Thursday, July 2, 2009

st john's, santa fe


St John's College - Santa Fe/Annapolis - is like nowhere else, in its devotion to Great Books, primary texts, and Thinking.   I'm on campus for three days on Bread Loaf business - and it always has a strongly inspiring effect on me for its idealism about the humanities - an idealism that isn't just there in its ethos and curriculum (which might make it a strange place to teach, if not to study), but in the accompanying little bits and pieces.   This collaged tin was left on a table by the upper dorms - it looks as though it might have escaped from the library, a repository for pencils or scrap paper or - this being St John's - homeless, but interesting thoughts.   I love the idea that someone can be bothered to decorate a functional piece of institutional hardware in this way, with the sun, and cupids, and a classical head, and what looks like a slice of the Grand Canyon - or at least of some part of the American Sublime.

1 comment:

  1. Greetings! to snowy Santa Fe from wet and windy New Jersey. It's great to know that there are readers out there... I don't know about you all, but my blogging is being mercilessly stretched by the final week of the semester - it functions, however, as serious and necessary procrastination/association/meditation. Looking forward to following up your own links... (and to being back in SF at the very end of the month...). Thank you! Kate

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