from Tipton, Iowa, to the California gold fields

more info

In early 1849, Sarah Royce and her husband were living in a small community about three miles from Tipton, Iowa, 60 miles west of the Mississippi River.

There had been a flurry of rumors about the abundance of unclaimed land in California. They had also heard that gold was found, the year before, at Sutter’s Creek, about 45 miles east of Sacramento.

They soon joined the ranks of those who were called the “Forty-Niners” because, in 1849, they packed their essential belongings in covered wagons, and all but blindly headed west.…

The immensity of their journey, powered by three yokes of oxen, from Iowa to California, soon became apparent. It took them an entire day to reach the town of Tipton, having traveled only three miles…

As it turns out, Sarah Royce was the mother of Harvard Philosopher Josiah Royce, a colleague of William James and George Santayana at Harvard. He persuaded her to share her memories of that trek. The full story is told in a new book by Roy R. Behrens, titled DREAMS OF FIELDS: Memory Traces of Iowa’s Past (Ice Cube Press 2025). Online link.

Alan Watts / merely a philosophical entertainer?

from Art, Design and Gestalt Theory: The Film Version

Currently I am reading the autobiography of Alan Watts (1915-1973), the British-born philosopher (whom some have dismissed as a “philosophical entertainer”), who popularized Zen Buddhism and other aspects of Asian philosophy. To my dismay, I am not enjoying it.

That said, I remain indebted to his introduction to The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity (NY: Braziller, 1963), which I first read secretly (since books were banned as “contraband”) while undergoing US Marine Corps infantry training. Back then, I was enamored by the resemblance between Watts’ essay and my own understanding of Gestalt theory (which had influenced him as well), which I had discovered as an undergraduate art student.

I wish his autobiography had been as precisely and sparingly phrased. But I would like to share the following passage, in which he bemoans his own education, and provides a list of components that he regards as more essential. Do not try this at home.

•••

Alan Watts, In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915-1965. NY: Pantheon Books, 1972, pp. 92-93–

[In an ideal education] I would have arranged for myself to be taught survival techniques for both natural and urban wildernesses. I would want to have been instructed in self hypnosis, in azkido (the esoteric and purely self-defensive style of judo), in elementary medicine, in sexual hygiene, in vegetable gardening, in astronomy, navigation, and sailing; in cookery and clothesmaking, in metalwork and carpentry, in drawing and painting, in printing and typography, in botany and biology, in optics and acoustics, in semantics and psychology, in mysticism and yoga, in electronics and mathematical fantasy, in drama and dancing, in singing and in playing an instrument by ear; in wandering, in advanced daydreaming, in prestidigitation, in techniques of escape from bondage, in disguise, in conversation with birds and beasts, in ventriloquism, and in classical Chinese.

Josiah Royce's mother walks west from Iowa

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Just published in The Iowa Source. Sarah Royce, the mother of American philosopher Josiah Royce (a colleague of William James at Harvard), was a "forty-niner," one of those hell-bent American souls, who walked with their families from the Midwest to the West Coast in 1849. Read the entire article here.

tao te ching / the space within defines the pot

Above One of a series of posters (2023) intended to commemorate the Index of American Design, a Depression-era US government program, which commissioned unemployed graphic designers / illustrators to make detailed renderings of historic craft and folk art. The original paintings, now in public domain, can be accessed on the website of the National Gallery of Art.

I was first introduced to Lao-Tse’s famous sayings from the Tao Te Ching in the summer of 1964 when, at age seventeen, I studied for the summer in California at Pond Farm with Marguerite Wildenhain. In 1919, she had been among the first students at the Weimar Bauhaus, where Itten was one of her teachers. A few days ago, I found the passage noted below.

•••

Jack Pritchard, “Gropius, the Bauhaus and the Future” in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. Vol 117 No 5150 (January 1969), pp. 75-94—

When discussing problems of space, Johannes Itten [head of the Bauhaus foundations course] was fond of quoting from Lao-Tse, who in the sixth century BC wrote [in revised wording]:

Thirty spokes converge at the hub,
But it is the space between the spokes that forms the essence of the wheel.

The walls of a vessel are made of clay, but its essence is determined by the space within the pot.…

• This saying is also referred to in a recent video on ART, DESIGN AND GESTALT THEORY: The Film Version.

Joseph Langland / life, literature, ethnic origins

Newly edited Joseph Langland video

the search for meaning / finding one's niche

more>>>

 

too late / sick, dried up, and have no strength

Vachel Lindsay album cover

Eleanor Ruggles, The West-Going Heart: A Life of Vachel Lindsay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1959—

From Cambridge, Massachusetts, the psychologist and philosopher William James acknowledged receipt of The Tramp’s Excuse and War Bulletin Number Three [which the poet Vachel Lindsay had sent him without asking]. Lindsay had read James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, pondering it in the light of his [own] visions, and James was touched that this unknown youth should turn for “comradeship” to an academic personage like himself.

Only it was, he said, “too late, too late!”

He [James] was writing in October 1909, ten months before his death. “I am sick, dried up, have no strength to read aught but the barely needful for my own tasks, have grown, moreover, positively to hate poetry in these last years. I can only stand old poems learned by heart in my childhood and adolescence. How then should I shoot the rapids and ride the whirlwind and tramp the wilderness with you?”

James was not at all sure that he understood the “Map of the Universe.” “I do think Bulletin No. 3 anarchistic; I do think it incoherent; but I do think it may represent an excellent personal religion. Don’t enter the Catholic priesthood, whatever you do! Your semi-automatic inspirations are very interesting, in conjunction with your free attitude toward them…

“Go in peace and God be with you, brilliant being that you are, and leave me to my decrepitude.” [pp. 160-161].

•••

[Sixteen years later] In Washington [DC], in the dining room of the Wardman Park Hotel, a brown-skinned bus boy in a white jacket ignored senators and oil magnates, sidled shyly up to the wall table at which the only poet in the crowded room sat opposite his wife and laid a slim manuscript by [Vachel] Lindsay’s plate, That evening Lindsay opened his recital in the little theater of the hotel by reading the poems the boy had given him. It was the beginning of fame for the young Negro poet Langston Hughes” [p. 353].

her broken cuckoo clock hoots at a stranger

So sorry. I have never understood the appeal of Madame Blavatsky (my interpretive portrait above), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (18312-1891), Russian author and co-founder of the Theosophical Society. The British poet William Butler Yeats recalls his various meetings with her in his autobiography. In the excerpts below, he describes their initial meeting, and various later encounters as well.

•••

William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats: Consisting of reveries over childhood and youth, the trembling of the veil, and dramatic personae. New York: Macmillan, 1953, pp. 106ff—

I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left…and as one of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time kicking my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a plain lose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humor and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, but she was deep in conversation with a woman visitor. I strayed through folding doors into the next room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the ground, and yet, as I stood there the cuckoo came out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say, “Your clock has hooted at me.” “It often hoots at a stranger,” she replied. “Is there a spirit in it?” I asked. “I should have to be alone to know what is in it.” I went back to the clock and began examining it and heard her say: “Do not break my clock.” I wondered if there was some hidden mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, though [a friend, William Ernest] Henley had said to me, “Of course she gets up fradulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something: Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin.” Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explained that she [the visitor] was a propagandist for women’s rights who had called to find out “why men were so bad.” “What explanation did you give her?” I said. “That men were born bad, but women made themselves so,” and then she explained that I had been kept waiting because she had mistaken me for some man, whose name resembled mine and who wanted to persuade her of the flatness of the earth.…

A great passionate nature, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive I think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness, she seemed impatient of the formalism and the shrill abstract idealism of those about her, and this impatience broke out in railing and many nicknames: “oh, you are a flap-doodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother.” The most devout and learned of all her followers said to me, “[She] has just told me that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so that the earth has really a shape something like a dumbbell.”…

One American said to me, “She has become the most famous woman in the world by sitting in a big chair and permitting us to talk.” They talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green baise, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no more. There was a women who talked perpetually of “the divine spark” within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with—“Yes, my dear, you have a divine spark within you and if you are not very careful you will hear it snore.”…

the stuff of my pleasures / flesh of my thoughts

Honoré Daumier (attr.)

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words (New York: George Braziller, 1964), pp. 93-94—

I’m a dog. I yawn, the tears roll down my cheeks. I feel them. I'm a tree, the wind gets caught in my branches and shakes them vaguely. I'm a fly, I climb up a windowpane, I fall, I start climbing again. Now and then, I feel the caress of time as it goes by. At other times—most often—I feel it standing still. Trembling minutes drop me down, engulf me, and are a long time dying. Wallowing, but still alive, they're swept away. They are replaced by others which are fresher but equally futile. This disgust is called happiness. My mother keeps telling me that I'm the happiest of little boys. How could I not believe it since it's true? I never think about my forlornness. To begin with, there's no word for it. And secondly, I don't see it. I always have people around me. Their presence is the warp and woof of my life, the stuff of my pleasures, the flesh of my thoughts.

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Embedded Figures in Art, Architecture and Design 

Other sources

the notebooks of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

Image based on the plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt

D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, quoted in Ruth D'Arcy Thompson, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, The Scholar-Naturalist (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p . 175—

You choose some subject or other which takes your fancy, you buy a notebook and label it with the title of your theme; and you keep jotting down therein whatsoever bears upon your subject, as it comes your way, in all your reading, observation and reflection. I have had many such notebooks and some I have soon grown tired of but others have lasted and served me well ... Your subject opens out wonderfully as time goes on, it tempts you into byways, it carries you far afield; if you play the game aright it never comes to an end. It grows in interest continually, for things are interesting only in so far as they relate themselves to other things; only then can you put two and two together, and see them make four or even five, and hear them tell stories about each other. Such is science itself and such is all the knowledge that interests mankind.

The senescent departure of Emerson's life

Karl Blossfeldt photo adapted (2018), Roy R. Behrens

Edward Simmons, From Seven to Seventy: Memories of a Painter and a Yankee. New York: Harpers, 1922, pp. 19-20—

The last time I saw Mr. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson was in 1879 [three years prior to Emerson’s death]. I was in my twenty-seventh year, had just returned from California, and was spending some time in Concord [MA] before going abroad. Charles H. Davis, the painter, was visiting me at the Old Manse, and we both went over and supped with him. He seemed much older, but was still that example of perfect serenity I had known as a boy. His memory was beginning to fail him, which made him a bit querulous, but his daughter Ellen supplied it whenever she could. For example, he forgot that he had ever seen Tom Taylor's tribute, or apology, to Lincoln, in Punch—in spite of the fact that it is included in the Parnassus [Emerson’s own anthology of poetry] and read it to us, at my request, with astonishment and delight. He read beautifully. and his voice retained all of its old hypnotic quality.

While his memory failed in the detail of names and places, he still retained, in most cases, his fascinating mode of expression, and the process of thought was still there. He said the night Davis and I were there—

"Last week, it was the day…the day that…who was it was here? Ellen, can you remember? Oh! It was our religious friend." He referred to [John Greenleaf] Whittier.

He asked, upon going out for a walk, "Where is that thing everybody borrows and no one ever returns.” He meant an umbrella and had forgotten the name.

This story was told me by my mother. They knew (the women) that opinion of [Henry Wadsworth] Longfellow was the same as theirs—the Bromides—and that the two men, of course, loved and admired each other—which they did not. Of course, Mr. Emerson must go to the funeral of the poet. Accordingly. the poor man was pulled up, himself more dead than alive [Emerson would die one month later], and brought down to Cambridge. He sat at the church, seemingly unconscious of the raison d’etre of it all. Then he rose (holding on to his coattails was not effective) and joined the procession about the body.

On crossing the Cambridge Common later, he suddenly stopped, faced around toward the church, and then looking at them, said:

"I do not remember the name of our friend we have just buried, but he had a beautiful soul."

In some people, the loss of memory can be a blessed thing.

•••

Edward Bok (his account of visiting Concord MA, at age eighteen, to obtain Emerson’s autograph), The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years Later. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921, pp. 54-59—

After a while she [author Louisa May Alcott, a close friend of Emerson] said; "Now I shall put on my coat and hat, and we shall walk over to Emerson’s house. I am almost afraid to promise that you will see him. He sees scarcely anyone now. He is feeble, and—“ She did not finish the sentence."But we'll walk over there, at any rate.”

[…]

Presently they reached Emerson's house. and Miss [Ellen] Emerson [his daughter] welcomed them at the door. After a brief chat, Miss Alcott told of the boy's [Bok’s reference to himself] hope. Miss Emerson shook her head.

"Father sees no one now," she said, "and I fear it might not be a pleasure if you did see him. “

[…]

"Well," she said, "I'll see."

