Gil talks with Tom May, a tutor at St. John's College, about his path to the school, how the place has changed over the years, and how he had to get a note from his priest to read books from the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 7 - Here at the Western World
[music] Welcome to part two of the June 2012 episode of The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and I thank you for making it this far. As you may recall from part one, I just spent a long weekend at St. John's College for a seminar in Flannery O'Connor. I had a blast talking books with smart, well-read people, walking around my old stomping grounds in the early 90s, and reconnecting with my tutors from those grad school days. The conversation in this part is with Tom May, who's actually the first St. John's tutor I ever met. My brother had gone to the graduate institute ahead of me, and he lured me down to campus in the summer of '92 to take an intensive course on Attic Greek. I wasn't pursuing a classics education at the time, like that would have even been possible at Hampshire College, but, you know, having little or no money and nothing particular to interest me on shore. Anyway, Mr. May was one of two tutors taking the course as a refresher, since he was going to be teaching the undergrads Greek that year. The course was great, as was the conversation, the social scene, the volume of basketball to be played, the whole shebang. And the class was taught by Christine Calcavitch, this classic scholar whose husband is a tutor at St. John's. She was around 40, or maybe a little younger, and I remember one of the students, a recent undergrad, mentioned on the road to her before class one day. And she had this puzzled look on her face. And the student said, "You know, on the road? Jack Kerouac?" And she said, "I'm afraid I don't know who that is." And I think that was a moment that I decided to come to Annapolis for my masters. I don't recall having any classes with Mr. May during my two years, but we stayed friendly, and he was put in charge of the graduate institute around the time I was finishing up. So, I think he was the person who handed me my diploma. As we caught up this seminar weekend, we came to the realization that when he took that Greek course in 1992, he was just about the same age that I am now. I think that made him feel old, but really, it made me feel bad for how I've let those years slip by. Anyway, Tom's a wonderful conversationalist, but I really just let him go with this interview. There's very little back and forth between us. He clearly had a lot to say about the nature of a St. John's education and his own history leading him there and the difference between undergrads and GIs and a lot more. He's also kind of soft-spoken, so you may have to turn the volume up a bit during this segment. And you should note that I asked a pre-interview question, and he was responding to it for about three or four minutes before it occurred to me to just turn on the tape because he was just saying such great stuff. And that question was, given your background as a devout Catholic, have you noticed any sort of divisions or clicks among St. John's tutors centering around religion? I was enthusing about, as I recall, I think it was actually even a seminar on Plotinus. Plotinus is one of the curiously...one of the few Roman writers we read, who of course writes in Greek, and just enormously influential on so much that comes later in the Middle Ages. I think most especially in the Christian tradition, but also to a certain extent in the Arab, and perhaps the Jewish as well. And I can see from the local in his face that he was being tolerant, and finally he interrupted me and said, "I'm just not interested in those kinds of questions." And I've thought of that since then, and I think that that's the more important thing. This man, as far as I know, was culturally Jewish, and I think perhaps, but maybe more than that. I know that he doesn't attend synagogue, and I'm just worried when you guys hit me up for that Opediah reference today. I was like, "I'm a stand-up comedy Jew, not a scholar Jew. That's a lot different." But the thing is that the kinds of textual theological questions that emerge are not things that not only he, but many tutors shy away from. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether or not they're "religious in a conventional sense." Because, you know, I think of one colleague in particular now, deceased, really interesting woman, who was one of that generation of tutors who came really in the wake of the Holocaust in the Second World War. She had been baptized as a swingling in Switzerland, but her as a child, her mother, I believe divorced, and then remarried, and remarried a German Jew, and they lived in Berlin. And she watched the emergence of the Nazi party and so on. It was she who told me somewhat archly that a very common confirmation present given to devout Lutheran children in Berlin was mine conf. And Bayon had devoted a lot of her life to, really, as a scholar, to studying resistance to the Nazis that was based on, that had any religious basis. And, you know, she was at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton before she came to St. John's as a sort of special tutor. And she had a great love of music and we shared a lot of interests. But she also told me, as we became closer as friends, that she had, you know, when she graduated from Ibanezium in Berlin, it was very clear the way things were going. And she had to get out, find a way further out so that her family could follow her because everybody was in danger. And even though she herself was not Jewish, you know, her stepfather was and so on. So she