pleasures of memory and bible and aristotle and brown university and rhetoric and october 1970

I am at the point in my writing where I want to pause and tell you what runs through my mind in addition to the themes I try to clarify in each essay. In short, what I do as I write is to try to "relive my life backwards," and I do so in the following manner. I imagine as I write that I am composing one essay per week, because that would be a reasonable pace of composition for these pieces. Then, I imagine, by going backwards, when I would have written each successive essay if I were writing one per week. Then, finally, I try to put myself back into the precise week which that essay "covers" and try to recreate the feelings and realities of my life at that time. I have only been doing this for about 1000 essays or so, but it has afforded the most unusual and unexpected pleasures, of which the following story is one.

Let me first explain my "chronology" by considering an essay I wrote in the past few days. I wrote essay 1850 two days ago. Writing one essay per week would yield 52 per year, 520 per ten years and 1560 in 30 years. After 32 years I would have written 1664; 34 years would yield 1768 and 35 would result in 1820. I would have "hit" 1846 precisely at 35 1/2 years ago. 35 1/2 years ago from two days ago would have been November 9, 1970. Then, if you add four weeks to that to get to 1850 (subtracting the four weeks from November 9, 1970), you would come to October 12, 1970. As I finished essay 1850, then, I put myself back in my life to the week of October 12, 1970 and re-experienced my days.

How, in fact, did I do it? Well, I found a daily calendar online from 1970. October 12, 1970 was a Monday, and I managed to recall that precise week for the following reason. I began my college days in September 1970 at Brown University in Providence, RI. For the first time in its history, Brown had a Fall vacation in 1970. Driven by the massive student protests around the country in 1969-70, culminating in the Kent State killings early in May 1970, the student movements had demanded "time off" for political activity. Thus, the 1970-71 school calendar had a week "off" from October 12-16, 1970 for us to "campaign for political candidates." The schedule planners probably were aware of the fact that 95%+ percent of undergraduates would have looked at this week only as a vacation, but we had the week off nevertheless. As for me, I knew not one Rhode Island political candidate (I was from CA at the time), and so I used the time to visit my grandparents in Old Greenwich CT.

Meeting My Grandparents

My grandparents were Oliver Sandreuter and Jeannette Sandreuter. Actually, my grandmother first married Rudolf Vontobel (whose first name I was given as a middle name) in 1927 and had two children, the older of whom was my mother. But my grandfather, who always had a bad heart, died in Florida at their Winter home in Mount Dora in February 1963 and my grandmother married "Ollie," as we called him, in 1967. Ollie was a proud, self-made type of man, having built his own house on Edgewater Drive in Old Greenwich as a 21 year-old in 1920, and he lived out his days in that tidy and well-kept home. Each election day he would proudly deck himself out in all his Republican finery and either march early to the polls to vote or would be a volunteer at the polling station.

Ollie believed that you should invest your money in land, and so he built a cabin for himself and his first family in Colebrook, CT near the MA border and then bought, in the 1960s, a chalet on Hawk Mountain in VT. During that "campaign" week in 1970, when the trees are just turning throughout central New England to their most brilliant russets and oranges, my grandparents decided to take me with them to the chalet on Hawk Mountain, between Pico and Killington peaks. I eagerly went along, since I really had nothing else to do. But, because I was a serious student, I decided to take several books along with me, the only one of which (in addition to my Bible, of course) I recall now was Aristotle's Rhetoric. I remember quite clearly every class I was taking during Fall Semester 1970 at Brown, and Aristotle's Rhetoric was for English 6: Argumentation, taught by 23 year-old Barbara Tannenbaum. I still have the book today, and occasionally I open it up, where I see my clumsy underlining (in pen) of many of Aristotle's thoughts, with few or no explanatory notes in the margins. Often I just put a ?? or !! in the margin.

Three or Four Days on Hawk Mountain

So, as I was writing essay 1850, I was transported back in my mind to the Hawk Mountain chalet. I recall the bunk beds, the crisp and bracing mid-October air, the lingering colors of the leaves, the hikes that Ollie and I took each day up the mountain, the hours I spent on the sunny porch trying to read a few pages of Aristotle while the silent symphony of nature was playing before me. I recall going to bed long after my grandparents had retired and feeling the immense quiet and dark of the mountain. In those stolen hours when the world slept, I recall breaking out both Aristotle and my Bible, reading, doing some memorization, not understanding much of what I was learning but vowing to myself that I would, before the end of my life, fully understand both of the books I was trying to read. I further recall saying to myself that I would love to make my life a life of mastery of great texts and ideas. That, indeed, would make me happy, regardless of the venue in which I would express my knowledge of these ideas. I tried to coax just one thought out of each of the texts, one idea that I could take with me into the realms of sleep, and then I would lay my books aside, fall asleep and not be conscious of the world until I heard my grandmother making breakfast the next morning.

Conclusion

So, in the quiet of the evening of May 9, 2006, when I had finished penning essay # 1850 in Salem, OR, I sat rapt in my chair, and put myself back to that time more than 35 1/2 years ago, when life seemed so much more simple and brimmed with the excitement of youth. I remember loving that young man who felt those emotions, even as I now see him through the prism of an intervening 35 years of mixed pains and pleasures. And, in a funny sort of way, I want to honor the longing in 2006 of that 18 year-old, who wouldn't let himself go to sleep at night until he had tried to internalize an idea from great philosophical or theological works. Maybe that really is the purpose of adulthood...

1854