Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

Page 14 text:

12 There is a story by Peter Taylor, called 1939. It begins: Twenty years ago. in 1939, I was in my senior year at Kenyon College. I was restless, and wasn't sure I wanted to stay on and finish col- lege. My roommate at Kenyon was Jim Prewitt. Jim was restless too. That Fall he and I drove to New York City to spend our Thanksgiving holiday. Probably both of us felt restless and uneasy for the same reasons that everyone else did in 1939, or for just the obvious reasons that college seniors always do, but we imagined our reasons to be highly individual and beyond the understanding of the other students. From Taylor’s story one gets a glimpse of a Kenyon 35 years gone, of a memory of Kenyon that is somehow still accurate. It has been a strange place and will con- tinue to be so for those who want to spend four years in isolation. It is a place that occasionally changes, but is essentially unchanged. It is a place where the past is gone, but remembered and therefore present.

Page 13 text:

 l There will be other memories, perhaps accessible only to certain groups, that will recall Kenyon in an image. For some it will be a long workout in the ficldhouse or on the fields, for others it will be tedi- ous committee meetings with tedious administra- tors. Some will recall play rehearsals that lasted into the long night, others will think of the Church of the Holy Spirit and choir practice. Drunken Spring Ri- ots and meals beneath the stained glass windows in Pierce Hall. The AD’s SOMF and the Betas' Lag naf. Drinking away Friday nights hangover on Saturday morning in a Bexley or New Apartment. There arc other images that call to mind Bishop Chases legacy; of conversations that spun from the bottom of souls to crate friendships or enmities, of books that struck us with their truth or offended us by their lack of it. of the countless frustrations, fears, sadnesses and joys. All these scenes merge into one. like the interweaving together of threads that make a tapestry and that tapestry is memory and desire. Then all the visions of night and day, of Old Kenyon and Gund, of long afternoon labs and religion semi- nars, all of these become one blur of past and present of which the entrances and exits arc most clear. Don 11 Guy Ricgcl

Page 15 text:

I guess it’s time to end this little revery, though Greg is impatient for this introduction and wants to have it soon. I’ll have to trudge out in Gambier snow up to Peirce tower to deliver it. In the library, now, heads are bowed and immersed in books, some read- ing Heisenberg or Wallace Stevens, others engulfed in Chemistry and yet more in vast research. Time is passing. I can tell because I’m sitting in the library, books sprawled out in front of me, and every fifteen minutes the Church of the Holy Spirit’s bell carves up the eternal into little bits of the tempo- ral, reminding me that a history paper is still unwrit- ten. Lindsay Flexner 13