found a way to Holland and ultimately to Britain. And when she was, and then she worked for British Intelligence during the war, but she also went and studied at Oxford, which is where she took her degree. And while she was at Oxford, she said to me, because she knew that I was a Catholic, she said, "I read and studied Catholicism with a Dominican at Oxford in the Catholic House of Studies at Oxford." She said, "I finally did not have faith." And she said, "but it was clear to me that she was someone who was really interested in the whole dimension that religious belief presents in terms of just the human imagination." And not only that, but also I think as a kind of moral impetus and not seeing it obviously as any kind of guarantee. But she was also friendly with one of the foremost, someone like her who had lived through the whole nightmare, but who also was one of the chief biographers at Dietrich Bonheffer. And so she was absolutely wonderful to talk to, as was another colleague who had, in his youth, had studied very seriously theology, had thoughts of being a Presbyterian minister, had written a book on Calvin, and then lost his faith completely. After coming here, I think this was all part of a long process, but with whom, who was always interested in talking about these kinds of things, but was also very candid about saying that he was not a believer. And so that's why I would say, Gil, that it's, whereas there are others who are devout, but it's the last thing that they want to talk about or study. That interesting moment in our seminar today when one of the participants asked, pointed out that she just didn't get why Flannery O'Connor and these characters are so concerned about salvation and death. It's just that realization of, well, I know it's a different time and you probably come from a different geography, but sometimes the only thing you're reading is the Bible growing up, or you're raised in this religious context and it's not something you just have as an option or an add-on. Well, I think for Flannery O'Connor too, it's whether you are or aren't, the questions are still there. Yeah. No, it's whether you choose to entertain them or not. And then who knows the ultimate mystery of what prompts us to some, it's very obvious. How could you not wonder about that? Or do you simply want to avoid it, which is the claim that, and I think Flannery O'Connor, in certain of the passages that we looked at in wise blood, the reaction to the preaching of hazel moods and others is, it's very clear. Yeah, there's a kind of, there's a veneer of religiosity, but let's not get too serious. And again, that's a book that seemed to focus very much on the commercial, the surface versus the spirit. It did occur to me that reading the last one we did today, Parker's back, could be re-titled "Wise Ink" instead of "Wise Blood", but I didn't want to toss that one into the conversation too. But I did make a note of it, which I'll probably, you know, title the post about this weekend. Yes, you know, I thought he was a very Enoch Emery-like character in a lot of respects. So, let's back to the conversation. I assume your route to St. John's was less circuitous than Ms. Von Oppen's was, how did you get here? Well, what brought me here was first of all an interest in the books, which I guess we can go back to that question. At what point in your life did you realize, essentially, that you were qualified to be a St. John's tutor without knowing what that was? Oh, well, I think the better question, when did I realize that it was possible to ask why and find interesting, very indifferent responses to it? And I think it was probably, this'll sound like a very unlikely place, maybe. But when I was in seventh and eighth grades in Catholic parochial school, with a very, very sort of prescribed, but I think decent curriculum. And that's what you have to remember. This is two in the baby boomer generation. So, the Catholic schools were just overstuffed. And typically, you would have 60 or 70 children in a classroom, with one very severe non-utally. Not merely keeping discipline. That usually wasn't hard for them, but also trying to cover a vast array of subjects, which always included what was vaguely called religion. And this was just pre-Vatican II, just barely. So it was very dogmatic. But surprisingly, in seventh grade, two amazing things happened. We were given, among the books that we had to buy, Bibles. Which exploded for so many of my Protestant friends, everything they thought about Catholicism, namely, we had no truck with the Bible. We were just into doctrine and writings and pronouncements and that sort of thing. And the other, which I found absolutely thrilling, I'll never forget the first time I began reading the Prophet Isaiah, and just was just amazed at the poetry and the sort of moral vision of that incredibly, incredibly involved book. But also, the other thing that went along with it was what would, from the outside, look like just a kind of course in the history of Christian doctrine and maybe a little bit of dogmatic theology. But it involved studying what happened right towards the beginning of the Constantine era when the great arguments over what was actually believed and the content of belief that led to the creeds and so on came about. And so we read really sort of synopsies of the, say, the councils of the Church of Nicaea and Calcedon and so on. Here are all these people that have read a lot of Greek philosophy and so on and so forth and who are trying to find the words with which to understand what they see as the central beliefs of Christian revelation. And that just opened a whole new world, I thought, one can have reasons, good and bad for