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Greenfield Library Archives, 1979

In MemoriamDavid H. Stephenson

1936-2012

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Founded in 1980, the Gadfly is the stu-dent newsmagazine distributed to over 600 students, faculty, and sta! of the An-napolis campus.

Opinions expressed within are the sole responsibility of the author(s). The Gad-fly reserves the right to accept, reject, and edit submissions in any way necessary to publish a professional, informative, and thought-provoking newsmagazine.

The Gadfly meets every Sunday at 7 PM in Room 109 on the first lower level of the Barr-Buchanan Center.

Articles should be submitted by Friday at 11:59 PM to sjca.gadfly@gmail.com.

Nathan Goldman • Editor-in-ChiefIan Tuttle • Editor-in-Chief

Hayden Pendergrass • Layout EditorReza Djalal • Photographer

Sasha Welm • CartoonistJonathan Barone • Sta!Andrew Kriehn • Sta!Robert Malka • Sta!

Sarah Meggison • Sta! Kevin Morris • Sta!Charles Zug • Sta!

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C,'$+16%$,+#Justin AndrewsSteve EdwardsAdam EggersPamela KrausChris NelsonChris Olson

Kimber Richter Jim Scott

M.W. SinnettMax Socol

Michael SullivanDavid Townsend

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Thank you to everyone who contributed to our

commemoraton of the life of Mr. David Stephenson. In order to devote the full issue to Mr. Stephenson, we have chosen to print our other time-sensitive submissions online. You can read them at issuu.com/sjcgadfly.

We hope you have a restful holiday vacation. See you in 2013! !

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Thank you for joining us this afternoon.We celebrate the life and mourn the death of tutor David Hanford Stephenson,

a good, strong, and joyful member of our community, who will be greatly missed by all of us—faculty, sta!, and students alike. Mr. Stephenson died yesterday afternoon at the Anne Arundel Medical Center after a struggle with an aggressive form of cancer. This was Mr. Stephenson’s 50th year with the College. In recent years, his seniority earned him the honor of carrying the College’s mace and leading the faculty and students in Convocation and Commencement processionals. I think he took pride in doing this.

David Stephenson came to St. John’s bearing great musical gifts, which were first formally developed during his undergraduate studies at Columbia. Since he joined the faculty in 1963, Mr. Stephenson was active as conductor of the student orchestra and leader of the Freshman Chorus; he displayed a great fondness for the music of Beethoven. He was also fluent in songwriting; most notable, perhaps, are his settings of Heine poems. Most enjoyable, though, might have been his undertaking in the 1990s to write, orchestrate, and star in a musical skit performed by the faculty to Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, as a lesson to students in how to put on a proper and still comical senior skit. Recently, Mr. Stephenson was preparing an April orchestra concert featuring the music of Bach, Mozart, and Mendelssohn. And of course, it was only two weeks ago that we heard a lovely Friday-night lecture from him.

But of course he was well read throughout the work of the Program. Mr. Dylan Knight Rogers, a senior at the College, said of him earlier today: “Mr. Stephenson led our junior laboratory class with the confidence and élan that only come from a great intimacy with the elements of the most di)cult sciences. He displayed equal understanding and devotion for the harmonic complexities at work in Beethoven’s symphonic writing. This is easy to understand, for Mr. Stephenson was a great student of nature.”

Mr. Stephenson was a gentle man. He was also a correct man. We saw evidence of his care for the College and for his students in his Committee work, his speech in faculty meetings, and his don rag reports.

In the coming days, we will provide notice of further details of a more formal memorial service for Mr. Stephenson, but we thought it appropriate to gather informally today when we are all together on campus.

We extend our deepest condolences to David’s widow, Helen, and to his family.Mr. May will share a few words and then will lead us in the singing of “Sicut

Cervus.”Thank you. !

President Christopher B. Nelson SF’70

*Editor’s Note: An impromptu commemoration of Mr. Stephenson was held in McDowell Hall on Friday, November 30, 2012. !e president delivered the following remarks.

David Stephenson’s years at St. John’s College were spent persevering in the activ-ity of teaching and learning, which is the life of a tutor. As we know from experi-ence and from other testimonies, he cultivated his many gifts here and made us beneficiaries of them, not only those of music and mathematics, but also of lan-guage and art. He did so daily and naturally, without fanfare or sentimentality or drama. In his death he gave us—and especially his students—another gift, that of his example: the simple, deep strength with which he loved and lived teaching and learning right to the end. !

