LETTERS: THE SOUL STILL HUNGERS FOR LOVE AND BEAUTY

To the editor:

A recent editorial in an eastern daily praised the new look in required college courses which pretty well eliminated traditional requirements in English and American literature as well as studies of serious music and art. "Not much to be found in these," the editor believed. "Let them study things relevant to the present age and need."

Even without this fellow's complaint, the elimination of much of the material he finds of no value has already taken place. As a student of the liberal arts who has spent most of his career teaching exactly those things which the editor blasts, I am of course offended. However, those very studies which he castigates have trained me to be a gentleman and to treat him with more kindness than he deserves. I shall use a show-and-tell approach, drawing from my own experience. Nothing in what follows is hypothetical. All is drawn from life.

My mother is dead. I return to her old garden years later and see the flowers she planted are still blooming, and I recall the line in one of those "worthless books" which I required my students to read: "I see her in the dewy flowers; I see her bright and fair." It hurts a little less now. Burns wrote that over 200 years ago, and since then it has cheered many who have faced loss. Maybe I should take a course in Grief Resolution 102, but for me it helps to read poetry.

So I'm getting older. Who isn't? It was great to be a child, and I remember the poet writing, "Though nothing can bring back the hour of Splendor in the Grass, of Beauty in the flower." I admit that, but I can still enjoy the grass and flowers. And I throw into the trash an advertisement for a stroke kit that some money-hungry huckster sent me.

We followed the old road on our first trip to California and near Gilroy, after a sharp bend, saw in the valley below a grove with ripe oranges and beyond that the white surf and then the ocean standing on the horizon. And the three of us began singing, "O, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain." That was to my brother's wedding. They recently observed their golden wedding, but no one of use has forgotten.

Or a student wrote that he sometimes became frantic about the modern world and would take his pickup and drive deep into the woods and then walk deeper yet and sit on a log. "Only then would things get better." But after studying Jake Wells' painting of a cabin, the student found the calm. Another student told me that after a class in which such things were studied, he saved his money and bought the complete symphonies of Beethoven and that other members of the family were ecstatic and told him that they had no idea there was such beauty in the world.

Throw it out? All this beauty? I'm not ready to. I have listened to popular TV for years, but I have not acquired nor will I ever acquire from TV that anthology of the best and beautiful that I learned from all of those courses which some argue should now be eliminated so that we might study something "relevant." What remains relevant is the soul of man and its hunger for love and beauty.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau