Samuel Scoville: Contact Hours

Friday, July 1, 2011

Contact Hours

Contact Hours

The heart of thinking is drawing
distinctions.

The heart of academics:
      arguing them out.

Heart of Liberal Art: relating them
(the distinctions drawn, instead of
sending one like Madeline down to
the cellar, and inviting the other,
like Roderick, to dinner table—
fall of the House of Usher all
over again and again.)

May I have an amen?

Well, then—improve my terms
and images and we can argue,
or what’s a college for? Contact
hours 24/7/365: we are always in
touch these days

          THINKING.
critical                      creative

Can you tell the difference?
Relate?

Separate, polarize, & characterize.
So there’s no likely hood of confusion.

Carl Critical Thinking & Carla Creative
Thinking walk into a bar…

Imaging the conversation. Do they just
get along? Decent back & forth?

Or all Carl, privileged character,
entitled, grandiose: doing the talking.

Carla merely obliging. In compliance.
Compliant?

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Auto Bio

I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by a thief in the night sometime in the late 19^thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow, squeezing off a couple of rounds and sending the burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons of family notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down to Philadelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him. She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-it would have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY but INSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville

Samuel Scoville