Pamela Kraus Dean

Elizabeth HennesseyHoward Zeiderman

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*Editor’s Note: !is interview was "rst published in Issue 7 of last year’s Gad!y. Because many students did not have the opportunity to get to know Mr. Stephenson, we reprint it here and hope that it serves as the smallest of introductions to a great Johnnie.How did you come to be a tutor at St. John’s? My advent at St. John’s was ex-tremely conventional: I sent a few hundred job search letters from graduate school and received half a dozen replies, among them one from the dean of St. John’s (John Kie!er at that time). I had little idea of what the school meant un-til I visited some classes, but, as soon as I did I was caught. Hard to say exactly why, but certainly a major attraction was my glimpse of a place in which I could spend a lifetime learning in the company of others, sharing and debating ideas and insights, helping and be-ing helped to indulge in all the his-torical and literary and scientific and philosophical curiosity I had thought I would have to abandon after graduation once the need to earn a living demanded my full attention.

What was the biggest adventure you’ve ever had? That’s really a hard one. Living a few years in Austria, with excursions into Italy and France, was certainly an adventure linguistically and culturally. To conduct an orchestra or com-pose music often seems to me equivalent to exploring a for-eign land; likewise reading a good book. Sailing, swimming, rock climbing, skiing: all adventures on a small scale. But if you forced me to single out a single occasion involving travel, I suppose I would point to a trip to the Pacific coast or a drive up the St. Lawrence seaway or a cruise in the North Sea and the Baltic...or a search through Beethoven’s original sketchbooks in the Viennese library now situated above the concert hall where many of his works were first performed or... What is the single most important piece of advice you would like to give to freshmen (or upperclassmen)? This is heretical, I suppose, but I would say, “Don’t believe any of the authors we read.” They’re just there to make you stron-ger if you wrestle with them and argue with them, and even if you end up in agreement, it will be your agreement and your understanding that persuades you, not their authority. What is your favorite seminar book and why? Montaigne, of course! (At least this year.) And something al-

ways draws me back to the Iliad every other year.

What is your least favorite semi-nar book and why? It’s hard not to become impatient with Descartes when he begins to preach and preach philosophy in particular, even though one can’t help admiring his mathemati-cal ingenuity and insight. In his defense, however, I would have to admit that without Descartes I don’t see how Kant would ever have been born.

What is your favorite non-Pro-gram book and why? A few of the moderns keep beckon-ing me, especially when they shed new light on music or on the fine arts. I’m thinking of philosophers

like Merleau-Ponty and Suzanne Langer. But I have to insist that Schopenhauer, for all his pessimism, explained the cru-cial importance of the arts—and especially music—long before the moderns. He has been too much neglected in this respect.

What is your biggest pet peeve (that students do) in class? Apologizing. If a student misses a class or an assignment it does maybe do some harm to the class as a whole, but that student su!ers more than the rest of us. An absence is rarely blameworthy, or so I hope and believe; failure to prepare for a class, on the other hand, can hardly ever be excused.

What is your favorite St. John’s tradition and why? There are probably few tutors left who remember the “soph-istry contest” that used to launch Reality Weekend. It was an occasion when tutors could join in the fun without entirely ruining their reputation. But that was in the Golden Age, when one tutor could tell a joke [that] would take ten [tutors] to mount nowadays.

What is your favorite class to be a tutor for and why? The Dean and Instruction Committee try to make it possible for tutors to teach what they want to teach each year, so my fa-vorite class is usually the one I’m teaching right now. But a lot depends on the students. An active and enthusiastic class on a difficult book or topic is much more rewarding than a dutiful but pedestrian class on a nominally more exciting subject. !

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My most vivid memory and impression stems from my sophomore year when I and my classmate and dorm neighbor Jim Carey were both in David’s nine o’clock music tutorial.

