, and he held that position until 1977. He retired from teaching in 1988.

During his early years he was deeply involved in thinking about the place of science and mathematics in the St. John’s Program. St. John’s was, I think, the only college at the time giving serious thought to the integration of science and math-ematics into a liberal arts education. Mr. Wilson worked long and hard on this is-sue, and, among other things, produced essays describing and defending our ap-proach to these matters, as well as a num-ber of laboratory and mathematics manu-als.

Mr. Wilson was responsible, during his two deanships, for shepherding the Col-lege through two major revisions of the curriculum. In 1961-62 he proposed the institution of preceptorials. He reasoned that students, as they progressed in the Program, needed time to study something in detail. He felt that the relatively quick reading of books in the seminars needed to be supplemented by opportunities to study some one thing closely. However, he also thought that this was just as important for the faculty. It is interesting to imagine those faculty meetings in which the faculty discussed and then decided on which 28 readings to remove from junior and senior seminars.

In 1976-77, during his second deanship, the faculty of the

College, under his guidance and after much anguished dis-cussion and disagreement, decided to reduce the o!erings in laboratory science from four years to three. It had by then become clear that five classes in the sophomore year—semi-nar, language, mathematics, laboratory, and music—were too many, and that students were not able to prepare properly for all. I was present at those discussions, and was filled with ad-miration for the deep thoughtfulness of the faculty, but also for the way Mr. Wilson guided us. He made it possible for ev-eryone to feel that his or her point of view had been heard. In his “Dean’s Statement of Educational Policy and Program for 1976” he articulated a view of our way of approaching science that still seems to me fundamentally true. He wrote:

One aim, and surely a primary one, is to learn something about Nature and Nature’s laws. Another aim, also an im-portant one, is to learn something about our knowing of Na-ture’s ways. If we are to speak of a “liberal dimension” of the Laboratory, then I think it must mean some cognizance of, some reflection on, the processes—conceptual, observa-tional, logical, experimental—whereby we come to know about Nature.

I served with Mr. Wilson on the Instruction Committee during the first three years of his 1973-1977 deanship. He was to a large extent like the philosopher-king in the Republic. He was an intensely private man who would, on the whole, have preferred to be left alone with his family, his studies, and his

students. But when duty called, he did not shirk the call. This was true for both deanships. He took on, without com-plaint, all the duties of a dean, including making alone di"cult decisions when the Instruction Committee couldn’t agree. I admired him a lot, and was even a little intimidated by him, because I cared what he thought of me. He was a

model for me of quiet but firm virtue. He was also extraordi-narily learned, although it was hard to know this—he was so modest.

An anecdote comes to mind that illustrates both his intel-lectual and moral virtues. There was some dissatisfaction, after we went from four to three years of laboratory science, about how we were studying electricity and magnetism in ju-nior lab. This issue came up for discussion in the Instruction Committee. A month later Mr. Wilson came to the meeting

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Continued On Pg. 07

“He was a model for me of quiet but !rm virtue. He was also extraordinarily learned, although it was hard to know this—he was so modest.

[ 06 ] The Gadfly

with a complete electricity and magnetism manual he had writ-ten while he a tutor in the class. He could be dean and scholar at the same time.

I would like to end this essay with two final examples of Mr. Wilson’s wide-ranging gifts. He gave beautiful eulogies at memo-rial services. I once asked him half-joking if he would do it for me. He answered that he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He also gave wonderful Friday Night Lec-tures, both as dean and later as a tutor, frequently illuminating some interesting topic in science or mathematics, or some other branch of learning. His talks were a model of how to speak about technical and di!cult subjects to a mixed audience, making things clear without talking down to one’s listeners: “The Archimedean Point and the Liberal Arts,” Dy-namical Chaos; some implications of a recent discovery,” “Formal-ism in Logic and Mathematics,” and “Homo Loquens from a bio-logical standpoint”—that is just a sample of his lecture titles. Many are available in the bookstore and the library. Read one. You will be glad you did.

For further information on Curtis Wilson, go to the St. John’s College website page “News and Publica-tions.” A memorial service for Mr. Wilson will held be at St. John’s on September 30 at 10:30 a.m. in the Great Hall.

Continued From Pg. 06

The Gadfly [ 07 ]

In the winter of 1962, then-dean Cur-tis Wilson submitted to the Instruc-

tion Committee “An Uno!cial Proposal Concerning the Program” to address an unintended consequence of the Program on upperclassmen: “Too often in senior year,” he wrote, “the work seems to take the aspect of a disagreeable chore which has unfortunately to be completed for the sake of a degree.”