what one thinks one believes, one can clarify that. And that just opened a whole horizon that I hadn't, and in, you know, if you think of at least the stereotype of the context, Catholic religious education at the grade school level, albeit what would have been called, I guess, junior high or middle school now. And so, and my appetite was really wetted, and then I went into high school and took a general CIV class that lasted for a year in my first year of high school. And finding it was very generous in at least giving names of important thinkers and books through a whole Western tradition. But having had my appetite wetted, I know, by the fact that there could be a life of the mind, and these books probably had arguments too. So, now bear in mind, at this point, I was in a rather kind of experimental Roman Catholic seminary. So, you remember what years was this? This would have been 63 to 67 was when I was in high school. So, by this point, the Second Vatican Council had been convened, and that was for all Roman Catholics who lived through that period. That was an amazing period. John XXIII, who convened the Council and called it, talked the metaphor that he used was opening the windows, finally, to the outside world. And so, there was this wonderful sort of ferment. There was also, I'm sure in certain quarters, great fear. There certainly was among many of the Vatican standard sort of bureaucracy. And as to where this might lead, there was skepticism too. It'll probably last a month. And so, this school, which was in the inner city of Baltimore, so that it would be centrally located for anybody who was interested or thought they might want to possibly have an interest in the Catholic priesthood. With a really solid curriculum that a very enlightened Archbishop at the time, it said realistically, 99% of these boys will never go through to the priesthood. So, we have to educate them as to be intelligent Catholic laymen. So, there's got to be really good science. There has to be good mathematics too, but there also has to be five years of Latin and four. And there has to be another European language, and so on. And a strong history program. So, so here I was, you know, in this sort of experiment, in a very experimental age, and the 60s, of course, it's the height of the civil rights movement. So, there are just questions, but it was, you know, the first year I was in high school was a Kennedy assassination. I'll never forget that. And we're at what class I was in, and what we were doing, and what the response was, and so on. And, but I was also learning names like Rousseau, and the Confessions, and Locke, and Luther, and the Protestant Reformation, which just completely fascinated me. And so, just as a vignette, on Sundays, because I was a seminarian, and most Catholic churches were very busy on weekends with many services, you know, with, and each church had a house for its priests called a rectory, which had a phone which rang continuously Sunday morning with people saying things like, "What time is the nine o'clock magic?" In the priest couldn't be bothered with that. So, sorry for answering the phone for maybe three or four hours every Sunday morning. And I'd take books with me to read, books like Luther's Babylonian Captivity of the Church, or Rousseau's Confessions. Yeah, I was just... Did the priest cast a wary eye when they walked by the phone desk? Well, they were... I had learned because my father expressed great alarm. He was very much, you know, having been raised in the post-Tridentine Church, which was very, very clear and prescribed and specific about what one should and should not read and study. There was still an index of prohibited books, which the council ultimately abolished, but... But there's still a secret list, right? There had always been the thought that, "Well, you can, you know, certain minds with the advice of a spiritual director." We're the same way with a Zohar. You know, you can't be under 35 or 40 or so, and of course, you know, you can't be a woman. Right. So anyway, yeah. So anyway, you know, I asked several of my teachers at school who were all priests, and also my spiritual director, if it would be all right to read these books. And they all said, "Yes, and if you have any questions, come and we'll talk about them." You know, if there's anything that disturbs you or surprises you, and you realize that you're not reading books that are formally speaking orthodox. So I took that back to my father who had expressed alarm, and I said, "See, it's..." I got a note from the priest that says, "Okay, that's right." And you know, it's really hard, if that's your argument that the church says, and if the church says, "Yes, well then, what are you going to do?" So he clearly wasn't happy, but he couldn't disagree. So I used, if one asked by any of the clergy at my parish, you're reading Rousseau's confessions. Most of them, a lot of them, I'm afraid, didn't really, that didn't ring a bell. It's not like everybody walked around with a clear sense of, "They just thought I was on." Luther, of course, they recognized. I would say it's okay, I checked. Yeah, I got a note from my mom. So anyway, that was what, and then I was getting, and then as I continued on, after I finished high school, I continued on in seminary for the first two and a half years of college. The first two years of that freshman and sophomore year, in the oldest and probably one of the most conservative seminaries in the United States, who found this influx of local boys who had gone to this experimental high school to... Broke that 99% curve. Oh, okay. Way more than me. Because they were always asking questions in class and that sort of thing. And they had