|
Stony Brook Dirge: ‘But the Best Is Lost’ Newsday Friday January 2, 1970
“I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.” James O’Neill stood before the microphone and calmly, in a voice sharp with resonance, read the “Dirge Without Music” by poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay to the 125 persons who had gathered in yesterday’s autumn dusk on the campus of the State University at Stony Brook. They had come to pay tribute to Ashley Schiff, an associate professor of political science who had died of a heart attack eight days before. Schiff’s widow, Dorothy, and others who knew the man sat on the stone steps and the lawn in back of Cardozo College dormitory and listened as the tributes were paid and paid again: “So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned.” Ashley Schiff, 37 when he died, was regarded with reverence by many students, as though he were a Plato who had settled among them by chance. Those who spoke of him yesterday called him brutally honest with himself and others, a demanding teacher, a pasionate conservationist. No one in attendance reflected the resentment of authority that has come to symbolize today’s American campus. “Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you/ Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” The service was brief, and as it ended the mourners formed a procession behind the college and walked slowly toward a woods nearby, entering through a trail that wound under stands of oaks and maples where Schiff and students often walked. “One morning he was bustling around the quad putting up posters, and I told him that he had the best college program going,” student Jeanne Douglas said, referring to the cultural and social programs that Schiff ran as master at Cardozo College. “And he said, ‘Thank you, Miss Douglas, thank you . We try, we try.’” “A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew/ A formula, a phrase remains – but the best is lost.” Robert Hirst, a psychology major, recalled: “I went up to his office one day and asked him why his college was the most active. He asked me if I had 10 minutes. We spent an hour and 15 minutes going over the college’s plan, and when I left, my head was spinning with ideas.” “The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love/ They are gone…” The trail seemed to end where it began. The procession filed out into the crumpling autumn sun light from the woods, which may someday be named in his honor. The university has said at least 12 acres, as yet undetermined, would be set aside forever wild on campus in memory of Schiff’s love of nature and his work in conservation. O’Neil, a senior economics major, stood beside the woods and, holding his book of poetry, said, “During the summer, he and I talked about preserving wild areas on campus. He was very pessimistic. He had tried for five years. There had always been something standing in the way.” “A formula, a phrase remains – but the best is lost.”
|
