Word: finley
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Finley's hallmark is his verbal legerdemain...
Undergraduates sometimes suspect an elaborate show designed to dazzle them. But Finley's show does not play to special audiences, and it is continuous. Recalls Professor Cedric H. Whitman, a colleague in the Classics Department: "I hadn't seen John in a year. Then one day I met him on the street. His very first words to me were, 'Humanities 2 is like a mulch pile. Each year I throw in a few new ideas, and they sink down to the soil...
Ensconced in his panelled study, surrounded by teacups and undergraduates, Finley takes unabashed delight in describing the advantages of an earlier time, the time of which his entire manner is a gracious remnant. "In my day," he says, "college was like a dirt country road with grass growing in the middle. Now it is like Route 128, and graduate school is like a turnpike. But what if you don't want to go to Albany...
Despite his distaste for modernism (Carpenter Center, he once said, resembles two pianos copulating), Finley himself works at mental urban renewal. Cambridge--Central Square and all--becomes "a jewelled necklace strung along the Charles." A stream of metaphors and classical allusions lends a rosy grandeur to what is, recasting it in more congenial form...
...Finley divides his time between two such goods. After graduating from Harvard in 1925 he became an instructor and finally a full professor in the Classics Department...