Word: clive
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...Yiddish word kochleffl might well have been coined to describe Professor of History and Literature John Clive, who died last month. I never knew him in the classroom and never would have known him at all had he been able to keep his nose out of other people's business. Yet because he could not, he became one of the dearest people I knew at Harvard...
...applied for a fellowship during my senior year, and Clive was one of my dozen interviewers. I received the fellowship, the interviewing committee dissolved, and Harvard more or less finished with me. Clive, however...
...interpretive skills were clearly deficient that day. Four days before graduation, Clive left a message for me with the Lowell House superintendent--Clive was wholly oblivious, I am convinced, to the student directory and the University operator. I returned his call, only to find that during the intervening two weeks he had made my casual luncheon remark his preoccupation. He had written letters and made transatlantic phone calls to friends and old colleagues. He was, I'm afraid, more concerned about my situation than...
...Tuesdays, Clive would deliver a character sketch of the historian in question, empathetic, but tempered with sly asides; shuffling his papers, quietly harrumphing, Clive would look off out the window, a laugh warming his voice as he hit the point of a anecdote. His sympathy for these people, who had devoted their lives to telling the human race where it has been, was strong. I remember most vividly his telling us about the shy, morose Henry Adams, who also taught history at Harvard. As the class wound to the end of the hour, and he related...
...hands, is a fluid thing; unfortunate as it is, the telling of our past by a historian, often, for all intents and purposes, becomes the past. We can only directly act on what we directly know. This is why history must be told well, told honestly, told vividly. John Clive did this. Now he is dead, and we have only his books...