A second explanation

            A second explanation for the library of Johnston textbooks lost to conscious memory is that the missing books really weren’t very good or important, and that this is in fact demonstrated by my inability to remember anything from them of a substantive nature or applicable to my recollection of my life at the time.  This hypothesis grants a wondrous power of judgment and discernment to the mechanics of my remembering, and gives my unformed eighteen-year-old mind the great tribute of presuming it capable of understanding anything of significance that might have passed before it on paper.

Possible Explanations (the First)

            Several possible explanations for the lacunae in my readings at Johnston as now recollected occur to me.  The most obvious is just that over thirty years have gone by, and that’s long enough to bury most memories under the sheer volume of succeeding events, even if those events consist largely of getting up in the morning, going to work, and having a couple of beers in the evening.  The hope contained in this first hypothesis is that only a Proustian catalyst is required to bring back the lost memories whole and having a freshness which the stories I’ve told and re-told myself in the meantime are wholly lacking.

Archaeology of Knowledge

            Between 1975 and 1977 I attended Johnston College, a hippie school associated with the University of Redlands which at that time had its own independent accreditation.  I dropped out of school because of concerns about money and ideas about ideals, and within a year or two after that Johnston College was re-absorbed into the University as the Johnston Center, where it has thrived ever since.  I begin with the notion that the whole account of this, my purest attempt at a “liberal education,” might be structured through the books I read both inside and outside of classes while there.

            But in setting out my list, I discover that I’ve forgotten many if not most of the books I read in classes, especially the ones that would lend this exercise a certain kind of intellectual credibility.  What remains are for the most part either books that were best-sellers in 1976 and 1977, and justified in classes either by instructors or students like myself for their “relevance,” or more abstruse works that are the most obvious displays of the period’s intellectual fashion (post-structuralism rolling steadily into deconstructionism).  I find no foundational texts, nor even rigorous surveys of the fields of my interests except perhaps for Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.