How does a man go from being a ne'er-do-well in a Pennsylvania mining town to a tutor at St. John's College? Peter Kalkavage joins the show to talk about his path to that Great Books institution, what he's learned in his 38 years as a tutor, how he fell in love with the music program, what he learned from his study of Hegel, what he'd add to the St. John's curriculum, and more! (Also: Iliad or Odyssey?)
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 24 - From Billiards to Bach
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can find past episodes and subscribe to the show on iTunes. You can also find those episodes and get on our email list and make a donation to the show at either of our websites, vmspod.com or chimeraabscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I took last week off, I figure if the New Yorker does 48 issues a year and not 52, I could skip a week every quarter too. I think that's pretty much a good barometer for me. My main reason for taking that time off was, well, my new business. We had the first board meeting for the Trade Association that I'm launching, plus there was a major trade show immediately following, sort of why we set up the meeting where it was, which is San Diego, and so I really had to prepare and didn't want the distraction of this show, which I know sounds like I'm slagging on the show, but when you get down to it, that Trade Association has to be my number one priority, otherwise, you know, the show doesn't exist unless one of you wants to pay me a six-figure salary to keep doing this and then in that case, you know, I might put the Trade Association aside, but I kind of doubt that's going to happen. The board meeting went great, a really fantastic response, there's a very active board which made me feel good, I was afraid they were basically just going to cut the check and tell me to go get results, but instead they really want to help and really want to participate and it really tells me I'm going in the right direction with what I'm doing, leaving trade magazines and going into this adjacent area to make this association and try to improve the state of that industry. Now, after the show, well, after the meeting, we had the bio show in San Diego, this big biotech industry event and I had a lot of good and fruitful meetings there, but after that, I rented a car and I went up to LA for two days. I'd only had one experience in LA before, got to see nothing of the city, so this time a short trip, but I got to do a bunch more exploring. I also got in two great podcasts, it'll be coming up in the next few weeks, as well as getting to see a Dodgers game and really just driving in Los Angeles and getting out and seeing places. I had my Google Maps app work in the whole time, so I didn't get particularly lost, but it's just a fascinating city in a lot of respects. Given what I know of cities and the way Manhattan is sort of my template, having grown up so close to New York and seeing something that's almost the antithesis of it, this sort of sprawling and spread out megalopolis with this incredible landscape that intersects with the city neighborhoods, I really have to go back and do a lot more exploring, both geographically and conceptually. Anyway, in podcast news, the month of June was our biggest month ever in terms of downloads, and even though I only posted three new episodes, we still blew away the previous record, which was set in April, by 50%, which is pretty mind-blowing. I want to thank every one of you who took the time to download and listen to the show. I could see from the stats, there were a couple of days where people were just discovering the archives and grabbing 30 or 40 episodes at a time, and that's really gratifying, knowing that people are going back and looking over the guest list and grabbing those past episodes and not just getting the five most recent ones. Of course, I give all credit to my guests because I'm a self-deprecating neurotic schlub, and I really want to thank all of them for making the time and providing such engaging conversation that new listeners are discovering all the time. Speaking of, our new episode features a conversation with Peter Calcavage, a tutor at St. John's College, where I went for my master's degree back in the early '90s. I returned to St. John's Annapolis campus every year for the Piraeus Seminar, a four-day conversation with two tutors and two dozen or so alumni about a particular reading. Last year was Moby Dick. This past one was a number of poems by Robert Frost. Peter wasn't one of the tutors in the Piraeus, but he lives in town and was going to be around, so I invited him on the show. He's going into his 38th year as a tutor at St. John's, which is nowhere near last year's guest, Eva Brand, who was in her 57th year when we spoke, but he was actually the first tutor who's writing I encountered. The first tutor I met was Tom May, who my interview two summers ago at the Piraeus Seminar. We were doing Flannery O'Connor that year, but it was an essay in the St. John's review that my brother passed on to me when I was in college, where I encountered Peter Calcavage and his thought for the first time. I still got that copy here, it's, let's see, volume 40, number three from 1990-1991, and Peter's essay was Dante Annulises, a reading of Inferno Canto 26, and the essay was adapted from a lecture he gave in 1989, and I think it's a pretty amazing piece of work, given where I was in my intellectual development back then, it served as a sort of guide post for me. It really sort of opened me up to the notion of close reading and the interconnection of great books and the conversation those authors have across the centuries, and that's what St. John's is also about, and that's why I go back to it