All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography — John Shaqi
All in the Day's Work: An AutobiographyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Journalists -- United States -- Biography; Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857-1944
The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting. Between
classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear a
horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An
imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that
side of the walk, only men go there.”
It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be
comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a
beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been
more severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves,
seated with the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In
winter (and the winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors
wet and cold. Often one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was
unheeding. My pioneer childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at
the start that I had found what I had come to college for, direction in
the only field in which I was interested—science. I found it in a way
that I doubt if Cornell could have given me at the moment, shy and
immature as I was: the warming and contagious enthusiasm of a great
natural teacher, one who had an ardent passion for those things which
had stirred me and a wide knowledge which he fed by constant study and
travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of Allegheny’s department of natural
science.
Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal.
Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many
hundred applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island
of Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the
Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could
understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly
it was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in
observation and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and
all her ways. For both men the material world was but the cover of the
spirit. Professor Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always
brings us back to absolute truth whenever we wander.”
This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious
tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage
of development where there must be a definite word by which to classify
oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I
repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find
out with the microscope what God and man are?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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