By LUKE SCHROEDER

Director of the Graduate Institute, Tutor since '79, Annapolis

When I was a mathematician I spent hours and hours alone with a piece of paper and a pencil, trying to decide whether a given claim was true or not, trying to prove or disprove it. Seeking to clarify my idea of the very most abstract structures was truly exciting; the more abstract the structure—"pure"is what mathematicians call them—the more I felt I was in touch with "beauty bare." Unfortunately, it became increasingly difficult to share my excitement with friends and family. I found I didn't have the words to express even the faintest outline of what I saw. Eventually, I realized I needed to abandon my paper and pencil, think harder about what was less "pure," and continue my education through actual conversation.

Learning new responsibilities can be rejuvenating. Of course, along with the new window on the world and the tapping of new potentials within yourself, come uncertainty, fear, and disorientation. But I love discovering that I can still radically change my habits and modes of action as well as the thoughts I have in response to conversation.

If everybody knew that classes at St. John's are full of invigorating, challenging, deep explorations of the sort that make one feel truly alive, we'd have to open many more campuses.

The concept of 'number' is open for further development. Ever since my interview at St. John's College (twenty-nine years ago), when then-dean Edward Sparrow asked me if I didn't think there was a problem with the number 2, I've realized that the concept of number is much less intelligible than we pretend. We all easily learn to count; we more or less easily learn to manipulate numbers. But the concept of a number, while certainly one of the clearest, most learnable, universally agreed-upon ideas, is rooted in mystery, perhaps even paradox. How can there be two identical one's (not two identical things, but two identical one's)? What distinguishes each from the other, when they have no spatial or temporal existence? How do they remain separate at the same time that they are necessarily held together in a number? What is the ontological status of a number?

Scientists today need to burst through the boundaries confining them to narrow fields of research. In the face of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg found himself turning toward the philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes—in order to find a way of truly understanding his own results. "Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.'" Recent results in molecular and evolutionary biology seem as challenging to our preconceptions as quantum physics has been. Scientists find themselves questioning whether they know what a gene really is, whether the notion of a genetic blueprint isn't essentially misleading, where to draw the line between organism and environment. Lurking behind many experimental results are questions which are essentially philosophical; I can't help but think that re-thinking these questions would refine our knowledge of both the world and ourselves.

Albert Einstein was right when he said, "The attempt to become conscious of the empirical sources of these fundamental concepts [space, time, and event] should show to what extent we are actually bound to these concepts. In this way we become aware of our freedom, of which, in case of necessity, it is always a difficult matter to make sensible use."

It is pointless to question one's dog. One must simply accept the reality of unconditional love.

A student once asked me whether tutoring the same class repeatedly got boring. One of the secrets of success of the St. John's program is how endlessly rich the Great Books are. Possibly, one could devote an entire lifetime to understanding the ideas expressed in any one of them. Here, we expose ourselves not only to hundreds of great books, but also to the endlessly shifting conversation between them and to the varied perspectives and illumination brought by students. Repeating a class never seems like analyzing the same tapestry so much as unraveling and weaving a new one.

If the Koran was added to the curriculum, I would have to re-think my understanding of the mission of the college. On the other hand, I have often longed for an extra year to expand our mission in some way….

Power is work done, or energy transferred, per unit of time.

The problem with W allace Stevens is that he recognizes he has no faith in truth and yet still feels "the need for some imperishable bliss." Stevens' poetry seeks reality, but simultaneously questions its own delineation of the real. Imaginative power is explored as an alternative to rational understanding, but its ephemeral and possibly unsatisfying nature imbue the resulting "things as they are" with their own dreaminess and strangeness. While desperate to find "the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice," he recognizes that "it can never be satisfied, the mind, never." Stevens is engaged in his own attempt to climb out of the Platonic "cave," to reach beyond "ideas about the thing" to the "thing itself." Can imagination supply the directedness inherent in the "cave" image? Or is poetry primarily a "destructive force"?

Think about it. If there is a barber in a town who shaves all and only those people who do not shave themselves, who shaves the barber?

I stab peas that roll around on my plate.

Text-messaging seems to me to require impossibly dexterous, and tiny, fingers.

I left Michigan in search of a meaningful life and a vocation. Of course, both require more than mere change of location. Tremendous good fortune along with a bit of effort revealed my life's work to me. However, the quest for meaning renews itself every day.

I like Annapolis in the spring. Unlike Michigan, where spring lasts approximately two days, in Annapolis the season unfolds in a leisurely fashion. Each flower or tree takes the stage for a week, snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, crabapples, cherry trees, azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwoods, etc. Each displays its showy blooms, reveling in the return of life, banishing the grays of winter. The very earth seems alive and overflowing with imagination.