U Chicago Stories

marlowe1
Thu, 23 Mar 2017 14:41:41 +0000

JBS - I can attest to the existence of those tunnels. Though never in them myself, I had friends who were! No murders ever came to their attention. Pity.

Famous professor stories could go on forever. 85Bears has inspired me. Here are a couple more:

1. Iconic Professor Norman Maclean (who in his retirement wrote "A River Runs Through It" and "Young Men and Fire") would reminisce in class about the billiard skills of Professor Albert A. Michelson, first American Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, who was a regular in the pool room of the Reynolds Club when Maclean was a young graduate student. Maclean thought that the very skills of attentiveness and precision that brought the Nobel Prize to Michelson were being applied to the pool cue. Maclean himself used to demonstrate very graphically his theory of the rhythm of good English prose by performing imaginary fly-casting actions in class. The beat is always 1-2-3, steady and without hurry. Given that "the human race is a god-damned mess" the tendency is to speed up the beat and end with a snagged ball of line. The same with writing prose: let it breathe and pay attention to the beat of it. Same with shooting pool - you've got to be smooth. You get the idea. A friend of mine who was himself from Maclean's home state of Montana was the lucky one - one summer he got invited to Maclean's cabin on Seeley Lake to go fishing! (My friend got his line snagged on that occasion.)

2. One Sunday morning, spring of 1964, I went for an early walk on the Midway (likely after a sleepless night). In front of me I glimpsed an elderly couple (so it seemed to me, but they were actually only 60ish at the time), tenderly holding hands and talking comfortably to one another. There could be little doubt that they had just spent the night together. It was inspiring to an 18-year-old to think that old people actually did this sort of thing. Then I took a second look. The lovebirds were no other than two of the towering giants at the U. of C. of those days - Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt. Who would have thought? I have subsequently read an Arendt biography that says that the two were great friends (which was not unexpected) but did not speak of a romantic aspect to the friendship. But why not? Reading great books and thinking great thoughts begs to be shared with another. It is inherently sexy!