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Description
My association with Cliff goes back to when we were both students at Antioch College. He was a fidgety, scratchy, given-to-mumbling sort of guy, in no way prepossessing although I knew on first exchange that he was no ordinary student. Not that he was given over much to casual conversation, even in that high academic moment known as the Veteran Generation, when student discussions (or better, arguments), usually about politics, were pretty much the order of the day. Cliff tended not to get involved, but if drawn in he invariably delivered some uncommon insight, often in the form of a quick retort followed by silence--a silence that some of us took as a reproach or embarrassment, as if our commentary fell short in some way. I remember in particular one heated and very undergraduate discussion over whether values were objective or relative. Cliff put an end to the conversation by saying that the only way to affirm a value is in terms of another value. It was the kind of oracular pronouncement that could put some people off.
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