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