A series of recent and not-so-recent political events--the flap over Clinton's Kaffeeklatsches, questions surrounding the nomination of Anthony Lake as CIA director, the conduct of the 1996 elections -- share a set of issues in common.
I am about as un-sentimental a fellow as you will find, but even I cannot reflect on the subject of old age in this country without becoming quite weepy. "The witch that came, the withered hag, To wash the steps with pail and rag, Was once the beauty Abishag." In Frost we catch an unfortunate glimpse of the prevalent view of old age in the United States: a thoroughly grotesque period of decay, pathetic mumbling about past glories, and, eventually, hollow years of senility.
The influence that the vagaries of language have over our mental processes is immense, and potentially very dangerous.
There is a poetry to names of place; it strikes us from time to time. The components that make a particular place name memorable are not susceptible to exact definition, but that Jeanne sequoia cannot be denied.
This is an analysis of that class of people called the "Know-Everythings." We all recognize this sort; these are the people who would rather die than admit that they are ever ignorant in any way. They take a particular delight in referring to the neuroethnomusicology of New Guinean tribes, to Nigerian poets with whose names the four corners of the globe would ring had their brilliant careers not been cut short in Biafra and to obscure European film journals. (Here we at Dartmouth can really one-up the competition: "But of course you know Wenders' comments in the April '73 Cahiers du Cinema?" "Oh come now, darling, don't you know he recanted all that in the Spring '95 Cahiers du Dartma?") But mere accumulation of knowledge for superficial purposes is not the Know-Everythings only distinguishing feature.
The pace of life at Dartmouth leaves time for very few lingering meals, of the sort good writers can render with such mouthwatering abandon.
A fortnight or so ago (at least at the time these words were penned), a piece by my esteemed colleague Mr. Strayer in these pages referred to his communications misadventures with "some guy named Muhammad," and then went on to refer to a professor here as "Tom." So flabbergasted at these liberties was the present columnist that upon reading them he very nearly dropped and broke his monocle, which he was in the process of dabbing at with a Wet-Nap.
One of the most welcome reliefs from academic drudgery is also a simple one: reading for pleasure.
We ought not need Aristotle and Horace to teach us of the importance of the aurea mediocritas -- the golden mean.
At an institution which aims to shed the cold light of Reason into every nook and cranny of human experience it seems a shocking anachronism that there should be a Department of Religion. If any of us still really believed in religion as it once was considered, as a sort of Truth revealed to one portion of humanity to the perpetual exclusion of another portion, then there might be justifiable arguments raised to defend it.