these really strange interpretations of literary works and so on. They were talking about things like symbolism, and they didn't simply memorize poems and move on to the next one. That's a new critical seminary. Right. Right. So anyway, but still, then I had to study Greek, I had to continue studying French, a lot of history, and I had taken the first bite of the apple long before. So, you know, I'm the one afternoon a week that I was allowed to go into town on a bus. I took a music lesson at the Peabody Conservatory and went to the Pratt Library, the central library, which was, you know, two blocks away from the conservatory. And went home fortified with music and alternative reading and giving yourself a liberal education. And just one other little bit in that I was anonymously chastised in, what was it called, spiritual guidance, which was a general meeting of the entire seminary in chapel after dinner with one of the priests speaking for about half an hour. And he would, from time to time, take up what he thought were issues in the community. He said, "I'm really concerned about some of the things that I find in your reading desks for chapel." He said, "One person is even reading Erasmus of Rotterdam." And that was I. And he thought I was reading in praise of folly, but I was actually reading his Erasmus' handbook. And so, in any event, that was, you might say, that predisposed me for something like St. John's. When I left seminary, and that's a whole other story. Yeah, we'll get into that in another row. So I finished at Loyola and then went to graduate school and philosophy at Fordham. And then I was invited back to teach at Loyola, which I did for six years, full-time and two years part-time philosophy at Goucher College when it was still in all women's college. And I really enjoyed that teaching, but it was only philosophy. And I found that even then I was really finding myself chafing a little bit. Wanting to integrate the literature, the math. Exactly. To continue learning. And not simply teaching, for the most part, at least two thirds of my teaching was pretty much prescribed works. And I had some leeway in what I chose, but not any enormous amount. Something that I read often with, even introductory classes that we don't read here, that I think we should, is Boethius' consolation of philosophy. My brother turned me on to that from his undergrad days. Which I really, really love. And I think. And you get the background for Confederacy of Dunses that way too. Right. That's right. That's right. So that's a dividend. Right. So I found some consolation. Yeah, I did. But I was, especially at Goucher, having to justify, for example, they asked me to teach a class in medieval thinkers. And we read some thinkers from the, of course, Christian, but also the Arab and Jewish traditions. And then at one point, I said, why don't we read? We should read at least a few cantos of Dante. We've been reading St. Thomas. And I said it said that Dante sets St. Thomas to music. And so let's read. Well, I received an objection from a colleague in the Italian department who wanted to know what I was doing, what we were doing reading Dante. And treading on his territory. Yeah. And I said, well, I said, first of all, we're only reading it in English. And I said, and secondly, he's in the public domain. This is in a class in medieval philosophy. And I don't think even Dante would have understood why you would have a literature department that is completely divorced from a philosophy department, completely divorced from a language department. And that that was why I was doing it. Similarly there, I taught a class, I was asked to teach a class in aesthetics, philosophy of art. And to my heart, I realized that most of my students have never bothered to go to a museum or listened to anything in the great sort of Western classical music tradition. So any example, there were no common examples that I could invoke that they could use. So several classes, I gave them, we just looked at slides of paintings and what not together, just so that we had a common fund of examples. And I received an objection from the art history department. We heard that you were talking about Rubens. I said, not only that, we were looking at slides. I said this wonderful painting I thought I love of Rubens called "The Descent into Hell" that's in the Altepanarchic music. And it's just everything that you would want it broke painting to be. It's a great busy swirling mass of light and dark and exaggeration beyond one thing's the human imagination. And so I thought, so in fact it was around that time I went back to Loyola to a colleague that I shared an office with, who interestingly enough had been teaching at Fordham and then who's transferred to Loyola. I helped arrange, it was kind of a sort of a business thing. We were close friends and I said to him, you know, what is this territoriality? It really drives me crazy. And this cult of an expertise at the undergraduate level where you're not supposed to say anything unless you're an absolute expert. And he said, well, you know, it's interesting, he said, the kind of place that you would probably feel most at home with, because that's the way your mind works, is a place, he said, I notice there's an ad in the chronicle of higher education that indicates both Annapolis and Santa Fe of St. John's College are looking for tutors. And the thing is that even though I'd grown up in Maryland and I'd walk through St. John's many times and I had a vague notion that it was the so-called Great Book School, I never realized until I picked up a catalog after talking to this colleague that there were no departments. And that was what, you know, as far as being