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This proves that some people can be up the pole and still have both feet on the ground.
RICHARD I. BRIGGS
East Cleveland, Ohio Simeon of Syria (see cut) was the first and most famous of the stylites, or pillar saints, a form of asceticism practiced in the Middle East for six centuries. He started out on a pillar o ft. tall and progressively worked his way up to the soft. column where he lived, on a tiny open platform, for the rest of his life.—ED.
Sir: I wonder what Sigmund Freud would say about the tiny whip.
MRS. MARIANNE MAURO Pittsburgh
Sir:
Every time I read about a religious recluse, I wonder what our world would have been like today had Christ chosen to cloister himself rather than give his great love and knowledge to the world.
MRS. BOB F. CRAFT Salt Lake City
Sir: Indeed Sister Nazarena may be "the most serene person" one could meet. However, is this not easy when one isolates himself from all social responsibility? Sister Nazarena's solution is rather too simple in any age—particularly in a nuclear one!
KARL PAUL DONFRIED Harvard Divinity School Cambridge, Mass.
Sir:
Give her six children, a husband and $350 per month to make ends meet, and I doubt she'd be so serene.
MRS. L. M. BAGLEY
Oceanside, Calif.
Books & Books
Sir:
An article in the April 20 issue implies that the Great Books Foundation was started by Encyclopaedia Britannica and that there is some connection between the two organizations through Britannica's publication The Great Books of the Western World. The Great Books Foundation was organized as an independent, nonprofit educational corporation in 1947, many years before Britannica's Great Books set was even published. We have no affiliation with Britannica except historically through association with Messrs. Hutchins and Adler, who did the pioneer work in starting Great Books seminars for adults when they were at the University of Chicago.
RICHARD P. DENNIS President
The Great Books Foundation Chicago
Sir:
While everyone interested in liberal education would wish the great ideas to be the main "toptics" of conversation across the land, grammarians would be happier if TIME had not misspelled the word last week. The key to the great ideas is the Syntopicon, not the Syntopticon.
MORTIMER J. ADLER
San Francisco TIME goofted.—ED.
Wives at Issue? Sir: Re your article on "The Families They Left Behind" [April 13]—hogwash.
I spent 20 years as a career soldier, and nothing was more disgusting to me than the control the military wife managed to gain over the military by her demands for herself and her family. She has done more to damage our foreign relations than a hundred "Little Rocks." If the President has any sense, he'll keep these vessels of virtue out of our overseas bases. Let the men serve their country, not the country serve its soldiers' wives.
ADAM BARKER Phoenix, Ariz.
Sir: