Family, Faulkner and Other Things from French

Hello, my name is Elise Akie Kutsunai. I’ve been having a ball with senior language, which was formerly French but is now Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and modern literature (Woolf, Eliot). This past class we finished discussing “The Fire and the Hearth” and discovered the overwhelming importance of family. People can and often do become different in college, but family and blood kin are always present. In Faulkner’s story, the McCaslin bloodline diverges, with the white Edmonds landowners and the black slaves/sharecroppers both tracing their lineage to Carothers McCaslin. Inevitable conflict arises when assorted characters confront their heritage and the demands of societal position. I was very pleased that no one in my class brought up their personal conflicts with family, but the discussion also reminded me of my favorite aspect of college, especially at St. Johns: friends become your family. I have kept in touch with my folks and my friends from high school, but my best friends are the people I have discovered here at St. John’s. They are all individuals in every sense of the word: intelligent, humorous and rather quaint (to put it mildly). I will always have a strong sense of identity from my family name, but my ‘found family’ of friends have helped me become certain in my beliefs and my goals in life. We argue at the dinner table about Kant versus Hegel, precisely how crazy Newton was, and how virtue is possible when Hobbes and La Rouchefacauld are dead-on about human nature. I would not trade my post-seminar conversations in the stairwell for anything—except perhaps a long phone conversation with an alumna who still has questions about “Hurrah for Karamazov!” Hurrah for families of every kind, blood or friendship nonwithstanding.

Check It Out: A Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

I’m such a Fool

My junior year began with most hectic schedule. Not only did I have 3 jobs but I also decided to involve myself with St. John’s theater club Chrysostomos. For I had decided to direct a play, Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes, a satire on academic pretension, which was quite a success around here, not to say we are all inflated scholars, but Moliere is good for us as Swift is good for us, sorry, I tend to be incredibly digressive as a writer sometimes. I must say though, the beginning of last semester was about the perfect time to carry out such a time-consuming task. Junior year gets progressively harder, in a challenging and rewarding sort of way. Nowadays trying to derive Maxwell’s equations and to understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason take most of my time. So given these present circumstances, I have no idea why I auditioned for the traditional Shakespeare play that shows at the end of the semester. But how could I resist auditioning for King Lear? Only a fool would do such a thing.

For whom the bell tolls…

It seemed that Johnnies could care less about St. Valentine’s Day. Well, at least juniors and seniors could care less about the holiday of love and friendship. Maybe the freshmen had their own secret celebration, but the old seasoned Johnnies (maybe the real Johnnies) had other business in mind. Senior Essays, the highlight and summit of the St. John’s education, were due on February 14th. To speak precisely, they have until midnight of the 15th, but most of them try to get them in by 9:00 pm. The president offers the seniors a nice reception, so most of them dress for the occasion and have a good time. The night when senior essays are due is one of the noisiest nights of the year. To begin with, seniors get to ring the bell in the tower of Weigle Hall. Traditionally, seniors would get a ring per page, so a 37-page paper would equal 37 rings. Those were the good old times; back then, our hill was not as populated with retirees, monks and artists. Rumor, Virgil’s beast of many eyes and tongues, has informed some of us that many neighbors complained about the unending tolling of the bells (in actuality from 9-12am), thus, as a result, they only get to ring the bell five times.
However, there is more mayhem to come. As seniors triumphantly leave Weigle with an air of pride for their great accomplishment, the juniors are giving the ultimate touches to a skit that portrays most of the seniors in good-humor. Yes, we make fun of them! But things are not as unfair, for seniors on the other hand, who get to make fun of the tutors in what is known as senior skit. Junior skit lasted for about an hour and half last Saturday night (well, Sunday morning), so the whole thing probably ended about 2:00 am. With the seniors re-reediting their papers, and the Juniors rehearsing most of the day, maybe the January freshmen were the only Johnnies that cared to have a Valentine’s.

What does Aristotle have to do with Disney’s Little Mermaid?

This last week was hell week for all those who have summer ambitions. Let me clarify…those who have worldly ambitions of the internship kind. St. John’s offers a summer stipend, called ARIEL, for students who want to seek summer internships in any discipline. A tutor framed the acronym to mean “Award for Relating Intense Education to Life.” So when you go down to the Career Services Office you see the picture of the little mermaid posted on the door. Well, the common chatter these days is about the upcoming Ariel deadline. Last year, as a sophomore, one of my close friends secured himself an internship with the Kansas Symphony Orchestra; he transferred to the Annapolis campus, and I think he finally decided on studying music composition after St. John’s. Seeing my friends solidify their interests and future career plans not only gladdens me but also makes me somewhat nostalgic. I am reminded that people here at St. John’s have such diverse interests. ‘Kwak’ (the nickname I gave to my best friend) is applying for a summer internship reserved for Johnnies by an Alumnus who is now doing research in a biomedical lab, while my other good friend, Mr. Winget, or as I call him “Winget”, has decided to intern with our Director of Laboratories Bill Donahue. Winget is looking forward to earning a PhD in Mathematics, and he is currently working on a website that so far features breakthrough propositions of Euclid, Apollonius, Newton and Isaac Barrow. His project, still in progress, is way more ambitious and elaborate than my simplistic summary. I, for my part, applied for a summer fellowship that provides the resources for undergraduates to pursue research in the Humanities. I have received an offer from Princeton and Cornell, but still waiting on Yale. So it goes, juniors are all asking themselves the question that is comfortably delayed being here at St. John’s, that is: What am I going to do after these four years of intellectual indulgence? Well, cultivating the mind is an option, but Aristotle phrased this problem nicely at the end of the Nichomachean Ethics, contemplation can only be afforded by meeting all other worldly needs.

"Outside the door listening to our crazy singing"

Every Tuesday kids from Santa Fe come to me for Spanish and Latin tutoring, but by some anomalous grace they all cancelled on me. I was then able to play piano, joke around with my friends, watch the sunset, and talk Borges with my smoky friend Mr. McCracken. Yet I still had another Spanish class to teach at 9pm, my student not being from Santa Fe but from a far away land. His name is Han Qi and he comes from Nanjing, China. He also teaches kids from town his beautiful language. To make the long story short, we have both agreed to teach each other our respective native languages, that is, Spanish and Mandarin, by meeting everyday for an hour. Progress is being made, however we have now detected our particular problems. I cannot memorize the tones and tend to make more consonant sounds in my Mandarin, while he tends to copy my intonation and forget about the consonants. So to get his mind off the tones, which are irrelevant if one follows the Spanish accents, I decided to sing Mexican folk songs with him. The result was beautifully atrocious! What was supposed to be a private Spanish lesson became a loud and public display of our bad singing. As I was trying to accentuate the words, I became gradually louder and so did he, in a completely different pitch. So apparently our dorm buddies were all outside the door listening to our crazy singing, and my RA was wondering if I was having a party. I hope he doesn’t make me sing Chinese songs today.