Every evening at around midnight Jim and I would wander over to West Street for a sub sandwich, and then return to our rooms in West Pinkney to settle in at Jim’s ancient and deteriorating phonograph to listen to Brahms and Schubert till 3, or 4, or even sometimes 5 in the morning. Though each had vowed to be the alarm for both of us, we were invariably late. Years later, in a don rag, David was berating a student who, though seri-ous, was always late to his early music tutorial. As he described the negative e!ect on others, he looked across the table and saw Jim and me waiting our turn to report. His jaw literally dropped, and then a few moments later, after he seemed to pu! on his by then imaginary pipe, he said perhaps he was being too harsh on this young man. For who knew, he continued, but perhaps this student would someday become a tutor. He knew that had certainly happened before and therefore could happen again. He o!ered this to the committee chair to record as he looked across to the two of us and shook his head with an amused or perhaps even more pointed smile. Of course, Jim and I turned every shade in the longer wavelengths of shame and embarrassment as Da-vid gave the two of us together the don rag report he probably wished he had been able to deliver years before. — Howard Zeiderman, Tutor

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I am, to begin with, an unreconstructed modernist. Al-ways have been and (probably) always will be. Wrote a

dissertation on Eric Voegelin (“fundamental experience of the cosmos”); read and reread all the Aristot-le (the order of the world is consummated in its intelligibility to man); Euclid Book XIII (Glory! Hallelujah!); Apollonius (Yay!)—Descartes (Boo!); even read the word of the Prophet Jacob Klein, Praised Be His Name!

Water o! a duck’s back, every bit of it. The world may fit comfortably in your mind (since the “world” is, by definition, whatever fits comfortably in your mind?), but it does not fit in mine. I have no expe-rience of the world as cosmos, but rather as a somewhat motley collection of sequential intimations of an order which will always—and rather spectacularly—elude me. The process for me “is essentially infinite”; my world “is a world still to be composed and never finished.”

The phrases I have quoted are taken from David Ste-phenson’s lecture “Ptolemy’s Truth,” delivered on 4 April 1997, five years before I joined the faculty of the College, and published in the St. John’s Review in the following year. The central focus of David’s lecture was his comparison of the epicycles of Ptolemy with individual terms in a Fourier series; its main achieve-ment, a luminous connection between two seemingly disparate approaches to the order of the world; its importance for me, a beautiful illustration of the sort of deep, calm reflection that is the means of all genuine interpretation and the basis of all fruitful conversation.

I once suggested to David that he could just as easily have entitled it “Fou-rier’s Truth”—the circular functions, after all, are a vast mathematical gener-alization of Ptolemy’s circles. He smiled his crinkly little smile and said, “We don’t read Fourier, do we?” Gentle, non-combative, and, as I later realized, ironic. Keep thinking, he was saying, and keep your eye on the needs of the College.

Keep your eye, in particular, on “Ptolemy’s Truth.” It was for me a turning point. It has made all the di!erence. — M. W. Sinnett, Tutor

David Stephenson was a de-lightful person with a vi-

sionary understanding of the possibilities of St. John’s’ mis-sion. I will miss him deeply and the many warm and enlightening conversations we shared. The wonder and power of music, the epiphanies and brilliant sensual-ity of Proust, the striking imme-diacy of poetry, profound insights into philosophical investigations, the joy of mathematics, all came richly to David in a seamless gar-ment of unending learning. How fortunate we are to have had Da-vid among us for so many years. — David Townsend, Tutor

photo by Anyi Guo

IN MEMORIAM

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Mr. Stephenson was my tutor for sophomore music, 2004-05. He’s the first tutor who was there when I was who has passed, and I do not look forward to hearing of more. The following are a few things that I fondly

remember of him.Mr. Stephenson was a fine gentleman who, like me, wore a straw summer hat (though mine did not have the clear,

green plastic visor that his did). He once spoke to me about where Plato mentions how some people have the ability to make money—and then, with a smirk and a smile in his eye, quickly added that he was not one of those people.

Once, while a few of us were drinking in the Quad late one night, Mr. Stephenson came walking through. I stopped him to ask a question, then thought better of it. In response to my saying that it’s foolish for a student to speak to a tutor while drunk, he responded, “Well, it’s too late for that, so why don’t you just ask your question.”

One of my favorite memories of Mr. Stephenson was when he assigned an essay for sophomore music, requiring that the paper must focus on music, that is, as he said, “it must use musical terms.” Well, I, like Socrates, know that I know nothing (especially about music, at any rate). So I set out to write a fine essay. The paper discussed music in terms of sounds, including vocals—especially foreign words. Since I didn’t know the language, I merely associated the vocals with all the other instruments. I used musical terms, just like he asked. But I was far from satisfied with the paper, so I took it to my trusty writing assistant to get his thoughts. Though his words were kind and construc-tive, the assistant basically told me the essay was bunk. I agreed. But I also didn’t know how to fix it, so, of course, I handed it in. Mr. Stephenson had nothing but good things to say about the paper! The full extent of the “musical terms” that I used (a mere one time each, just as they are listed here) were: “soprano,” “mezzo,” “tenor,” and “bass.”

