Door Posts

A college office door is important, maybe as important as any teaching one does. In addition to posting things I found, I would sometimes put up questions and theses for discussion. (I no longer have a job that gives me a door, so I have stopped doing this.)

January 11, 2008

Can you imagine that Adolph Hitler dying alone, in prison, a murderer and a thief, bitter and angry and hated, would have been the greatest moral triumph of the 20^th Century?

Can you imagine that Wolfgang Mozart, dying at 70, the most beloved choirmaster in Salzburg, would have been the greatest tragedy and the greatest human iniquity of any age whatever?

January 25, 2008

In the primeval seas, one imagines, limited experimental organisms swam around, sure to vanish because of their inborn inadequacies. Occasionally, one of these connected in some symbiotic way with another limited organism, and the partnership was so obviously perfect that none of the limited versions survived -- only the cooperating pair. Over time, the cooperation became so intense that there was no meaningful sense in which the two were not one organism. (This must have happened hundreds of times, to produce complex life.)

I suspect that rural agricultural towns and communities are in just that situation with small liberal arts colleges. Ultimately, one makes no sense without the other.