every year. Anyway, Peter and I bonded during my time in Annapolis back then, his wife Chris was my tutor in Attic Greek, the summer of 1992, the year between my junior and senior year as a college, and he himself was one of the tutors in my pre-septorial on Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which is sort of a life changer for me. Also we're both big fans of Miller's Crossing, the Coen Brothers Gangster Flick from 1991, I make no apologies for that one. In fact, during the Piraeus weekend, we bumped into each other later on and tossed a couple of lines from the movie back and forth, which was kind of refreshing knowing that there's somebody else who's just as nuts as I am for that flick. Anyway, Peter published The Logic of Desire, an introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in 2007 through Paul Dry Books, and he is, as I mentioned, going into his 38th year as a tutor at St. John's. A long time listeners know that St. John's is a really important place in my life, and I'm always interested in finding out how tutors discovered their calling, like that moment when you realized you're a St. John's tutor. Peter's got a pretty interesting path to guide him there, and I think you'll enjoy his story. And now the virtual memories conversation with Peter Calcabbage. How did you become a tutor here at St. John's? Well, I was in graduate school at Penn State in philosophy, and I had never heard of St. John's before, didn't know it existed. If I had, I would have tried to come here with everything I had in me when I was younger. Anyway, there was a St. John's alum, Joe Sacks, we were graduate students together. And after he left Penn State and got a position as a tutor at St. John's, he encouraged me to apply, which I did. The first thing that attracted me, and I guess I had known this in general for a long time, was that it was the place where Jacob Klein was. And I had known Klein's works, especially the Greek mathematics and the origin of algebra book since I was, oh, maybe when I was 19 or 20, I had discovered that. So I knew he was here, but I didn't know really about the college or what kind of place it was. And then when I heard about it, and especially when I saw the seminar list, I thought, this is amazing. This is amazing. This is everything I've always wanted to do, and they even have music. So anyway, that was the main thing I thought, wow, now I was in no way prepared for the kind of teaching that one does at the school. All of my classes had been lecture classes, so it took me a little while to catch on. But the curriculum was just fantastic. Everything I always wanted to study more of, and a few things I hadn't studied at all, such as. I hadn't done any non-Euclidean geometry, I hadn't spent any time with French poetry. These are things that I came to love very deeply when I came here. What was your history with the classics prior to college? What was your youth like, when did you discover this phase, this love of that work? Well, let's see, going all the way back in early high school, that was the time that I hated school, and the only thing I loved engaging in was rock music. I played in a rock band and loved that, and that's all I wanted to do. But I had some teachers, yes, I did, but then I had a few teachers who took an interest in me and took me aside, especially in my junior year, when two very eccentric brothers, one of whom I studied physics with, the other trigonometry, took me aside and offered to give me, in effect, private lessons in physics and math after school. And they helped me realize that I loved things of the intellect. Really, coming from the mathematics and natural science side of things? That was mainly, yes, that's how I got into it. I got to the study of philosophy through math and science, started college as a math science guy. It's interesting. Most of them come from the literature or history or something of that ilk. That was a late love. That came to me. I really didn't discover my love for fiction and poetry until I was a tutor at St. John's. I was a late bloomer in that respect. It was fascinating. Yeah. The Greek I wanted, and the Latin, especially the Greek, because of the philosophic texts. That was the main reason. So it was a tool for the sake of reading Plato and Aristotle. This was before I had really discovered how wonderful Homer was, not just because of the way Plato was using him, but it was the case that if it hadn't been for teachers and friends along the way, I don't think I would have found my way. They were essential to my discovery of things of the mind. Do you feel that effect on students, both at St. John's, and do you do sort of pre-college outreach programs? Are you involved in any of the, no, not usual. Really my contact outside, with people outside the college is at the college level. But our students here, for example, when they come as freshmen, just seems so far ahead of where I was when I was first starting. They've studied languages in a way I hadn't. Even some math and science that I hadn't. See, it's amazing. It's amazing. As a guy who is a graduate student here, I like to believe the undergrads are too young for the program, and that they're actually all horrible students and they're missing out on something, which is just my way of trying to deflect the fact that I didn't come here as an undergrad and would have benefited a lot more from it. What sort of changes have you seen over the, how many years have you been a tutor? This coming year will be my 38th year at the college. Yeah. Yeah. I came in '77, almost four decades. Wow. So how's it changed? The college? Yeah. The first thing, there was a time when we could say of the college that we had no administration, and now we have a lot more of that. So just