October 1957

A senior wrote to her parents: “I have been doing some fascinating reading for my central English course, in which our first section of study is devoted to the handling of time in contemporary literature; we were referred to Bergson, St. Augustine, T. S. Eliot, by way of background, and are reading Eliot’s Four Quartets, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Mrs. [Agnes Rindge] Claflin’s nineteenth and twentieth century p’t’g. is fun because it’s hers, and she is a delightful, if scatter-brained, lecturer, owing to her special sense of humor combined with a quality of the worldliness that Mother was talking about the other day, a soupçon of which is essential to any real personality. My other courses are Contemporary Drama…and a required course on the development of the language. UGH—and please no philosophical mish mash on its ultimate value!”

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