interested in what the program does, that was, you know, there were many things that I hadn't done but that I could see myself as doing or that I wanted to do. But it was that there were no professors here, there was no professing here. Yeah, I always have to catch myself when using tutors to explain to normal people. I'm sorry, it's just because it's a terminology we use, it's okay. Yeah, yeah, and it's very confusing. So I came down, you know, so I wrote a letter to the college, applying, and I came down and I had an unforgettable interview with the instruction committee of the college. And that is for me. You have to explain, which I'm sure you will. Well, it was, they, of course, wanted to ascertain, I had done like a prospective student what I had set in on a class. And the, and I'll never forget, it was, it was a seminar on, on Plato's Timious. And I, of course, had to sit on the side and not say anything. And they asked me how the, how the seminar struck me and I said, well, it was, I thought it was an interesting discussion for the most part, slow at times. The tutors seemed to have very little to say and it was inconclusive and I found it very difficult to simply sit on the side and not say anything. So I guess in some ways that was the right thing to say, but they, I remember being warned or, or asked to understand the tutors were not expected to say much. And I had, I had in my mind inwardly, I smiled the memory by analogy of, because I was thinking, well, what happens when students are really completely stuck? What happens when they're saying things that are absolutely wrong, that are simply going to leave them off into cloud cuckoo land? Because I could have, not that I'd necessarily seen that happening, but I could imagine it happening when I looked at the list of books and what we're reading and the potential. Yeah. And it, where it's accumulated reading, say like the critique of pure reason or the republic or something like that. So I, but I had in my mind that, well, that it must be the school policy. I had an aunt who said that she was very proud of the fact that she had gone to a school that was, you know, first generation she had finished before the end of the 19th century, great aunt. And she, and of course it was a Catholic girls school. And she said, I can remember, sister said to us, you are never to help a gentleman with his coat, no matter how much he may struggle. Is that the heights of education at that point? That's right. That's right. Because a lady did not do that. Right. And I thought, so a tutor is not supposed to do this. You know, this, this, this will be interesting. And I learned that perhaps it was not as, as absolute original. Okay. Right. Right. But, but in any event, it, and I think, and I think by the way that things have changed in some ways, that is here, that is to say, when I came, I heard two, older tutors who worried that tutors spoke way too much in lab and mathematics classes sometimes, particularly as things got really difficult, because for whatever reason, the classes just found themselves stuck, you know, just, just stalled in front of the material. And I think that, that has, has changed for the better in terms of sometimes a manual, sometimes changes in the specific works that are being used. So I think it's very hard. I, I particularly worry, having been at this now for 32 years, it's too, it's too easy to want to say things. And to, in a sense of, I know these books, son, I've been teaching these for 32 years, let me guide you through this, or, or, no, it's more as if, I think it's, you know, I'll just say in my own case, it's this. If this is, you know, the umpteenth time that I'm reading this book, and I'm still seeing new things in it, and there's something that I realize that I thought, on an earlier reading, that was really not being nighted. It's very, it's very hard not to, to simply want to cut to the chase and put in a question that's going to try to divert that from even coming up. Because they still need to go through the, the basic reading kind of work. Exactly. That's it. You know, when I, I remember when I came to the college, one of the most senior tutors said to me, the only advice I can give you, and it's, it's advice that's impossible to follow, but nevertheless it's true, is never teach a class for the first time. And, you know, I would get farther and say, never read a book for the first time, but of course you have to read a book for the first time, and that's what, that's what this is about. You know, is, and so it's not about getting the book necessarily right, but it's learning how to read a book. It's learning how to read a book and it's just because one can read, one doesn't necessarily know how to read. I told you the moment I finished the leopard, about 48 hours later I picked it back up and started all over again because, well, you know, I think I mentioned that, you know, I did that precept on Ulysses a couple of years ago in the G.I. And the thing that I built in despite feeling really pressed was that we read, we read the whole of Ulysses together in the last meeting was rereading the first three sections. Because I, and it was after people already turned their essays in and whatnot so that they had a little more time, and it was also going to be much easier to read the first three sections this time. Those are also more readable sections. Yes, they go later. But just for a couple of reasons, to see how incredibly rich and self-referential the book is and just intricately brought and how much easier and much more delight it is to go through the second time. And the first time I think it's having done it the first time completely on my own, I found the only