to state the obvious. I think we've gotten better in many ways at doing what we do, and especially the faculty I think we've gotten, we have gotten more conscientious I think as a group, probably better at classroom teaching. As for the students, I don't know. It goes in waves. I don't know if it's really, I would say if they're better prepared or worse prepared for college, sometimes I worry about their writing, which seems not to be very good when they first get here. But I don't know. It all depends. I haven't seen anything in a certain direction. Of course, everybody's become more electronic. Sure. How's that impact of the campus and your teaching? Well to the extent that anybody becomes more attuned to visual cues, they become less aware of live speech. So for example, listening to students read out loud in class, they want to blaze through it as quickly as possible, and they stumble all over the place, instead of pausing to realize that it's live speech, and they should just take their time. That's part of why I'm here studying Robert Frost for a few days instead of doing the Dante, because I just, the enormity of doing the Inferno over four days, I thought, "I just..." It's a small poetic thing to bite off this time. I don't want to rush through something that amends. This is all my way of talking about what it's like not to be at St. John's anymore. Yes. And to try to have a life that you're balancing with the day-to-day exigencies of work and things of that ilk. Do you experience that at all, or do you experience the aspect of what you want to read versus what you're teaching and what you have to render up for the campus? Occasionally, but I like to, I'm pretty good at juggling a lot of things at once. If there's something I very much want to do, no amount of doing other things will usually get in my way. It will get done. But it's very difficult to do everything one has to do with the college when you have a family. That becomes a juggling act that can be quite hard because the college takes you away. In fact, this orbs you so much. Two of your children attended St. John's. They did indeed. What is that like for a parent and a tutor to adapt their children here on campus? It depends on the kid. My son Matthew loved the fact that we were together at the same place. He thought that was a hoot. When he first, before his freshman year, I said to him, "Well, maybe I'll be embarrassing to you." He said, "You want me to just stay away from freshman classes?" And he said, "Why?" Okay. You've been hearing you teach? No, he's fine. No, he's fine. He was utterly comfortable with that and liked the idea. My other son, maybe not quite so much, but still, we enjoyed being at the same place together. Yeah, that's very nice because, of course, there's a lot to share. Did you give the kids a liberal arts education growing up? My brother, that's largely the way his children have been raised, or reared, sorry. Somebody once told me that chickens get raised, people get reared. I don't know if that's real. I don't know. They were from the south, so I took that as some sort of linguistic thing down there. No, we didn't do anything except encourage reading. But there was nothing, we didn't make an effort to give them a quote-unquote St. John's education before they came to the school, drilling in a grandeur and rhetoric and things like that. No, it wasn't there. Although, one of the things that we very much wondered for our two boys was piano lessons. We wanted them to have some music, and they both did that and got a lot out of it, so. How significant is music for you? I know you teach the sophomores. It was huge. I remember when I was in graduate school and I had made the decision to major in philosophy. I remember this very clearly. And then I had planned to take some music classes, but then realized what I really wondered was Greek, and I couldn't do both. And it felt like the door was just closing on my study of music. It true, I wanted the Greek more and I knew that, but it was a kind of farewell. And then when I was applying to St. John's, music was in there, but it wasn't as high as my Klein related interests, philosophy, Greek, math and science. But then the music program, which always needed new blood, was there, and I got involved with that. And suddenly the thing that I thought was closed started to open up again. I loved teaching it, and I do it almost every year. It's always new to me. Having got involved with conducting, studied harpsichord with Douglas Allenbrook, finally learned to read music, which I hadn't done, coming to it later. It was hard and often embarrassing, because being adult and having and being very passionate about studying it, I wanted to make progress very fast. But you can't. You've got to take things step by step. And so I started at the bottom, some piano, and progressed up to the point of playing Bach fugues and things like that. But music is one of the most important things in my life and in my studies at the college. And no thought of resurrecting your old rock band from high school? Every once in a while I really miss it. I miss the abandon. What did you point? And the release of energy started out as a drummer. I really missed that. And there are a number of faculty members and friends of mine on the faculty who have similar pasts. Did I come? You guys did warm up. I was up in Bennington last year interviewing some authors as part of their MFA program, and they have a band they put together every -- it's a low residency MFA, so it's a couple of weeks in June, a couple of weeks in January, and they put together a band, and it's all a bunch of writers and such, who just jam away for hours in some local bar in Bennington, Vermont. So I'm saying you guys can go around the corner and, you know -- Well, yeah, yeah, it would not be unpleasant. But discovering really great music. That didn't happen to me until college. I hadn't heard classical music until I was 17, 18. Where'd you grow up? I grew up in a coal mining town in eastern, northeastern Pennsylvania, Shenandoah. My father was a former minor who then turned truck driver and construction worker. So people in my family either worked in the coal mines or worked on highway construction. And how was your career path taken by them? What was their response to, you know, college boy, I guess? Oh, they had a very high opinion of anything that involved study, without knowing anything about it themselves. Especially my mom and dad, pardon? Just that you were not going into a mine? Yes. Anything. Their belief was they did not insist that I have a job. Some of my friends, families, who started out pretty poor the way we did, insisted, you know, that their kids learn the value of money and get a job. My mom and dad didn't think that. They just thought, look, we work so you can study, this very interesting situation. So for them, the life of the mind was like the priesthood. It was way up there. And so I remember when I decided, well, what I really want to do is study philosophy. At least with math and physics, that's useful, or could be. You could find some sort of engineering. Sure. But with philosophy, I thought, oh, my heavens, what am I going to do to my family? But that was nothing. They were utterly fine with that, supported me all the way. Well, I was expecting some sort of deer hunter-like story from the era, the Northeast, Pennsylvania, et cetera. Well, as I visited, I frequented a pool hall, very much like the one in that movie, yes. It was called the Pocket Academy, sorry, the modern academy of pocket billiards. It used to be a bank. It was one of those places where you're grateful that they don't turn the lights up for fear that you might see what's on the walls and the floor. Wow. And that was not quite the life of the mind, but you did have physics as part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was just beginning to discover that there was more than rock and the pool hall. Now, you talk about engaging in projects, you know, kind of devotedly in long-term. I remember from my time here, 20 years ago, you've been working pretty hard on Hegel at that point. You were working on study groups, which ultimately yielded a book almost 20 years later, about 15 years later. Can you talk a bit about what you were looking to achieve and what you managed over the course of your Hegel studies? Yeah. My love of Hegel began with Stanley Rosen, who passed away just recently. He was offering a graduate class on Hegel's science of logic, the Olympus of philosophic works. And I just thought this was amazing. Everything about Hegel fascinated me. The fact that for Hegel, you had to rethink everything in order to get at real intelligibility, including the law of non-contradiction. So Hegel was down there, it seemed to me, and it still seems to me, the deepest level of philosophic exploration. So for me, he was up there with Plato and Aristotle. Still is. Anyway, so I became fascinated with Hegel, but it wasn't until I got to St. John's that I became interested in the phenomenology of spirit. And so got an NEH grant to lead fact, to study the phenomenology and to lead faculty study groups on it. Out of that came a lecture called Hegel's Logic of Desire, and I became very interested in what Hegel meant by desire. What does it mean to be a desirous being? And it seemed to me he had tapped into certain elements of that experience that other philosophers had not touched on or as deeply, especially the connection between desire and non-being. So that then, through Eva Brann, I had come into contact with the publisher Paul Dry, who asked me to send him some things that I had written. So I sent him some things, and he encouraged me to write a book for him. Initially, it was going to be about Dante. But I backed out of that because I didn't want to ruin Dante. I thought I wasn't up for that. I couldn't bring myself to do it. I got cold feet. My very first experience with your writing, in fact, was a Dante essay you wrote in, well, 25 years ago. Ulysses? Was it the Ulysses essay? Yes. The role of Ulysses was in the Divine Comedy, which I was recently rereading in preparation for our conversation, then realized, yeah, it was 25 years ago. He probably doesn't want to talk about, you know, where he was then intellectually versus now. But anyway, you moved from Dante to Hegel in the process. Move from Dante to Hegel because I thought I could chew on that. It started out as a project only about those parts of the phenomenology that were about desire explicitly. Then I realized I couldn't do that. It had to be a commentary on the whole book. And so I did that, and came out in 2007, and it was a lot of hard work. It was written primarily, I mean, first of all, it was written so that I could have a better understanding of the work. I think all writers are involved in that process of learning and exploration. But I wanted to write something, coming from St. John's, of course, I wanted to write something. I was imagining that my reader would be someone who was coming to Hegel for the first time and needed help. So I decided to play up the narrative elements of the phenomenology to really emphasize the connection between Hegel's dialectical logic and story. I remember in our conversations about the philosophy of right, we were engaged in '94. Oh my god, 1994. But anyway, when we were setting up an lecture you gave around that time, it will sound weird to say. You seemed in a sense to be almost trying to offer a key to understanding Hegelian terms, a sort of way