Santa Fe tutor Ralph Swentzell, a faculty member from 1966 until his retirement in 2003, died of cancer last summer. At a memorial service September 25, he was remembered as a lifelong learner, as a man with many diverse interests, and as a devoted husband and father. In the words of Dean David Levine, Mr. Swentzell represented for many of his colleagues “the paradigm of the St. John’s tutor: An insatiable desire for learning joined to a generous spirit, he mentored and inspired generations of students and tutors alike.”

Similarly, Mr. Swentzell’s ability to balance the demands of being a St. John’s tutor, while raising a family and pursuing many diverse interests, inspired colleagues such as Tim Miller, who joined the faculty shortly after Mr. Swentzell. “Because of the hours of study needed by a tutor teaching parts of the Program for the first time, the strain on the tutor’s home life is enormous... I think Ralph found a balance between the two obligations as well as any tutor I have known. The collaboration of Rina and Ralph in designing and building their beautiful solar home remains an inspiration for me and I’m sure for many others.”

The following are some additional remembrances from Mr. Swentzell’s colleagues and friends:

Jorge Aigla,Tutor
Ralph Swentzell was born in East Patterson, N.J., on July 13, 1938, attended the local public high school, and joined the U.S. Air Force Band at the age of 17 in 1956, where he remained for four years playing clarinet. In his free time he read widely and was much affected by the writings of Freud. He went to study psychology at Highlands University in Las Vegas, N.M., where he came under the tutelage of Robert Bunker and Stuart Boyd, and where he also met his wife and life companion, Rina. After Mr. Bunker and Mr. Boyd were recruited to St. John’s College, Mr. Swentzell followed, and he joined our faculty in 1966, retiring in 2003 after 37 years of active and exceptional teaching (and learning).

Ralph Swentzell made significant contributions to our Program: he was instrumental in introducing original papers to our music and junior mathematics tutorials, and his helpful handwritten notes for the junior and senior laboratories and senior mathematics are legendary in their clarity and true liberal approach. Ralph was an early incentive in the planning and formulation of the Eastern Classics program, and was responsible for the first-ever computer-based Chinese lexicon. Several of us had the privilege to be in his “Computers and the Mind” Schmidt Study Group the first year this fellowship was awarded.

If there ever was a man who learned from learning, it was Ralph Swentzell. For him, teaching was an excuse for touching—students and colleagues. To co-lead a seminar with him or to be in a tutors’ meeting with him, were transforming experiences. Every conversation (about anything) was a conversion. One could feel oneself learning from him and being changed by his authentic human presence. Ralph illuminated the texts, never disposing of them; he opened the books while he allowed himself to be intimately and personally opened by them. One could often hear him in the hallway or Quad. . . saying to his interlocutor: “Yeah, yeah that sounds right, and from what you are saying it is as if. . .” and then he went on clarifying and amplifying whatever was centrally at stake in the conversation.

His personal interests were deep and broad: neural networks, consciousness, quantum mechanics, computer modeling, relativity, emergence, Chu Hsi and Neo-Confucianism, Bodhidharma, thermodynamics, biochemistry. Ralph was an intrepid wind surfer, a house builder (he and his family built their lovely home in Santa Fe and their weekend home in Madrid), a jogger, and a lover of sweets and used bookstores, and since his retirement, he was engaged in learning how to play the guitar.

As an individual he was kind, gentle, acute, compassionate, without a tinge of pride in his polymathy or intelligence. Through him many of us were granted a glimpse into the mystery of friendship.

Ralph was a devoted husband for 45 years and a loving father of three wonderful daughters, grandfather of twelve, and great-grandfather of three children. He made time to be with his family, and to make a family.

Tom Simpson
Tutor Emeritus
In thinking about Ralph Swentzell, the word that comes first to my mind is “hearty.” I think of his hearty laugh, his zest for ideas, his love for people and for the world—his total dedication to the pursuit of truth, and an almost diffident modesty about any claim to having arrived at it! For many years, Ralph and I have been good companions in adventures of all sorts, including, most of all, adventures of the mind. Whatever crazy idea I came up with, I could always count on him to give a hearing to, and find some possibilities in it, but when I came up with a seemingly safe and innocuous idea, he would say gently that he’d been wondering about that—and I would find that the idea I had thought so simple and secure in fact had a very different side, and opened up in ways I had never imagined.

He liked to play with ideas, not because he took them lightly, but because he found them so beautiful and fascinating. The more seriously he took them, the more he delighted in that play. I think it’s fair to say that however far afield his personal interests took him, the college was always in some way close to the center of his life—not in its institutional aspect, certainly, but because those books and those questions were always so vivid and vital to him. They were part of his lifeblood, and that is why it was always so exciting to share them with him. He suffered immensely—more than most of us, I suspect—when institutional constraints seemed to cramp and distort that open chase for truth.

He did indeed voyage far from the known shores of our Western learning! Armed with that computer program he had devised to open Chinese works to our tutorial way of starting out by reading fascinating texts –he took off for the far shores of Eastern thought. He went to the core of the question of what language is, and how it serves thought. He knows, as Scott Buchanan had before him, that it is only by getting far outside the confines of our presuppositions, that we might be able to see ourselves in our true proportions—not as Western, or Eastern, but as fully human. With the Eastern Studies, he threw a challenge to the college, one which I always felt we had really failed to hear. It is not too late for that!

When Ralph got hold of a good idea, he would not let go of it. Many years ago, when he and I were thinking about possible spaces and other worlds, we began wondering about the strange structure of the Lobachevskian geometry. What would it mean, we wondered, to be living in a world like that? We tended to conclude, as everyone does, I guess, that depending on the scale, things might not seem so different. The closer you got, the less you would know where you were! There seemed to be a moral in that. We had that conversation long ago. But just a few weeks ago I had a chance to visit with Ralph one more time, catching him, as it happened, at a moment when he was briefly filled again with his old exuberance. He went up the little stairs to his computer room to make me a copy of the latest version of the Chinese dictionary—and then called down, “Hey! Come on up! I want to show you something!” Thinking back to that old conversation, he had worked up a computer program which was ready to take you anywhere you wanted to go in the Lobachevskian world. You could go to any farthest corner, and there look around to see what the cosmos looked like. Sure enough—our old speculation was verified: the deeper you got into that cosmos, the more it looked like home!

Ralph had achieved a special stance, at some far corner of the cosmos best known to him—from which he could see all his worlds at once—the Western one, with the music, the mathematics, the quantum perplexities he loved so much—the Pueblo one, in its deep peace with the cosmos—and the Chinese one, with its special power to see truth as at once aesthetic and whole. He hasn’t solved everything, or maybe anything, but he had seen so much! He was ready to take it all on, with that hearty laugh and an undying sense of wonder and amazement.

It was very typical of Ralph that at the end of our last few minutes together, he said he wanted to lend me a book. It was the philosophy of Hua-Yen, and he thought it might be just what I was looking for. I don’t yet know just what he meant, but I still have the book. I have my assignment, and I’ll see what I can do with it!

(Read by Hans von Briesen)

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