Friends, When in doubt — read more

For forty years the students of Thomas D. Howells of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., were charmed by his bon mots, habitually writing them in the margins of their notes. Now, decades later, this collection of those hasty notations reflect what his students knew he was sharing – a deeply felt resonant truth. To paraphrase Howells on poetry, he was saying things precisely that cannot be said at all. In 1981 Howells reminisced that, “As the years went by I discovered that students wanted me to say again what I had said. They wanted my obiter dicta engraven on a stone and I often could not remember at all what I had said. ‘You said something very good about this.’ Well, I said, ‘Did I? What was it?’ So I began to write more and more of these obiter dicta down.” The handwritten collection of obiter dicta in Howells’ own hand has not been found. But many obiter dicta in student notes did survive and are shared in this volume.