of translating Hegel into something that's not a layman, but that an interested reader could actually parse and understand, which I found very useful because I couldn't make heads or tails early on and needed some sort of, not skeleton key, but at least some map, I guess, of how to understand this stuff. Do you find, or do you keep up at all with contemporary philosophy, which can reach a point of obfuscation that you simply can't convey what's in it to a non-PhD level? No, I don't keep up with it very much at all. I just find myself constantly coming back to authors who, for me, are fundamental. In some ways it's a lack because it's good to keep up with things, to see who's saying a lot these days, but the most contemporary author I grapple with and want to understand more deeply is Heidegger, so I try to spend a lot of time with him, to a lesser extent, the language people like Wittgenstein, but much more Heidegger, who's surreled to some extent in Heidegger and some of the phenomenologists, but apart from that I don't really know what's going on today, except I know they have a lot of French names. And is that any sort of issue at St. John's itself that tension about trying to keep up at all with contemporary, contemporary thought, given that the mission of the school is much more the, well, it is the great books? How much of their, how much of a tension exists in terms of relevancy versus what you know to truly be relevant? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting question because I don't think it's so much a tension. I would put it this way. No one can be affected deeply by this program of study and not want to go beyond it. It just, it gets you excited about all sorts of ideas and questions and authors, and so to read one author is to lead you to another. Let's take biology for example, for example, anyone thinking about the phenomenon of life to use Hans Jonas' term has got to be interested sooner or later in what's going on today. Now I haven't read a lot of those authors, but many of my colleagues do, and I would at some point like to get more of an insight into what's going on now. So it's not even so much a tension, it's a kind of provocation to go read more things. And some people want, you know, have a better idea of what that might be than others. Yes, as far as contemporary philosophy goes, to tell you the truth, I'm not that interested in it. From what I hear, I find it jargon, and it's just a lot of jargon, self-reference. I don't find it very fruitful. And there are plenty of things in the tradition that I would like to understand better. And by the tradition I mean through Heidegger. Now besides the music, what's your favorite, either favorite book or favorite area to teach? I thought you were going to ask me that. I was thinking about that, I must say, much as I love doing the mathematics program, all of it, I would have to say after music, French, really, yes, this was the biggest surprise to me, it's a kind of joke on me that the program played. When I first came here I thought, yes, math and physics, philosophic texts, want to study the Greeks, want to study the Germans, want to study the early moderns, want to look more into questions of physics and mathematics, ancients, moderns, that sort of thing. Music, I knew I was serious about that too, but French, thought why in heaven's name is that on the program, I was just like, for sissies. And then I did a study group, several study groups in fact, with Douglas Allenbrook, and we did Racine's Phaedra, and some Moliere, and another study group on Bodler, and a little bit of Paul Valerie, and I absolutely fell in love with this stuff, especially the Bodler. It was wild, in some ways grotesque, and it seemed to me perfectly crafted. So that combination of wildness and formal perfection and musicality, because the French like to give their poetic works a kind of musical or quasi-musical voice absolutely entranced to me, because that was it, I was in love with it, and love teaching it, love teaching it. And I like getting students who think they don't like it, to like it, and I like getting students who think they can't recite it very well, to get better at it, and discover that even if it's done badly, it can be very rewarding. Was that your transition point into literature, into the joy of literature, or was this a much later phase for you? My love of Dante, Homer, and Virgil preceded it by quite a few years, especially Dante. I think it was Dante who really got me thinking more seriously than I had before about the possibilities of poetry as a way of knowing something, not merely liking it or finding it beautiful, but a way of, but poetry as a way of knowing that opened up to me really with Dante, but even at that point, the thought of getting seriously interested in so-called lyric poems, or short poems, didn't appeal to me until the French. So I really, I really love doing that, and I especially like, you know, russine, baudelaire, and valerie. And within fiction? Fiction. Which is a tougher, a better job of the day. I'm, I love Jane Austen, I could read her all the time. Now as far as fiction on the program, I enjoy reading Tolstoy, I actually prefer reading him to Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky has all of the deep issues. That's a question my brother always wants me to add to the Tolstoyevsky. He also, by the way, Bleak House or Middle March, that's the other question my brother likes to- Very interesting. Yeah. But anyway, let's go with Tolstoyevsky. You know, I get a lot out of reading Dostoyevsky, but I don't enjoy him the way I enjoy reading Tolstoy. Tolstoy just as the storyteller. Not when he pontificates about history, but when he's telling the story, or he observes just the, these little