She had scarcely left the room when Miss Alcott rose and followed her, saying to the boy, "You shall see Mr. Emerson if it is at all possible."

In a few minutes Miss Alcott returned, her eyes moistened, and simply said: "Come."

The boy followed her through two rooms, and at the threshold of the third Miss Emerson stood, also with moistened eyes.

"Father," she said simply, and there, at his desk, sat Emerson—the man whose words had already won Edward Bok's boyish interest, and who was destined to impress himself upon his life more deeply than any other writer.

Slowly, at the daughter's spoken word, Emerson rose with a wonderful quiet dignity, extended his hand, and as the boy's hand rested in his, looked him full in the eyes.

No light of welcome came from those sad yet tender eyes. The boy closed upon the hand in his with a loving pressure, and for a single moment the eyelids rose, a different look came into those eyes, and Edward felt a slight, perceptible response of the hand. But that was all!

Quietly he motioned the boy to a chair beside the desk. Edward sat down and was about to say something, when, instead of seating himself, Emerson walked away to the window and stood there softly whistling and looking out as if there were no one in the room. Edward's eyes had followed Emerson's every footstep. when the boy was aroused by hearing a suppressed sob, and as he looked around he saw that it came from Miss Emerson. Slowly she walked out of the room. The boy looked at Miss Alcott, and she put her finger to her mouth, indicating silence. He was nonplussed.

Edward looked toward Emerson standing in that window, and wondered what it all meant. Presently Emerson Ieft the window and, crossing the room, came to his desk, bowing to the boy as he passed, and seated himself, not speaking a word and ignoring the presence of the two persons in the room.

Suddenly the boy heard Miss Alcott say: "Have you read this new book by [John] Ruskin yet?"

Slowly the great master of thought lifted his eyes from his desk, turned toward the speaker, rose with stately courtesy from his chair, and, bowing to Miss Alcott, said with great deliberation: "Did you speak to me, madam?"

The boy was dumbfounded! Louisa Alcott, his Louisa! And he did not know her! Suddenly the whole sad truth flashed upon the boy. Tears sprang into Miss Alcott's eyes, and she walked to the other side of the room. The boy did not know what to say or do, so he sat silent. With a deliberate movement Emerson resumed his seat, and slowly his eyes roamed over the boy sitting at the side of the desk.…

For a moment he groped among letters and papers, and then, softly closing the drawer, he began that ominous low whistle once more, looked inquiringly at each, and dropped his eyes straightway to the papers before him on his desk. It was to be only for a few moments, then! Miss Alcott turned away.

The boy felt the interview could not last much longer. So, anxious to have some personal souvenir of the meeting, he said: "Mr. Emerson, will you be so good as to write your name in this book for me?" and he brought out an album he had in his pocket.

"Name?" he asked vaguely.

"Yes, please," said the boy, "your name: Ralph Waldo Emerson."

But the sound of the name brought no response from the eyes.

"Please write out the name you want," he said finally, "and I will copy it for you if I can."

It was hard for the boy to believe his own senses. But picking up a pen he wrote: "Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord; November 22, 1881.”

Emerson looked at it, and said mournfully: “'Thank you." Then he picked up the pen, and writing the single letter "R" stopped, followed his finger until it reached the "W" of Waldo, and studiously copied letter by letter! At the word “Concord" he seemed to hesitate, as if the task were too great, but finally copied again, letter by letter, until the second "e" was reached. "Another ‘0,'" he said, and interpolated an extra letter "—in the name of the town which he had done so much to make famous the world over. When he had finished he handed back the book, in which there was written:

The boy put the book into his pocket; and as he did so Emerson's eye caught the slip on his desk, in the boy's handwriting, and. with a smile of absolute enlightenment, he turned and said:

"You wish me to write my name? With pleasure. Have you a book with you?"

Overcome with astonishment, Edward mechanically handed him the album once more from his pocket. Quickly turning over the leaves, Emerson picked up the pen, and pushing aside the slip, wrote without a moment's hesitation:

The boy was almost dazed at the instantaneous transformation in the man!

Miss Alcott now grasped this moment to say: “Well, we must be going!"

"So soon?" said Emerson, rising and smiling. Then turning to Miss Alcott he said: "It was very kind of you, Louisa, to run over this morning and bring your young friend."

Then turning to the boy he said: "Thank you so much for coming to see me. You must come over again while you are with the Alcotts. Good morning! Isn't it a beautiful day out?" he said, and as he shook the boy's hand there was a warm grasp in it, the fingers closed around those of the boy, and as Edward looked into those deep eyes they twinkled and smiled back.

•••

His students remember John Dewey

John Dewey

Will Durant, Transition: A Sentimental Story of One Mind and One Era. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1927, pp. 262-263—

Finally I came to Professor [John] Dewey. I smiled as I saw him cross the campus on a winter's day, hatless and overcoatless, collar turned up and hands in his pockets, hair unsubdued and neck-tie awry; none of us would have supposed, from his bearing or his appearance, that he was the leading figure in American philosophy. Nevertheless his lectures were almost the worst in his university. His voice was a monotone and his pace an even drawl,—except when he sought Flaubertianly for the fittest word, and stared out upon the lawn till it came. Some of us went to sleep; others of us copied his lecture in longhand word for word in order to remain awake. But he was slow because he did his own thinking, and ploughed virgin soil. Most lectures are compilations; and if they flow easily on it is because they follow a beaten path. But where Dewey thought there were no paths; he had to make them as he went; and like a frontiersman he had no time for ornamental delicacies. When, in the leisure of the evening, we read over what we had taken down during the day, we discovered gold in every second line. We found that without excitement, and without exaggeration, this man was laying a firm basis, in biological psychology, for the progress of his country and his race. Sometimes he spoke so radically that only the obscurity of his speech and the modesty of his manner saved him from the sensationalism of reporters or the hunters of heresy. And then at times, with a quiet sentence of irrefutable analysis, he annihilated a theory or a movement, and brought the eager ideals of youth within the circle of reality.

•••

Earl K. Peckham, quoted in Robert Bruce Williams, ed., John Dewey, Recollections (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1970), p. 12—

[American philosopher John] Dewey was speaking slowly and very carefully [in an evening class in 1935 at Columbia University], also in simply constructed sentences, which was typical of his style. I was listening intently to a point. Many of the class seemed to have left the area of thought. Dewey himself seemed to have left, to have gone into his own world. I felt that I was with him regardless of the seeming absence of the other members of the class. He hesitated after his point was made, and he looked at me through his thick bifocals. I said to him in a too loud, nervous voice, “Doesn’t emotion play a part in this thought process?” His stare fixed on me. I was embarrassed. He was silent—then he walked slowly over to the window and looked into the night, for the better part of two minutes. Then he looked back and fixed his stare at me (at least that is how I felt) and he said in a very slow and almost inaudible voice—but he knew I heard and he seemed to me not to care if anyone else heard or not—“Knowledge is a small cup of water floating on a sea of emotion.”

Roy R. Behrens | Site Revised & Redesigned

Intro

We've been struggling with the design and reorganization of our website, using the subsections 0f Intro, Books, Essays, Design, Art and Research. These scroll down, and include high definition images that enlarge when clicked on. There are also links to downloads or to further information. Above is a screen grab of the Intro page. Additional pages are shown below. Each of these has a live link, or the entire site can be easily accessed here.

Books

Essays

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Art

Research

Marvin Bell | On Bertrand Russell and Camus

Bertrand Russell with his children c1935 (public domain)

Marvin Bell in M. Bell and C. Merrill, After the Fact: Scripts and Postscripts. Buffalo NY: White Pine Press, 2016, pp. 100-101—

Bertrand Russell, May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970. An event of mind that lasted almost ninety-eight years. We shall not see his kind again, but are beset by ideologues pretending to be thinkers. I was hurrying along Broadway in the Capitol Hill District of Seattle. As I sped past two men deeply engaged in conversation as they walked, my hand bumped the wrist of one. I glanced back to say "excuse me" and kept going. But the bump must have "cleared the wax from my ears," as our teachers used to put it, and I realized that the older of the two was talking about Albert Camus. He was talking about Camus, Existentialism and meaninglessness. That was the word he used: "meaninglessness." I had overheard him say that meaninglessness was "a big idea." I couldn't just keep going. I went back and confirmed that they were indeed discussing Camus. I asked if they knew his essay on the myth of Sisyphus, who was sentenced to eternally push a boulder up to the top of a hill from where it would always roll down again. The older man (the other was much younger) said that in fact he had just been talking about Sisyphus. So I asked if he knew the very last sentence in the essay. "It's very important," I said, trying not to wag my finger. Well, he didn't, and he looked as if he wanted me to tell him, and I did. The last sentence in Camus' essay, the last of Camus' ideas about this man Sisyphus—who has been sentenced to an eternity of what seems to be meaningless suffering—is, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." The older man was delighted at this information, and the younger one's eyes lit up as if he had been given permission to be cheerful. I felt like a Boy Scout of philosophy. I hadn't helped anyone across the street. I hadn't offered a way to escape the dark matter and sticky stuff. I had simply pointed out that one could live there. And I have lived there myself, largely as a fly on the wall, a bystander at the parties of the famous, a guest whose photo was taken in the movie star's bathtub, a tourist in international hot spots. We date watersheds, ages and eras, firsts and lasts, but nothing is over until no one remembers. Blessings on the lone scholar who looks again and recovers our words. Nonetheless, I have, like Bertrand Russell, no illusions. 

Albert Camus (1957), Library of Congress Prints & Photographs

CD Portfolio Package | Bailey Higgins

© Bailey Higgins (2015)

Above Design for a CD portfolio package (covers and interior spread), designed by Bailey Higgins, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Leonard Woolf [British writer, husband of Virginia Woolf] in Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, pp. 145-146—

[Cambridge University philosopher J.M.E.] McTaggart was one of the strangest men, an eccentric with a powerful mind which, when I knew him, seemed to have entirely left the earth for the inextricably complicated cobwebs and O altidudos of Hegelianism. He had the most astonishing capacity for profound silence that I have ever known. He lived out of college, but he had an "evening" once a week on Thursdays when, if invited or taken by an invitee, you could go and see him in his rooms in Great Court. The chosen were very few, and Lytton [Strachey], Saxon and I, who were among them, every now and again nerved ourselves to the ordeal. McTaggart always seemed glad to see us, but, having said good evening, he lay back on his sofa, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, in profound silence. Every five minutes he would roll his head from side to side, to stare with his rather protuberant, rolling eyes round the circle of visitors, and then relapse into immobility. One of us would occasionally manage to think of something banal and halting to say, but I doubt whether I ever heard McTaggart initiate a conversation, and when he did say something it was usually calculated to bring to a sudden end any conversation initiated by one of us. Yet he did not seem to wish us not to be there; indeed, he appeared to be quite content that we should come and see him and sit for an hour in silence.

Collections Poster | Maris Price

Poster © Maris Price 2016

Above and below Posters on the theme of collections and recollections by graphic design student Maris Price (2016), Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Mircea Eliade, Journal IV, 1979-1985 (University of Chicago Press, 1990)—

22 June 1979
At 7:30, at the Tacous’: reception for the marriage of their daughter, the beautiful Florence, to the son of Claude Mauriac. At 8:00, with G. Dumézil at the home of his son, the doctor. Splendid apartment. At dinner, Claude Lévi-Strauss—very charming toward me. But we didn’t talk much. Only in the taxi did I realize I’d taken Lévi-Strauss’s raincoat by mistake.

Poster © Maris Price 2016

Collections Poster | Rachel Bartholomay

Poster © Rachel Bartholomay 2016

Above Poster on the theme of collections and recollections by graphic design student Rachel Bartholomay (2016), Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa.

•••

Joseph Gerard Brennan in The American Scholar (Autumn 1978)—

[British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead] himself had moments when he was not quite sure where he had put things. One day in the early 1930s he had Professor James Melrose of Illinois to tea at the Whitehead cottage…It occurred to Whitehead that his guests might like to see the work in progress on a library addition to the house. So he led them outside, first carefully putting on Professor Melrose’s hat which he found in the coatroom closet and assumed was his own. After the excursion he returned the hat to the closet, but at tea’s end, when he and Mrs. Whitehead prepared to accompany the guests to their car, he went there once more for his hat. This time Melrose beat him to it and retrieved his lawful property. Whitehead reached up to the place where his visitor’s hat had been, made a little exclamation of surprise, then trotted some distance to a spot where his own hat hung on a hook. It was clear to his guests that the author of Process and Reality did not realize there were two hats, but believed that his own had in some unaccountable way changed its place.