Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

Page 8 text:

Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us the complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as the ex- treme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions. Liberal education is lib- eration from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful. LEO STRAUSS

Page 7 text:

FOREWORD It isn't long before the Kenyon student reading The Magic Mountain begins to see how remarkably similar are the worlds of experience which lie atop that Swiss mountain and upon his Ohio hill. This isn’t so surprising, despite the cultural and temporal gulf which seems at first to divide them, for Thomas Mann's vast work is a novel of education and. though his hero’s experiences may seem initially far removed from the Kenyon curriculum, parallels quickly suggest themselves. It has been my good fortune to explore both worlds in the company of Kenyon men and I am happy to write a preface to this intriguing effort to join them through a marriage of photograph and text. It is a union. I think, that would have delighted Thomas Mann, himself at home in America during long years of exile. B. H.

Page 9 text:

PREFACE Hans Castorp, “that still unwritten page as Mann calls him, is what heredity and an affluent industrial society have made him when, on the threshold of manhood, he goes up the mountain to join his cousin, Joachim. The world of Davos and the sanitarium, its rarefied atmosphere ambiguously “good for the disease, eventually yields to Castorp an understanding of the human condition such as the flatland would never have provided. For on the mountain, removed for a time from the necessity to cope with that flatland world on its own terms, Castorp comes first to know himself—the dimensions of his own person, his lusts and needs, his inadequacies and his strengths—but only after he has been shocked out of his complacent acceptance of the rightness of everything “down below by confronting the fact that death rules “up above. It is “death in a host of manifestations that the mountain world shows to Castorp. First he sees death only as a force that crushes the living, bringing an end to movement, growth, love and joy. But he comes to understand the presence of death also in the printed page, the painting that holds nature permanently fast, the idea that becomes the binding slogan, the faith that paralyzes the believer. All these at first seem evidence of the superiority of death and its sovereignty over life and Castorp plunges into their study, thinking to find a clue to the riddle of existence. A series of eager pedagogues offer to guide him, each claiming the whole truth for his particular approach. There is the Italian, Settembrini, who preaches a threadbare humanism and advocates the individual’s surrender to the masses’ progress. There is the Jesuit Naphta, bom a Jew, whose road to salvation passes through terror and absolutism. There are the two doctors, men of science, who in turn explain the spiritual in terms of the physical and the physical by means of the spiritual. And above all there is the seductive Madame Chauchat who, Castorp feels instinctively, has more to teach him than do his teachers. Yet each one, Castorp comes to see, is more concerned to make him a receptacle for a particular and confining faith than to encourage his growth to understanding.