things about how people are, or what their gestures are, or the kind of love they have for each other, or what we'd like to have for each other. It just strikes me as very human. Being Slavic, I respond to Tolstoy's version of being Russian. Have you seen The Last Station? By the way. No, but I've wanted to. I've wanted to see that for a long time. I must see that. Really? Really should. Because we did bond a lot over movies back at our time here. Yes, and let me say, and who plays Tolstoy, is it Christopher Plummer? Christopher Plummer. Yeah. And James McAvoy is just a revelation. Oh, I've got to see. Oh, I've got to see. Oh, I've got to see. But my own background is that my mother was the Polish side, the Russian side of the family, and my father was the Polish side. Yeah. Which Russia, or which part of Russia? What is, what now is Lithuania, but parts of Lithuania and parts of the Ukraine? Gotcha. I'm Jewish mutt from all over Ukraine, Eastern Europe, et cetera. It's one of those things where you don't really have a place you can fix on exactly, with it. He says, I remember once when I was young, and I thought, well, just a little boy, and I wanted to know, we know where we came from. So I asked my grandmother. Wow. And to my grandmother, the only grandparent I knew, because the others had all died. And I said, Bobchi, where do we come from? My mother's mother. And she said, don't ask, we're all gypsies. Which frightened me, because of the image I had of gypsies. But no, since all of the, it was very hard, fact and legend were constantly mixed in the way my family talked about themselves and where they came from. So I could never figure it out. And there were no written records, really, that was just memory, because all of my grandparents were illiterate. So nothing really got down. They were the ones who came over to America? Mm-hmm. Yeah. But anyway, and I'm just the sucker for Natasha's doing that Russian dance. I'm sure it's a cliché to say that, but I absolutely love it. Now, what book would you add to the curriculum? Very interesting. If there were room? That's the next question. Oh, boy. What would you drop to make room for? Oh, no, I don't know. Oh, gosh. I don't know. I really don't know. If there was space, an extra semester existed and non-Lobuchevsky and, or non-Euclidean Lobuchevsky in time and space, where we find an extra couple of weeks to stay. It's really hard. It's really hard. There are certain great philosophic works that we don't do regularly, that I think it would be good for all of us to know about. One would be Spinoza's ethics. I'm doing a preceptorial on it in the Graduate Institute this summer, a very difficult book. I don't think it would work in seminar because of the way it's put together as geometric proofs for philosophic assertions. Very great work, enormously influential, and I think for good reason. I would say another great work on education, in fact, would be Rousseau Zemile. Love him or hate him. He's brilliant and wrote this amazing book that deals directly with, in fact, dramatizes the education process. Again, love him or hate him. Still, they have to have him under your belt. You have to have him under your belt and really to see what he's talking about. There's a great claim that's being made by a great mind about what is the proper education for a human being. Again, whatever one thinks of it, he takes on the big issues. What's your opinion of that? What is the-- Oh, authentication. I think Rousseau is probably one of-- I consider him an antagonist. I think he's someone who, you know, it's important to wrestle with him. He has all sorts of ideas about education that I think are questionable to say the least. I'm thinking of the whole notion of a state of nature that is innocent. I was thinking of Joseph de Maestra's quip on Rousseau. He said, "Ah, yes, men were born free, but everywhere they are in chains. You might as well say sheep were born carnivorous, yet everywhere they eat grass." So this myth of a state of nature, I think, is not good. I think Hobbes is closer to the point in showing the darker, inevitable things that are in our souls. After your time here, what book has been dropped from the program that particularly irks you? What would you want to see brought back? It's an interesting question. We used to do-- let me see. It's not a question. I don't know how iric I am by it. But we used to do Flannery O'Connor, at least one of her short stories in the senior year, and I think it was very sad that we dropped it. We used to do Parker's back, and before that, I think everything that rises must converge. Now, I know we've got the Faulkner, and I think it's good that we have that, but it's a pity that we drop the Flannery O'Connor. Now, to be sure, tutors do irregularly in senior language classes. But that was dropped. That was what brought me back to St. John's. I'd never read her before, and came here two years ago for the Pyreus seminar with Mr. May and Mr. David and Tom because we're supposed to do that now that we're graduating. Right? And that was just a revelation to me, but I think both of them had the-- it would be awfully nice if she was on the curriculum, again, when we spoke. Seminar's always went well. Always. Always gave rise to a wonderful conversation. I will say that in my time here, the one change, perhaps that has irked me the most, is that our shift from Luther to Calvin in the sophomore seminar. Hmm. I know nothing about this. Is it a characterizer for me? Hmm. There were understandable problems with Luther. He rants. At times, it seems to be rhetoric is very repetitive. On the other hand, he deals in a blunt and, I think, powerful way with questions of freedom, secular authority, the whole faith versus works, question which it's