To the Editors of the Crimson:

I am writing to compliment Crimson reporter Jacob M. Schlesinger for his sensitive and intelligent articles on the six Kennedy Institute fellows. As a reporter, I especially appreciated Schlesinger's grace in reducing hours of interviews to a few essential phrases. Despite his success, however, people are asking me what the devil I meant about Wadsworth, butterflies and newspaper reporters. Please let me clarify.

I was trying to paraphrase Wadsworth and Hawthorne, who lamented that in order to really see the beauty and truth of the butterfly, one had to kill it and mount it--and therefore lose much of its truth and beauty. Similarly, the writer's problem is that we must take ideas and images out of the flow of events, and mount them on lifeless ink and paper. Our daily challenge as newspaper reporters is not--as the article suggested--to "take events out of the flow of reality and to protray them two-dimensionally," but rather to keep the events ALIVE as we pin them down in words.

The whole point probably is moot anyway, since photography solved much of Wordsworth's and Hawthorne's problem, and television may be the Final Solution for our newspaper nattering. Ellen Hume '68   Kennedy Institute   Fellow '81