In a way, my life since then has been a distant reflection of those boyish hopes. I switched from physics to mathematics, and in fits and starts, after hanging around Ithaca for eight years, I finally got a BA. I moved to New York City, and with more fits, more starts, in 1985 I finally got a Ph.D. in mathematics from the City University of New York. My field is dynamical systems, the qualitative study of differential equations using tools from topology. I chose it because it is rich in interesting problems both pure and applied. After two years at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and three years at Tufts, and one year at Trinity College in Hartford, I got a job crosstown at the University of Hartford where I have been ever since. I am currently working on a mathematical model of two interacting pools of neurons which is called the Wilson-Cowan model. Well, neurons are in the brain, which has something to do with the mind, which has something to do with the humanities. In the Spring 2001 issue of The Mathematical Intelligencer, I have an article on the philosophy of mathematics, which also has something to do with the humanities.

Here is the place where you talk about the wife and the kids. For some reason, no wife, no kids. At least not yet.

In the spring of 1969, as Cornell cracked up, so did I. By June of that year I was out of psychiatric hospitals. Since then I have never taken any medication nor have I sought any professional help for mental illness. I mended my soul by thinking about it. It took a while.

The greatest influence on my life in my Cornell days was my teacher Allan Bloom. He went on to write the bestseller THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND and to be the model of the character Ravelstein in the Saul Bellow novel of that name. Bloom followed his teacher Leo Strauss in claiming that the best human life was a life dedicated to philosophy understood as inquiry about the whole of things, natural and human. After I left Ithaca, I continued these kinds of studies by attending for ten years the classes of my brother Seth Benardete. Seth taught classics at NYU and philosophy at the New School. He died this past November. To learn more about this unusual man go to the website www.benardete-memorial.org.

In the fall of 1989, after years of atheistic/agnostic nonbelief, I called out to god to help me in the middle of severe anxiety attacks brought on by fears of academic unemployment. And god was there, immediately. And has been there ever since. Seek and you shall find says the gospel and the tune. I like to use the lower case, following Melville in a letter to Hawthorne, who states that the upper case smells of flunkeyism. Along with my prayers, I continue with inquiries in speculative theology, trying to figure out who or what this god is. I am too far gone to rest content with any kind of traditional belief, though I still honor the Judaism I was brought up in.

I remember all sorts of fun things from my days in the Res Club. Howie Bursen could do a dead-on imitation of Allan Bloom, stutters, gestures, and all. I remember tossing pillows back and forth from my perch on the second floor balcony. I remember Joe Savago getting the idea of us calling some radio talk show, pretending that we were concerned parents, wondering whether to send our kids to the Six-Year program or to a good university. Can it really be that Joe is dead? How I remember him dismissing uncool things as ``oh, norko''. I suppose I was very ``norko''. I remember taking late night rides down through the cemetery and over to the State Diner. I remember us crazy kids getting a pile of bricks and erecting some sort of altar in the lobby, and then prostrating ourselves in worship.

I believe that the Res Club was one of the first coed dormitories in the country. People were reading then Robert Rimmer's book THE HARRAD EXPERIMENT which told of all sorts of wonderful things which would come of such innovations. I think it was a good thing for someone like myself who was totally inept with the opposite sex. At least I got to talk to you over breakfast, gracious ladies.

There were also our studies. After breakfast, we would head off down Triphammer Road to the main campus. We were supposed to fulfill our general education requirements by taking special seminars which had six credits attached to them. Mattjes Jolles of the German Department taught one of them. We read Goethe's YOUNG WERTHER and Schiller's LOVE AND INTRIGUE. Jolles confessed to us that he himself had once tried to write poetry but that he lacked the talent. I remember that one day Mike McFarland spoke to me after class, and told me that I was mistaken about poetry. It was not just emotional expression but it also had a cognitive component. James Marchand taught another seminar, this one devoted to the Middle Ages and to Wolfram von Eschenbach's PARZIVAL. Marchand, who hailed from the Appalachian hill country, and who was proud to be a hard-shell Baptist, was also a fantastically erudite man who claimed to have read all medieval literature up through the eighth or was it ninth century. He made a distinction between hoity-toity folks and us good plain people. He thought of Allan Bloom as hoity-toity. We learned about the different kinds of courtly love such as something called hohe-minne. We learned about the sixth century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville. Marchand was charmed by Isidore's fake etymology for aves, a via, no path, which is how birds travel.

Not to neglect the other side of things, one of the faculty in residence was Michael Balch from the Department of Mathematics. One day he brought in someone else from the Department to talk about the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. On reading the announcement of the talk, even Fred Kardon expressed fear that it would be way over his head. Or at least so he pretended. Later Fred and I were lab partners on a project in a physics course, measuring the Johnson noise in a resistor and using that to compute Boltzman's constant. I was assigned the task of presenting our results. I had difficulty because I did not understand the complex version of the Fourier transform.

I wasn't a good student. I very often skipped class and went off to read in the stacks of Uris Library or in the Browsing Library in Willard Straight Hall. If any of my students should try to pull such a stunt on me, I would drop them from the course immediately.

In the browsing library I would read periodicals which discussed the growing war in Vietnam. I do not remember much discussion of the war in the Res Club that first year, except for one occasion when a group of us gathered for an informal teach-in in Michael Balch's room at the end of the corridor.

Timothy McKibben was a graduate of Phillips-Exeter. In his senior year there he had taken a tutorial on T. S. Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS. He set up a study group for the poem. He explained that the lines ``Garlic and sapphires in the mud/ Clot the bedded axle-tree'' refers to the Cross. He liked Bob Dylan. I remember a group of us gathering in his room to listen, oh so carefully, to the newly released BLONDE ON BLONDE. He had a little portable record player, nothing fancy. Timothy was a serious and noble young man. He died that summer, climbing in the Alps.

The night of April 5, I was working late in my room on a paper for Allan Bloom's Government 462 course. I was writing on the character Polus in Plato's GORGIAS. I had open in front of me the translation by Jowett in a two volume set from the Random House Modern Library which I had taken to Cornell from my father's library. I heard a noise in the corridor and went out and found smoke. I tried to set off the fire alarm, then I knocked on several doors to wake people up, and then I made my escape out the window in my first floor bedroom. Some of us tried to get a ladder from a nearby fraternity to help the people on the second floor. We also crawled around to the top of the kitchen in back of the Club in order to see if we could help anyone there. I was alert and wide awake, so I could do these things. Most of the students were drowsy from sleep and dazed by what was happening. I still have that Jowett Plato, stained by smoke on the page to which it was opened.

I will try to come to the reunion in June.

January 8, 2002. Errors, comments: email to benardete@mail.hartford.edu