RADOSLAV ANDREA TSANOFF
perhaps, it was because he never was supplied a secretary.
One morning, a few years after his retirement, Tsanoff came briskly
into the corridor that Philosophy and English then shared in Anderson
Hall- ɪt could not have been later than eight-thirty. As usual he had
risen early and gotten in a couple of hours of work, and now had driven
eleven miles through heavy traffic, eager for the day he had planned at
∣1is desk in the library. He was even more cheerful than usual, a little
excited, almost gay, when he fell upon a colleague in the English De-
partment who specialized in nineteenth century romanticism. “Will,” he
said “I don’t know how it came about; but as I was driving in this morn-
ing, two whole cantos of Childe Harold went through my mind.” That
he could recite yards of Byron seemed perfectly natural to him (why,
he had learned it as a schoolboy in Bulgaria) ; that he did so on that
occasion surprised him, and he was unaffectedly delighted with the ex-
perience.
A prodigious memory may become a curse by inexorably storing trivia
or by interfering with thought. Tsanoff never exposed his mind to the
cheap or meretricious. He disciplined his great gift by exercising it on
the highest products of human genius and by subordinating it to a con-
trolling philosophical purpose. The vastness of his learning is focused
and refracted by an active mind onto the pages of his works and
built into the texture of his daily life. Affirmatively, it places at his al-
most instant disposal great insights of genius in at least eight languages
—from simple folk wisdom to sublime religious utterances. Negatively,
it forms an absolute bulwark against one-eyed wisdom, rigid factional-
ism, sectarian simplification. Tsanoff is too constantly aware of alterna-
tives to be fanatic. His mind always sees a balance among claims
that he knows have been passionately advanced and masterfully defended
against each other, for balance is the dynamic equivalent of the ulti-
mate stability: integrity of purpose and style, which the mind pursues
as its demanding goal and satisfying destiny. This live integrity matures
not eclectically by gathering this and that snippet of presumed wisdom,
but teleologically by arduously respecting the superiority of the inherently
superior.
One of his most recently published books, Worlds to Know, well il-
lustrates the spirit of his philosophy and his life. I can do no better
than quote at some length from its concluding pages, where the author
is himself summarizing his guiding conviction, indeed his life’s work so
far:
Our modern specialized and often onesided thinking has found expression in
the over-departmentalized organization of our universities. We need greater
integration in our programs of higher education. Any real basic problem is
bound to lead our research beyond our departmental bailiwick. In my own ex-
perience, at least, I have found that this is especially true in philosophy. In