and skills from the large world roundabout. I imbibe a great deal of civilization through media books, computers, tapes, and so on. But such freeze-dried civilization would become quickly unpalatable if I couldnt also absorb civilization from the living presence of my colleagues and students. The social ambience of a campus is crucial; without it most people, myself included, would have little motivation for civilized pursuits. How have I advanced lately in civilization? From an article I have learned that the hydrocarbons pristane and phytane make good chemical fossils that is, when found in a rock formation they are indicative of extremely primitive life forms because they persist without change through geological time and are not formed outside of living organisms. From a colleague speaking at a brownbagger I have learned that in certain reptiles the pineal gland is photore-ceptive and serves as a kind of third eye. From a student in a hallway conversation I have learned that Bach wept while composing the St. Matthew Passion. Random, chaotic, soon-to-be-forgotten facts? Maybe not. Im often startled by the understanding I attain from random facts. In any event I took pleasure in learning these facts. They excited me, revived and refreshed me, gave me a sense of acquisition and adventure, made me feel more wealthy and powerful. Obviously some students arrive on campus already converted to civilization while other obdurate and hardy barbarians successfully resist conversion through a four year stay. So I cant assert that the freshman year is more promising than any other, nor that Freshman English is a more promising course than some other. By sheer whim I make a special association between Freshman English and civilization. As Ive already said, I need something to feel zealous about when teaching it. Furthermore, I retain a nostalgic memory of my own passage through Freshman English years ago, which in retrospect seems one of the most important courses I ever took. My Arizona boyhood was tuned to little towns, to church socials and family parties, to corn and cattle, to silvery plains and forested canyons. Having enrolled in Brigham Young University in the fall of 1951, I endured an unhappy year, being morose over a lost girlfriend, homesick for my mother, scornful of Provo customs, and depressed by Utahs looming mountains and the snow which began to fall in November and piled up until April. The university arbitrarily assigned me for three quarters to the same Freshman English instructor, Olive Birmingham, a woman of attractive features whose precise grooming and implacable composure filled me with something like the fear of God. Her syllabus called for a weekly cycle of themes, vocabulary lists, studies in a handbook, and readings in an anthology, with which I grappled in a conscientious and apparently mediocre manner. My final grades for the three quarters were C, C, and B, my single triumph being a third quarter research paper on forest fire control, which Mrs. Birmingham awarded an A minus. I can still identify a little of what I did and didnt learn in the course. I grasped the concept of unity as I see from the fact that the margins of my anthology, which I still have, are littered with my penciled notation, central idea. That term was a favorite with Mrs. Birmingham and to this day I often use it when explaining unity to my students. From my handbook I remember learning the distinction between theyre, there, and their; sit and set; and lie and lay. I mastered the use of the subjunctive in statements of wish or supposition I wish I were and if he were a usage which momentarily paralyzed my mind. I also learned to use the pronoun he rather than they in reference to indefinite pronouns like everyone and somebody. (Alas, life is in constant flux. Handbooks now permit I wish I was and attach a sexist label to he used in reference to indefinite pronouns.) I think, however, that I missed most of what was in my handbook just as my students today seem to miss most of what is in theirs, a good handbook being rich far beyond the capacity of freshmen to exploit. I know I failed to grasp case, because I can remember the moment two years later when I finally caught it. One evening I showed my date a little poem in which one of my lines began To he who.... She said, You cant say to he. Its gotta be to him. She explained and when I got back to my dorm, I opened my handbook, read awhile, and finally understood subjective, objective, and possessive case. However, it wasnt the technicalities that I mastered, few or many, that made Freshman English into a crucial course for me. It was the peripheral subject matter which contributed to my awakening intellectuality, particularly the readings in the anthology serving as a source of topics and rhetorical patterns. I have considerable affection for this old book. Patterns for Living, Macmillan, 1949, which with assignments duly marked and margins copiously annotated allows me to revivify in some small degree both the wonder and distress of my freshman year. One focus of my peripheral learning was the weekly vocabulary list twenty unfamiliar words drawn from assigned reading, each with its pronunciation and definition and a sentence in which I made appropriate use of it. I remember learning nexus and modicum, words which have proven constantly useful in speech and writing. Another word, cole-opteron (any insect belonging to the order Coleoptera), I have never until this moment found an overt use for. Conceptually, however, it was instantly useful, its implication of biological orders setting me on the road to understanding taxonomy. Who can measure the education latent in random words? As the vehicle of thought, emotion, and image, words furnish, evoke, and even in a sense create the mind. To this day I love words for their own sake, having awakened to their larger significance through Mrs. Birminghams vocabulary assignments. An even more important kind of peripheral learning came from the express meanings of the anthologys works stories, poems, and essays thematically grouped under such headings as The Arts, The World of Science, and The Appeal of Religion. I read all the short stories well ahead of class assignments for entertainment and escape. Some of the stories were simply pleasant. James Thurbers The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Stephen Vincent Benets The Devil and Daniel Webster made me laugh and affirmed things I already believed in. Others were disturbing. Walter Van Tilburg Clarks The Portable Phonograph taught me that civilization is a fragile, precarious condition; Willa Cathers Pauls Case, about a sensitive