thing that made me do that was that I knew I had to. That was it for here. Yes, it was for here. And because that's all I did this summer before I let that precept was read. You didn't have that Giffords concordance sort of thing that line by line. Well, I had it, but I realized it was madness. I mean, here is someone who is, you know, obviously brilliant, but a kind of incapable of distinguishing what is really the most important thing. The most important. I mean, you should at least highlight what are the most sensible things and then whether or not there was actually a store by this name at this address. It's just encyclopedia. Yeah, it's it reduces the book to it encyclopedia. Exactly. Exactly. And so I think it makes sense to say, but it's impossible and ridiculous. You should never read a book for the first time, which means it put more positively. You should read it every book at least twice, at least of these kinds of books, particularly. And then my own experiences shown that they really are inexhaustible. I took my fourth Iliad reading before I finally had that connection with Achilles that I've been incapable of grasping the first three times out. Well, it did for me with Paradise Lost. Now it's my favorite epic poem. Absolutely. You know, Milton is one of my very favorite poets, but that was not it was not love it for a sight. I much prefer John Dunn. Yet ever one thing his poems were short in my part shorter, pithier, and far more dramatic in a certain obvious spiritual sentence. Something like the Holy Sonnets or even the Jack Dunn Nauti sonnets like Elegy to his mistress upon going to bed or something like that. And just the sort of wonderful use of argument and that that sort of thing and the richness of the imagery. And all of these things are in Milton too, but there's a very, very different kind of poet. And so yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true. And there are books that I've really liked, you know, on finally reading them for the first time, like George Eliot's Middle March, that if I did not have to, I would never read it again. Because with each rereading, I guess I've read it about four or five times now, I become more and more impatient and I rate with the narrative voice of the book so that I'm almost apoplectic if I read more than about 40 pages. And yet it was fresh and energetic the first time. Yeah, I was really curious and the harder passages and so on. I thought I was very forgiving. Well, you know, this is her style, maybe a payoff, I'm not used to it, you know, but the more I read the novel and thought about it, I just found myself disappointed and friends would say to me, well, Virginia Wool said that it's the first novel for really grown up people. And, and I found that quote and it said, the fuller quote was middle March for all its faults is the first. Yeah, we always kind of kind of excerpt and then cut into context. Right, right. It's like the famous line of Alexander Pope's, you know, Fool's Russian where angels fear to tread. To clergy, particularly, I'd like to quote the full couplet, which is go not to the sanctuaries. There they'll preach you dead for Fool's Russian where angels fear to tread. Changing our meaning. Yeah, it really, it really does. And what books do you find most difficult to work with the students? Well, I can't say that there's any one kind because, and this is not simply an evasive, say, Johnny answer, but it really depends upon the particular mix of the class. Are there books that you dread at all going into, again, going into a semester? Just, I know this is going to be tough. Yeah, I mean, they're the really obvious ones are, for example, let's just take the seminar list. In freshman year, I know they will begin Thucydides with enthusiasm. As freshmen? Wow. Okay, and then, and then because the readings are so long, it has so demanding. Yeah, I didn't read them until I was 28 or 29. And I think that that's, that that's because, well, the thing is that he comes as a kind of, you know, in terms of the ways just put in the program. He comes, he comes after a long spate of platonic dialogues and, you know, so it's different. And, but he's not the smarmy sort of storyteller that Herodotus is. Right. And so, and it's just, and his details are all important. Though, for seminar purposes, and giving, given the prejudice of this institution, you know, one tends to focus on the great speeches and the arguments and that kind of thing. But, but I think that, so I know that that's going to be difficult for people. That's, though, more, almost a matter of, of just a sheer length and scope of the work. But then, in the second semester of a freshman year, the long march through Aristotle, where there is so much that's being read that by the time, the ethics they find a real, I think most students find a real delight, even if they don't like what Aristotle is saying or find it perplexing the questions. It's engageable. Yes, very engageable. The politics we read too little of, but at least the parts that we read are very, very interesting, suggestive. And then it's after spring break. Metaphysics? Yeah. We're reading the metaphysics and, and then the, at the very end now in freshman seminar towards the very end, like two weeks before the end of the year. We're reading the Dayanima. And even though they've read a bit of it in freshman lab, it's really, really difficult. And I think most students are happy to bid at you to Aristotle for a while. And then sophomore year, I think it tends to be, and this is, this is one of a writer who I really love, but I would freely confess is really difficult, is Thomas Aquinas. You know, because we read a lot, we have six seminars on