truly beats you over the head with it, but it's an important question, and I think it served as a good counterpoint to the theolog-- other theologians we read. Calvin is there, and it just seems so relentlessly negative and too obsessed with the question of predestination. I just don't see it as nearly as fruitful as Luther could be. Plus, Luther-- I mean, no, we're not supposed to think in terms of influence, influencing other authors at the college, but in this case, I think it's important to say that Bach, for example, whom we take very seriously in the music tutorial and in the seminar, was a Lutheran. So I think Luther's assault on things that had been established strikes me as it's true. It's more brutally put, more rhetorically charged, and Calvin has the appearance of being more intellectually respectable, but I don't think the trade-off was a good one. Do you think the undergrads get some of those high-level tensions flying back and forth? That notion of-- again, something like this, the shift from Luther to Calvin, do they understand the import of that in a way that comports with how the tutors themselves see what's going on? I mean, if you sound off the way I usually do, then the student will accept that. No, exactly. You know, then it's no mystery. But left of themselves, no, I don't think so. I think our students, by and large, you know, you know this from firsthand experience, takes seriously what's on the program and try to make the most of it. Do you think there's books that they're too young for? Not necessarily within the program, but are there things that they simply-- my Iliad didn't work until my fourth reading when I was 38 years old when I finally felt Achilles as a person, as a being himself, and it took me, again, four readings over almost 20 years before I had that sense of him as a man. First of all, we're all of us are always trying to catch up with where those books are. So in that sense, we're all too young. But yeah, I mean, the question points out what an enormous demand we make on our students considering the greatness of these books and what kind of reader they really require. We aspire that we try to do the best we can with these books, tutors and students alike. Are they ready to read them? In a lot of cases, probably not. How is one to have-- just the, let's say, the military experience that the characters in the Iliad have. The importance of honor, you know, Aristotle says the young are not suited for political conversations. And we're not supposed to study the kabbalah before the age of 35, we go mad. So yeah, certain books pose certain kinds of problems with the Iliad, there's the phenomenon of war about which they think they know things. But they don't. The importance of honor to a warrior, how could they know about that? You know, they tend to be dismissive of Achilles. So therefore, they can't really be critical in the deepest ways that Homer probably wants us to see. So there's that. Then there's the symposium. So now what are you going to do with that? You know, again, they think they know about those things, they think they know what the word love means. And they say, oh, they're not talking about love, they're talking about lust. Well, it's not always so easy to separate those things. So yeah, certain books pose special problems, the Iliad, the symposium, the acidity is very difficult, you know, to get some sense of what political rhetoric really is. Very hard. Are there books or authors you responded poorly to, who you, the books became much better as you got older, anyone you've come back to, and oh, I was just not getting this when I was a certain, this is something I've run through the podcast for quite a while. I call it secondhand loves. The actual genesis of it is the Coen brothers, I'll be honest. But I usually ask a book or author who you once read, not something you were assigned to read, that you detested at the time and later came to a door. In my case, it's the big Lebowski, which I completely failed to get the first time I saw it. I have trouble with it. Friends of mine love that movie, and it makes me think I should see it again, because I had a very low opinion. As did I, because I'm coming off of those crossing and my other great co-inspiring way up there. Yes. And I came back to Lebowski 10 years after I first watched it and had the, not only did I love it the second time, but I also had the, I don't understand what I didn't get the first time. I had apparently changed so much that I couldn't even figure out what I was, you know, angry about the previous time I'd seen it. But anyway. Well, based on that, I think I'll see it again. That may have been what pushed me over, what pushes me over the edge. But let me see things I, I didn't, I didn't like it first, or even despised and then came to love. Gosh, you know, I, I really, hmm, hmm, because most people just go with Kant because of the unintelligibility of their first time out, but, you know, most people here at St. John. I'm drawing a blank and I'm thinking about why I'm drawing a blank. It's okay. People always love this question and have no answer for it. So it's very, yeah, that's a, you know, that's a, that's a hard one. I guess, I mean, this, this isn't just despised, but I never thought I would come to love Jane Austin's novels as much as I did, you know, since I like things that are dramatic, daring, and all that, but then I, I just began to love the way she writes, the way she, her, her sly humor, her perceptions about manners, what's decent and what is not. Along the lines. Told story, Dostoevsky, Iliad, or Odyssey? It's hard. It's hard, it's hard, it's, it's, it's hard, yeah, yeah, this is a hard one. I'm going to have, I'm going to have to go with the Odyssey because of the