Mr. David Hanford Stephenson met the student where the student was to pull the student further upward and forward. — Michael Sullivan, A‘07

I was in Mr. Stephenson’s freshman Greek class, 1979-

80. I believe it was the first time he taught Greek, and we had lively, productive classes, even though he would frequently point out his lack of expertise in the language. He created a sup-portive place to learn together. I find myself wondering why he made such a big impression on me. As the first person in my family to attend college, com-ing from the South, St. John’s was a real stretch for me—just as teaching Greek was for him. And I think he showed me that humility, humor, work, curiosi-ty, and kindness are fine tools for learning and leadership. When I think of him, I remember his sil-very baritone singing voice, the amused look in his eyes and the way a corner of his mouth would twitch a bit when he thought of something funny, and a very bright green velvet sportcoat he sometimes wore. Thank you so much, Mr. Stephenson, for help-ing me through my first year at St. John’s. — Kimber Paschall Richter, A’84

Greenfield Library Archives, ca. 1983

I had Mr. Stephenson in junior seminar (co-leader Leo Raditsa), in 1982-83. Also, he was my preceptorial tutor that year on Leibniz’s

New Essays on Human Understanding. I had much respect for Mr. Ste-phenson’s intelligence and relaxed manner. He was confident without needing to impress others about how smart he was, and curious, with-out trying to show that the things he was interested in were obviously the most important aspect of the work being discussed. I thought we dealt with the Leibniz book in great depth. Liebniz wrote it as a re-sponse to Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In many respects it was a Platonist’s response to an Aristotelian. Mr. Stephenson had a great grasp of the subject. The seminar that year was an occasion of great growth for me intellectually. I wrote my best essay of the four years in there, on Paradise Lost. I always felt I owed a lot to Mr. Raditsa and Mr. Stephenson. — Jim Scott A’84

IN MEMORIAM

Mr. Stephenson was a serious scholar, and his intensity set

the tone for not only freshman semi-nar, but also acted as a model for how we were to approach our stud-ies for the next four years. — Adam Eggers, A’91

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Mr. Stephenson was a kind and gentle man with a wry smile. I used to talk with him of a summer evening,

37 years ago, when he would appear on front campus in the cool of the darkness, taking his little dog for a walk.

He invited the summer freshmen, then called Febbies, to his home for a cocktail, and I was lucky to go along with them, being the “Feb-bie Father” in their dormitory that summer.

Mr. Stephenson was a cordial host to us. Thanks to him for the memory of his virtue. — Chris Olson, A’78

Mr. Stephenson was my tutor for junior lab 1978-79. The class was small, maybe a little too small, because some of

the members were the least loquacious members of the class of 1980. For the last day of the spring semester class, Sandy Dor-nich proposed to me that we bring wine and cheese to celebrate. When she told Mr. Stephenson of her plan, he said, “But can we still have class, too?” And indeed we did. — Steve Edwards, A’80

I was lucky enough to study music and seminar with Mr. Stephenson, and blessed along the way by his mentorship and friendship. He was

such a kind, thoughtful, and funny man. I remember how easy he was to talk to and how I much I enjoyed the chats we had when I caught up with him walking his dog along Prince George Street. He had a quiet eloquence and great generosity. He inspired in me a love for opera and choral music; you couldn’t help but be drawn in by his passion for great music and his desire that you share that passion. And wow was he smart. Working with him on my senior essay was a master class in how to sup-port the search for meaning and illuminate the way toward understand-ing—all with great patience and humor. Mr. Stephenson made a tremen-dous di(erence in my life, and I am truly grateful for his many gifts so generously bestowed on me and many many others.

I send sincere condolences to Helen and Jennie Stephenson. — Eliza-beth M. Hennessey, A’77

Mr. Stephenson was the friend-ly, enthusiastic, slightly mad

leader of our sophomore music pro-gram. I struggled with the material, and for a while made the mistake of blaming the tutor. I doubt I ever re-ally got a handle on music, either as theory or expression, but by year’s end Mr. Stephenson had won me over. I remember watching in stu-pefaction as he played one of his own atonal compositions at a small concert in McDowell; or the uncon-firmed rumors that flew around our class that he was the pseudonymous author of multiple pulp sci-fi novels.