Thomas. That's, is very demanding. Machiavelli's discourses are really difficult, and we don't spend enough time with them. And they haven't, they haven't read enough. And there, I'll parenthetically say, one of the biggest lacunae in the program is, or are all of the Roman books that we don't read. Most importantly, we don't read any Livy. And so we're reading discourses on Livy without Livy. Without Livy. And without our students, most of them having any sense of Roman history. And our conversation at the beginning of Piraeus, you'd mentioned a sort of Athena-centrism within the college that you would like to see more, more of the Romans covered. How do you address that, or is there a way of, well, you know, there's one possibility, and this is, I think, is something that is at least being discussed by some. Of course, when we lost so much, and going back to something we talked about earlier, too, when we lost so much of the, not only speaking in terms of periods, Romans, the Renaissance, and so on, writings in the program, was when preceptorials were introduced. In the name of letting people read something closely and carefully, that is, losing eight weeks of senior seminars. So that was, that was in effect in 32 seminars total that were lost from the program. But it's all, it's not only those period, those particular periods, it's if anything, there's a tendency when you have to cut not to cut philosophy, or narrowly to see despite the fact that we're non-disciplinary. Yeah. It's the genius loci, and the bias tends to be philosophical. And of course, the philosophical works tend to be sometimes the most technical of the seminar readings and the hardest to read. And so there are not enough works, let's call it, works of the imagination. Yeah, imaginative literature, I think, as Harold Bloom's turn for it. Yeah, and that's a good term for it. He puts Freud in there, too. Sure. Sure. Sure. Well, and look, I mean, if one thinks closely, why don't you put the Republic in there? Sure. Because Plato writes so beautifully and dramatically, but in any event, it's that that I think I really feel the... What would you reinstate that's been dropped from the curriculum if you... Okay. Well, what I was going to say, one possible antidote to that would be to say, why don't we do, and it's being talked about to some extent, why don't we reinstate those seminars and simply do preceptorials in junior and senior year that meet once a week? And in fact, that's what we're talking about now is adding something to the program, but this is also so that we could have our cake and eat it, too. Another way to deal with it, and this is being talked about in Santa Fe, is that this is not to deal with the particular problem of what is lost, because this would be both the gain and the loss. It's say, in senior year, to rather than trying to do the melange of things that are read in senior seminar, especially in the second semester, to set up another choice of preceptorials in which students could choose, let's say, two preceptorials over the course of that term that deal with two in depth, two of the authors that are included in the list and just say, this is life, you've got to make a choice, so many books, so little time. Because I think the biggest, for all the strengths that there might be in reading and thinking this way, the greatest danger is to say, well, yes, we don't read all of the great books, but we read all of the most important ones. And the proof that they are is that they've somehow made it into the first verse. We're the ones that we're reading, therefore they're... Yeah, which is very close to, you know, Tweedle Dums. Words mean what I want them to mean. Now, given that, and just the progression, you've been here since '79, how has it changed, and how do you think the strengths, how have those changes in the course? How have those changes in the curriculum, you know, or in the student body, in the world around outside it? I'll just say this, and this is not, despite the interests that I've told you about, I try with might and may not to be merely pious. So having said that, the thing that I think is most essential, namely, primary texts and the allure that they have for students. The kinds of students that we, by and large, that we've tracked to the college in both the undergraduate and graduate programs are what make this fresh for me. Institutionally, I think there's really been a tendency for, well, again, what a tutor emeritus and one who had taught everything in the program called. This endless tinkering for the elusive, perfect program that can somehow, if we just tweak it this way or tweak it that way, then we've got it. So I think there's a tendency to think, at least implicitly, that somehow we're almost there. And what that does, at least, and he, who was someone who was old enough, he's an alumnus of the college who came in in the very early days of the program. He felt that the genius of the founding by Barn B. Cannon was that this was a great experiment, and his fear was that it had long since ceased to be experimental. And I remember his saying this around the time that we were talking about the 50th anniversary of the new program, and now we're approaching the 75th. And so, if anything, I think that, at the very least, I think that's still true, and perhaps it's more true. He thought that things changed for all the wonderful things that were done when, during the deanship and under the influence of Jacob Klein, that there was a tendency to lose that much more fluid sense. To really sort of codify what the program is, and then turn it into something that just needs money. And to be really, really rigorous about every single thing that we do. And