Recollections of a Golden Age

by Rudolph Schevill

From Back Very few of the great scholars I have known throughout the long years of my university life had the boldness and the innocence of soul to be totally truthful to themselves in teaching their young students, Rudolph Schevil was one of them. He didn't lecture. He relived with us the personal experience of intellectual discovery, the joy of confronting a mystery in order to give it sense, order and beauty. Thus, he illuminated the age of Cervantes and Erasmus, unassumingly leading our minds through the labyrinth of a dying society and the birth of a modern one. Reading this memoir of his youth lived with passion and daring, with tenderness and humor, his image has come back to me. In his words so full of wisdom, intelligence and understanding, I see once more the silver halo of this man I knew when I began my university career and again I feel the sense of starting an unexpected and vast journey, precisely at the moment when he was coming to the end of another so much richer and meaningful than anything I had envisioned before. Schevill gave the word humanism the only meaning I could accept then and now, that of knowledge learned through action, of erudition blossomed in the act of poetry. - Fernando Alegria, Sadie Dernham Patch Professor of Humanities, Stanford University

224 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1985

Reviews

[Mills College Library]

Biog S328s 1985