His preceptorial on Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way—a book that really ought to be part of the Pro-gram—was a revelation for me. As much as I enjoyed seminar, and as much as I savored it in the final months of my senior year, I don’t think I ever felt so much anticipation for conversation as I did during that precept. But the experience would have been so much less without Mr. Stephenson’s patience, good humor, taste, and depth of knowledge, par-ticularly of art. I believe he felt the interplay of art and memory on a deep level, and through him we had a glimpse of it.

To me, Mr. Stephenson embodied certain peculiar qualities of the ideal tutor: openness, breadth of learning, interest in students, and patience for the painstaking process of educat-ing those who are only just arriving to the world of books. I’ll never for-get our final Proust seminar in his home, where the walls were covered in beautiful art, any more than I will forget a Saturday afternoon weeding his garden and being paid in beer. I admire and even envy his life and the joy he took in it. — Max Socol, A’08

IN MEMORIAM

photo by Anyi Guo

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Articles• “Introduction to ‘The Tuning Fork.’” St. John’s Review 48.2 (2005). 27-28. Print.• “Is Nature a Republic?” St. John’s Review 35.2 (Spring 1984): 34-39. Print.• “Muthos and Logos.” St. John’s Review 48.3 (2005) 41-55. Print. • “Ptolemy’s Truth.” St. John’s Review 44.3 (1998): 73-96. Print.

Faculty File• “Humanistic Education and Scientific Literacy.” Hood College. 31 Mar. 1979. Lecture. Print. (Call Num-

ber: FaFi-StephensonD001)

Lectures (Audio) • “Beauty alone has looked on Euclid bare.” St. John’s College. 24 Jan. 1974. Audiocassette. (Call Number:

Tape 261)• “Ion’s Art.” St. John’s College. 30 Mar. 1990. Audiocassette. (Call Number: Tape 344)• “Is Nature a Republic?” St. John’s College. 6 May 1983. Audiocassette. (Call Number: Tape 630)• “The ‘oceanic feeling’: whole and part: a lecture.” St. John’s College. 18 Jan. 1979. Audiocassette. (Call

Number: Tape 438)• “The Sin of Learning, ‘in Faust we Trust.’” St. John’s College. 26 Mar. 1993. Audiocassette. (Call Number:

Tape 297) • “Talk on L. Carnot.” St. John’s College. 13 Jan. 1982. Audiocassette. (Call Number: Tape 635)

Lectures (Print)• “The Novel’s Moral Playground.” St. John’s College. 15 Jan 2010. Lecture. Print. (Call Number: Lec-STE

2010 Jan 15) • “The ‘oceanic feeling.’” St. John’s College. 18 Jan. 1979. Lecture. Print. (Call Number: Lec-STE 1979 Jan

18)• “Ptolemy’s Truth.” St. John’s College. n.d. Lecture. Print. (Call Number: Lec-STE n.d.)• “Refraction under Least Action.” St. John’s College. 1987. Lecture. Print. (Call Number: Lec-STE 1987)• “The Sin of Learning.” St John’s College. 26 Mar. 1993. Lecture. Print. (Call Number: Lec-STE 1993 Mar

26)

Manuals• “Freshman Music.” Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College, 1996.• “Readings on Di(erential and Integral Calculus and Related Subjects.” Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College,

1971. (Call Number: Oversize QA303.R43 1971)

Video• Twelfth Night. Dir. Elise Berg. Music: David Stephenson. St. John’s College 30 Apr. 2000. Videocassette.

(Call Number: Archives VHS 682a)

!"#$%&'(%)*+,#-,./0,1(2342*+)*Librarian Cara Sabolcik has graciously com-piled the following list of publications by Mr. Stephenson available in our very own Green-!eld Library. "e list is a testament to the breadth of Mr. Stephenson’s academic inter-ests—it includes studies in philosophy, music, mathematics, and more. We hope this list will serve to help the Polity continue to engage with Mr. Stephenson’s life and work.

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Standing on a chair barely rememberedthe lock of hair falling and brushed back and fallingit was all so hard to pay attention to the anachronistic spectacles always sliding his conductingour being conducted on the Fridays offifteen years agoseer-suckera squint eye as exasperated measureall of us there waiting to drink.

And death cu!s my stomach the way once when, alone, with a voice which, as one then said, was not the best,he stood on his chair with his spectacles sliding and sang for us Hinei Mah Tovcracked and joyous and full of life and every-one for once shut up.

I had forgotten that,on days of unexpectedwarmth in early springwhen I sing the samesong to myself and catch myself happy, I am remembering him.

Justin Andrews A’01

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