Bernadete at St John's (mar 1, 1955 – dec 20, 1957)
Description:
A brilliant man - he could just start delivering choruses from Greek tragedies at the drop of a hat, according to Eva Brann - but, "not student friendly" (agan, Eva) due to his habit of mocking inadequacy. He would read student papers in humorous ways...in public. Eva has a story of riding with him on buses when they were both in Greece with the American college there and he had a whole notebook in which he had assigned each student an animal, and anytime the student did a behavior like that animal, he would make a note. (!) This story is told in the short documentary/interview of Brann, "Higher Gossip" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp5kLBYxgEA He was just the clear superior of everyone around him, and he knew it.
Klein asked him to leave, and it was a "friendly agreement", and asked him for a recommendation and Benardete recommended Eva for the post, later joking that "he had meant to be malignant but it didn't work that way". Eva's take: he wasn't really a "friend of man". as a student of Leo Strauss, "he was so under the influence of the grandeur of the ancients and the diminishing of that in modernity, and especially in himself, that what came over as arrogance was really a kind of self-despising that came from maybe not overestimating but taking too personally the greatness of the great." ("Higher Gossip")
Added to timeline:
Great Books Education
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