From the Editor

People in the Sun (1960) is one my favorite Hopper paintings.  It depicts two rows of people facing right, facing west? There are wavy dark mountains in the distance below a blue sky showing a breath of white cloud and a field of wheat straw in between the mountains and this concrete patio blanched white where people in deck chairs sit, facing the sun.  There is a building behind them with a hint of a doorway to the inside, some institutional-like block thing, but the people are outside in the sun, and that’s the main point, in rows together.  It is one of the few Hopper paintings that even comes close to being gregarious, a joint enterprise of people admiring what's out there.

It's a painting of five people, three men, two women, but one man in the back row is reading a book, and I think that’s what I like about the painting, that he has his head bent in reading prayer, while the people in the front row, oblivious, and well dressed, are engaged in a moment of looking out from where they are, and in silence.

One imagines it could be some kind of vacation hideaway in the great American West, some retreat, some academic conference, and if it wasn't for the intended silence, one could believe it. (There is much unintended silence at a conference).

But I like the reading man, the together-and-apart part of the painting, the man engaged, reading, listening, aware of the here inside the solitary imagination and the there outside, yet belonging to the group even in this way.  After all, he knows the out-there is still there, no matter where his mind takes him.  More pragmatically literal, it is a comfort to know a person can read in public, that they can belong and be a part at the same time, and that it's okay. Reading in a bar, or the neighborhood restaurant, at the ball park, underneath the shade of Georges Seurat's tree, even with a child on your lap sleeping, is the freedom of the "I" while serving the "We" -- a balance that often tilts from time to time.

Either tip can be a tyranny -- the isolato with his own brand of liberation who will burn the world down to get it -- or the obsequious sycophant chained to serve the personality of power, or the righteousness of consensus.  The man in the second row in Hopper's painting seems to be neither, but balanced and secure.

Listening to the speeches of the outstanding graduates, I also heard that balance.  Both marking a moment of some gained wisdom.  Not wisdom merely in the accumulation of fact or writing skill or reasoning ability, but wisdom in the age-old understanding of it -- some sense of judgment that embraces the rational and ethical, and an awareness of the soul's mystery and the depths of self-knowledge, an understanding of the self apart and belonging to the larger world.

The ways to wisdom are several, according to the ancients, but not many -- meditation, imitation, and experience -- perhaps all three in some shape similar to the methods of a university education.  Though the "W" word(s) makes many academics uncomfortable in its universal supposition and elusive discernment, we, who have been fortunate to study and to teach language and literature, have meddled in all three methods.  Meditation, according to Confucius et al, is the most noble method; that is -- reading and writing, reflecting, and sitting on the stew.  Nick Frankenhauser and Rachel King reminded us that wisdom comes, in spite of terminal academic degrees and faculty achievement, and is the better sun that shines above the things we do.