If there is any tragedy about these remarks, it is that students are too appreciative of these small things. So easy to do, they are, inexplicably, seldom done.

BUT HOLDING more seminars and pushing student-tutor contact can only be part of an effort to get at the problem on loneliness. What is also required are qualities of personal warmth and understanding, and the effort, on an individual level to reach out to those who might be lonely and in need of help.

Both John Neumann and Ru Selle Harwood's suicides have had a profound impact on the Harvard-Radcliffe community. As Ted Polich, a junior in Eliot House, has put it, their deaths have made almost everyone reflect upon what is most important to them. For Ted, a member of the Harvard football team who was laid up in Stillman Infirmary, as was I, the most central thing in his life is not the fierce competition for grades, but the love of his family and friends. Friends, from the legions I see streaming past my room into his he has many: And, to earn this, I suspect be has been a very good friend himself.

Both in London and New York at the present times is an exciting new play. Tom Stoppard's The Real thing. The play casts a weary and jaundiced eye (much as John and Ru Selle would have done) at a world preoccupied with lust. materialism sensation, and self gratification Christopher Lasch in , The Cultone of Narcissism published in 1978, talks about the same theme.

The Real Thing, by contrast, is love, intimacy, fidelity and trust in marriage. To M.D. Aesechliman, who has written a marvelously moving review of Stoppard's play in the April 6, 1984 National Revies the sentiments expressed in the Real Thingrecall these lines from Mathew Arnold's Dover Beach.

Ah, love let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems to be before unlike a land of dreams. So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light. Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

If John Neumann and Ru Selle Diana Harwood have left any legacy--and I believe they have left a very rich one--it is to keep our hearts and minds forever fixed on what is most important in this too often dark and turbulent world--qualities of compassion, the meaningful pursuit of excellence in the service of human needs, and great love. As we mourn their passing, we should be thankful for them. It was once written of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., "Standing apart is one way of standing out." Let us hope that John and RuSelle's standing Loneliness' and isolation will be instructive to us all.