I've started a wonderful adult-education seminar at Chicago's Newberry Library on American Writers in Paris. This week we read passages from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Although ostensibly the autobiography of her companion, Alice B. Toklas, the book continues plenty of pithy insights into Stein's own fascinating life.
Stein was a pupil of William James at Radcliffe, and the two were very close. I loved the following passage, describing Stein's senior exam in William James' class:
It was a very lovely Spring day. Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night, and going to the opera also in the afternoon, and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James's course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. "Dear Professor James," she wrote at the top of her paper, "I am so sorry, but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today." and left. The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself." And underneath it he gave her the highest mark in his course.
I wish I'd had James as a professor.
-LC
Stein was a pupil of William James at Radcliffe, and the two were very close. I loved the following passage, describing Stein's senior exam in William James' class:
It was a very lovely Spring day. Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night, and going to the opera also in the afternoon, and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James's course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. "Dear Professor James," she wrote at the top of her paper, "I am so sorry, but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today." and left. The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself." And underneath it he gave her the highest mark in his course.
I wish I'd had James as a professor.
-LC
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