Confronting Great Books, he realized, can be a disheartening experience.

“Too infrequently does the Program succeed in inducing a continuing process of independent investigation and thought-ful reflection, leading outward from the student’s natural and initial standpoint,” he wrote. Further, he wrote:

The inevitable frustrations involved in confronting, one after another, great or important works which are never ad-equately understood, and the unavoid-able distress involved in finding oneself, again and again, on uncertain ground—these e"ects appear to be insu!ciently balanced by a positive sense of achieve-ment and of independent, on-going in-quiry.

Mr. Wilson proposed a solution: bi-weekly meetings with a tutor “for the close reading and analysis of a text or of a series of texts, or the investigation of a problem,” which would replace one-quarter of regu-larly scheduled seminars in the last two years. Mr. Wilson considered the propsal a part of the College’s natural progression:

I view the original rejection of the elec-tive system at St. John’s not as in itself establishing a principle, but as a defiant call for new exploration in education. What the elective system endangers in many of its embodiments is the com-munity and liberality of learning; but a non-elective system also tends to have serious defects, particularly insofar as it can hardly fail to present itself as the one right program of study, however frequent the warnings to the contrary.

Like a natural Johnnie, Mr. Wilson framed his conclusion as a question:

The question I am asking here is whether there is not a better balance of requirement and choice than we have so far achieved, one which would lead

the student beyond his freshman state of shock or enthusiasm or piety into a more profound assumption of respon-sibility for his own education as he, a modern, confronts the problems of modern thoughts.

The committee added preceptorials to the Program in the spring of 1962.

Jump forward 50 years: Has the student experience changed? How has this sus-tained, elected form of inquiry improved the College? What is the e"ect of an elec-tive feature on the Program?

Susan Paalman, who, as the current as-sistant dean, organizes each year’s pre-ceptorial list, has found that students en-joy the unique opportunity.

“I’ve never had a bad preceptorial. It’s almost always been full of students who are really excited to be doing something they choose only, and are really ready to dig into something a little deeper than they get the chance to in seminar.”

Current dean Pamela Kraus values the enthusiasm coupled with the chance for sustained inquiry.

“We do give many opportunities to students to concentrate, but not in a sus-tained way, in many aspects of the Pro-gram,” Kraus says. “The preceptorial can reinforce some of the strengths of the Pro-gram, both the speculative strengths, but also the detailed analytic strengths, in dig-ging into the meat of a book and getting to the deepest levels of it.”

Additionally, preceptorials are unique in allowing students to study non-Pro-gram texts. As a student, current Annapo-lis president Chris Nelson read Frege and Gauss; as President, he has led a precepto-rial on morality in Japanese fiction.

“[It] is another opportunity the precep-torial o"ers: either to go into greater depth with a particular text on the Program, or to take a step outside and see what it might look like to do the same thing with a book that’s much more unfamiliar,” he says.

As for Mr. Wilson’s concern about find-ing the balance between an all-required curriculum and freedom of choice, Presi-dent Nelson says the question has disap-peared: “What I have heard is there’s a need for close reading, and there’s some-thing about honing the skills in the liberal arts and the skills of reading that can be done in a preceptorial, and that can’t be nearly as well done in the other kinds of classes.”

Hayden Pendergrass A’14

!"#$"%&'()*+(!#+,+-).#%/0$1Exploring Curtis Wilson’s Legacy for the Program

When the editors of the Gadfly gra-ciously asked me to write some-

thing for their Homecoming issue, this little homily came to mind. Not that our alumni, our nurslings, need it. (For those whose Latin lags behind their Greek, “alumni” are people who have taken “al-iment,” nourishment, from their school.) They, we hope, need it less than most. I wrote since I really wanted to articulate what follows to myself, its very theme being articulateness.

I want to claim (returning alumni and present students are welcome to accost me on this when they see me on campus) that sixty-six-and-two-thirds percent of the world’s despondency stems from word-poverty—not to speak of much of its mayhem: think of Larry in Of Mice and Men, or Cain, or Ajax, or the Cyclops, or someone in your life.

My theme here is ordinary, prolonged, unassuaged—and un-necessary—misery, the mildly grey sort. I think that Socrates means this grey misery when he says—not really “the unexamined life is not worth living” but actually—“the un-searched-out life is not livable,” or sim-ply, “not lived.” He’s saying that unless you lead a double life, once as just a hap-pening and a second time re-viewed as a Telling, you’re not all there; you’re a grey shade, in Hades before your time. What he says seems to me extensible into imagining; you can re-view and search out in pictures as well as in words. It is a sort of internal myth-making, in which mere occurrences become Events.

So our alumni are wandering around the campus meeting their ghosts, even where new buildings block the venues of their past. How much happier a stay for those who learned to articulate them-selves to themselves and to their friends, to compose their speech, as my favorite dictionary (the Heritage) says, of “dis-tinct, meaningful words”!

Freshmen often haven’t got enough of those yet. They revel in vague unmean-ing expectorations. (Last year’s battle

against “Awesome” with a freshman in a seminar I’d gotten very fond of—he used to assist my elderly incompetence by finding our place in the book for me—was won, sort of, when he told me this fall that he’d be using “Glorious” in-stead.)

But upper-class students have gained the articulateness that impresses visi-tors. It’s almost the opposite from talk-ativeness, which is practically de-linked from inner speech. Articulateness seems to me to have some articulable marks: Descriptive precision replaces evalu-ative vagueness, brisk clarity lengthy maundering, so that saying your say doesn’t take ages. (My simile for talk-without-end is squeezing a tube of glue: You’ve got quite enough out to do the

job and then there’s an-other unneeded dribble and yet another.)

But the main feature of articulate speech is that it comes from the inside out: The world pierces us with experi-ences and we project them, transmogrified into ours, back into the world. Which means

that inner speech is the pivot. That’s where things eventuate, take permanent shape, and make meaning-fraught con-nections, or, to shift the sensory analogy, resonate—each with all.

So here’s the homily: Speak to yourself and illustrate your words with inner pic-tures. Re-search, re-view, re-vision: re-live to have lived at all. Like a Homeric being, live in similes: Try to see your ac-tivities projected on a large likeness, as the campfires in the Trojan plain appear like stars in the cosmic vault.

To come down to earth: Get a the-saurus, a dictionary of synonyms. Not, Hermes help you, to find fancy alterna-tives to plain language. But to remind you of the words available to you for picking the one that most precisely ar-ticulates your soul’s presentiments.

Warning label: This is a tendentious little preaching. Read, say the sayings of Zen masters, and you’ll be told the op-posite—to achieve silence.

!"#$"#%&'()&*+,$-.

Eva Brann T!"#$

“Speak to yourself and illustrate your words with inner pictures. Re-search, re-view, re-vision: re-live to have lived at all. Like a Homeric being, live in similes.

/0#"#%&12

It’s how you’re thrown into fresh-man chorus, terribly self-con-

scious about your own singing abili-ties or lack thereof, and then a few months later you’re singing “Sicut Cervus” alongside your classmates, as well as the rest of the Polity. It’s how you begin to join in during the chorus of some Irish drinking song during New Year’s until you know the whole thing by heart. It’s how you put everything you’ve got into the “Introitus” of Mozart’s Requiem at St. John’s Chorus and feel like a lightning bolt is going through your veins.

That’s how it is for me, anyway. See, I consider music my first and

truest love (it’s consensual and mu-tual, I promise). But my time at St. John’s thus far has seen a develop-ment and growth in that love. It’s obvious that music has a firm place at the school, but the extent of that musicality has made an incredibly profound impact on me. It’s one of the things to which I’ve attached myself, and one of the things that in turn makes me feel attached to St. John’s.

Of course we are a talking col-lege, and thus music and singing fit quite well with what we do here. Singing songs or playing music with or for others makes us part of a larger conversation. Several con-versations, actually, between us and our listeners, us and the writers or original musicians of the song, us and ourselves. And an intricate and passionate community is formed.

Freshman chorus, “Sicut Cervus” flash mobs, New Year’s/impromptu Quad-singing, playing piano by my-self, St. John’s Chorus, sophomore music, and finding new bands to love through my friends have all shaped who I am quite a bit. I en-joy and appreciate a wider variety of music than I did before. I’ll sing in public now. I compose things for my music tutorial that I’m actu-ally proud of. Perhaps most impor-tantly, I have this thing with which I am hopelessly infatuated. There’s something fulfilling about chasing an insatiable passion. I’m aligning my soul with the divine or some-thing like that, right? Cool.

Sarah Meggison A’15

[ 08 ] The Gadfly

photo by Matt Denci A’15

Living an Articulated Life