character of Odysseus. That was, that was, it was, and Odysseus and Penelope. There's no other, where else in literature, are you going to find a marriage like that? You know, understood, it's, it's practically telepathic. And who are you reading now outside of the program? Let me see, um, well, it's a little technical, but I do this sort of thing for fun. I, I, I like to read musicalogical great works that I don't get a chance to read during the year. It's a very demanding, uh, as you may know, we, uh, we read this, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, Is it Victor? Is it Victor Kondle who studied with Heinrich Schanker, the, the, uh, great, in fact, infamous, uh, late 19th century, turn of the century, uh, theorist. And right now I'm working through his last great work, free composition. Very hermetic. He mixes all sorts of reflections seemingly from just out of the blue on theology, politics, history, you name it with his musicalogical, uh, observations. So I'm reading that and, uh, let's see, what else am I reading? I'm reading, uh, Don Quixote for Junior Seminar, which I haven't done in a while and I'm enjoying that very much. It took me a while to, uh, oh, there's a book that I learned to appreciate. There's a book. Okay. We found, we found one. It's not that I hated it, but I remembered reading it for Junior Seminar and reading it fast and finding it utterly episodic and repetitive. And I just thought, what is going on here? It's, uh, it's, it seems to be going nowhere. And then in part two, it just seems to get into these mean-spirited adventures where the authors seems to just be grinding his hero into the ground more and more and more. Then I did a GI Preceptorial, Summer Preceptorial, on the novel and got a lot more out of it. That's amazing how those books seem to get better. It's, but I, in my case, I have to temper my, uh, my tendency to read fast. And so if I really just am patient, read slower, especially with this book, I get a lot more out of it. So. And what are you working on, new, uh, new book at all? Well, um, I'm thinking about writing something on music, but I don't quite know. The plans for that keep shifting. I am giving a lecture on something on the general topic, music and philosophy, uh, at Catholic University in November. And I'm thinking of writing something on music and the will, and it would be an exploration of the theory's theory of music of, uh, Schopenhauer in the world as will and representation. Of all the philosophers one could read, he's the one who gives music a place of prominence that it has no other thinker. Where do you see this college in 50 years? Oh, I worry. We already have 38 here. Yes, I know. So we're celebrating your 88th anniversary at that point. Ah, yeah. That's right. Um, you know, there have been, uh, recent concerns, understandable concerns about things like enrollment and the place of liberal education in current America. Um, it's, it's, it seems to be in danger in lots of ways for all sorts of reasons that I only partially understand. Um, there's been a recent effort to go through a rebranding as it's called, but we have to be very careful not to present ourselves in what we think might be an attractive way, which misrepresents what we most have to offer our students, the country and the world, which is our curriculum, the program. That's the most important thing. Not our location, not the extracurricular activities, but the program. The following teachers are returning to St. John's next year. That's, so I hope we can preserve that. They're, they're all sorts of ways in which, um, I see that threatened from time to time. Um, so I'm, I just hope that we can hold on to that central idea that we are most of, of all, is our program of study. Peter Calcavitch, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory. Sure. You're quite welcome. It was a pleasure. Good to see you. And that was Peter Calcavitch. He does not have a website, but you can find his book, The Logic of Desire, An Introduction to Hagel's Phenomenology of Spirit at better bookstores or directly from the publisher, Paul Dry Books. That's P-A-U-L-D-R-Y. He's also translated, or helped translate, a number of Plato's dialogues, including the Statesmen and Timaeus. He's the author of two texts that have been used in the St. John's Music program on the measurement of tones and elements, a workbook for freshmen music. He's a contributor to the imaginative conservative, which you can find at theimaginativeconservative.org. I've told you guys before, I think the St. John's College program is the best education one can get, but, but then I'm weird. So that's it for this week's virtual memories show. I'll be back next Tuesday with a conversation with Merrill Marco, the novelist, essayist, columnist, humorist, late night producer, dog saver, and all around amazing person. That was one of the conversations from the Los Angeles trip. I think you'll really dig that one. In the meantime, please hit up our websites, VMSPod.com, or chimeraobscura.com/vm to make a donation to this ad-free podcast. You can find past episodes on those sites and also get on our weekly email list there, which will update you about the newest episode, as well as activities and new books from our past guests. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at groff@chimeraobscura.com, or reach me through VMSPod on Twitter, or like our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. And do me a favor. Go to the iTunes store, look up the virtual memories show, and leave a review and rating there. More people do that. Better the chances will get featured when somebody searches for great books, conversations, and the Coen brothers. Until next time, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]