when, in point of fact, we can't, because if you follow, I think, the full logic of that, then the language tutorials should be like the very formal and specific study of language that makes one a classic scholar or a modern language major, or a mathematics major, or a physics major, or that sort of thing. And that, practically speaking, is not possible. Well, if it's not possible for the students, maybe the tutors though should be that way. So it's a very, very difficult question, and I think, as a result, I, as a tutor, and I think most tutors, find ourselves with all that we do, just really, really exhaustive, and by the end of every year. And I think that that's one of the reasons that sabbaticals are just crucial, because you would just burn out in terms of what you're trying to do, both in terms of what you impose upon yourself or feel as expected. And then, just the myriad directions that fresh minds looking at things for the first time want to go in, and the conversations that they want to have, and you're being available for them, and being attentive. And so it's a real, as what another colleague said to me, it's really ridiculous what we give ourselves to do. And that's true. I think that's true for the students, as it is for the tutors. So I think the students are given a kind of latitude that tutors do not give themselves. Do you see yourself staying staying? I mean, is there a, well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, you know, practically speaking, I'm 62 now. So, and so I'm very close to at least the conventional retirement age. People don't seem to do that. I'm, you know, not here. I seem to plan to. Yes. I do. I, you know, and, and that has, when I've said that, I haven't said when, but I certainly plan to, and I want to do it while I'm still in, and, and what I, at least I think is the full position to my faculties. But, because, yeah, there are people who stay on and on and on and on. There is a kind of, I think, devotion to the institution that's shocked when someone says, no, I don't plan to stay here forever, or till death do us part. This is not a marriage. It is a kind of vocation, certainly. Yes, I'll always read books. Yes, I want to talk about them. But the thing is that I will leave St. John's with this good of reason as I came here. I have other lives to live, like Thoreau leaving Walden, you know? It's, it's, it's a really wonderful thing, but there are other things to do. I thought we could just end there, but I decided to ask one more thing that was kind of preying on me. What difference do you find between the undergrad and the grad program when you're teaching? I know it's a truncated program, and I'm talking Mr. Townsend about this a bit yesterday, but. I think the biggest, the biggest, I'll, I'll use a kind of similarly metaphor to describe it. I think the biggest difference is that the undergraduates come by and large without having much had the opportunity to, to consider the kinds of questions that the books were reading raise. That can be true even of the graduate students too, so then what's the difference? The difference is this. That by virtue of their age and lack of experience, they do not have in many cases the, not having had the experience, or in some cases the kinds of convictions that older students have. They'll try anything on, and there's a kind of, and most of them have the kinds of minds that really are just exhilarated at the first opportunity to try out dialectical reason. The graduate students, I think, can appreciate that as well, but they're not as willing to try anything on, and then quickly switch to something else. And so, and so that's one metaphor, the other might be a musical one. I think because of experience, age, also the other things that they've studied, which I do not think the college recognizes in the case of graduate students with sufficiently. I had a rocket scientist from NASA during my math and natural science who kept trying to break down euclid in ways that the rest of us were fine with accepting this pretty much on what it's saying. That's right, and I think that that's just so wonderful to have that kind of thing. So the other metaphor I would use is that the undergraduates are like a harps court, which has no real sounding board. It has a frame and a very delicate instrument with a, you know, a plectrum and very clear sound, a full range of notes, even stops. But the dynamic of the instrument is terraced dynamics. In other words, like an organ, you can go from relatively loud to soft, but you can only do it all at once by adding or subtracting stops on a manual. Whereas the Institute students, it's more like a piano with a sounding board and expression pedal. And so there's a whole range of, and it's a much, that experience, I think, both intellectual and abstract, and what we would call practical and real. It provides that very firm sounding board that's against which these books are being sounded, echoed, considered. So anyway, so I really, I love both, I'd like, you know, to hear Bach both on the harps court and on the piano and on the organ too, but I don't know where we'll put that metaphor. I hope you set the Ph.D. program here, which would not be good at all. I think that's an oxymoron. And that was Tom May, one of my favorite tutors at St. John's College. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you didn't find the conversation too esoteric, then. And if you did, well, I hope you decide to pursue some of the writers that Mr. May mentioned. It might make things a little less opaque. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. ♪♪♪ ♪ Here at the Western World ♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ [BLANK_AUDIO]