Page 7 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

PERSPECTIVE
The Spirit of Adventure
I’d like to take cred-
it for planning an
issue of Alumni Horae
centered on an inten-
tional theme, but I
have to admit (shhh
. . . don’t tell anyone)
that a theme began to
emerge for the spring
issue before I realized it was happening.
Perhaps a unifying motif came about through
some sort of subconscious organization – I’d like
to think that – or perhaps by chance. But what I
strive for in the pages of this magazine are good
stories that are well told. The three features that
appear in this issue achieve that storytelling goal.
And, by fortune or fate, they all share a common
theme of adventure.
In “The Gift of Trust,” author/essayist Rosemary
Mahoney ’79, known in part for her account of a
solo trip down the Nile, shares the tale of her Sixth
Form Independent Study Project. As a 17-year-
old, she traveled alone to Ireland with little else but
the name of a town and a local who had agreed
in principle to provide housing while Mahoney
practiced her Irish Gaelic at a local grade school.
“The fact that I was keeping my own schedule,
with no one telling me what to do or keeping an
eye on me, was inordinately thrilling,” she writes.
“I learned that I was capable of exercising good
judgment, of following my instincts, of knowing
when to offer help and when to ask for it. I
learned how to talk to and appreciate people
whose lives were very different frommine. These
revelations gave me a sense of independence,
self-direction, and adventure that I have craved
ever since.”
Rosemary Mahoney’s piece lines up nicely
with “Trowel, Cloak, and Dagger,” a story about
the late Rodney Young ’25, a professor and
archaeologist whose life and work bear simi-
larities to the fictional Indiana Jones. No lack
of adventure there. Underneath his passion for
leading digs in Turkey and Greece, Young was an
American spy, who masterminded 57 missions
inside Axis-held Greece. A colleague, George
Bass, said of Young, “His sense of adventure was
matched by a confidence that he would succeed
in those adventures.”
Finally, former SPS humanities faculty mem-
ber Mark Bell spent a day trailing entrepreneur/
adventurer Tim Ferriss ’95 around the streets of
San Francisco, observing The 4-Hour Workweek
author’s interactions with various startups he
advises in Silicon Valley. Ferriss’s life is anything
but predictable, and the result is a story Bell calls
“The 4-Hour Hacker.”
This summer, Ferriss’s show, The Tim Ferriss
Experiment, will be made available online through
iTunes, Amazon, and YouTube. His method of
dropping all 13 episodes simultaneously got a
Twitter shout-out from House of Cards actor
Kevin Spacey, who wrote, “Great to see guys like
you shaking up the status quo of how we get con-
tent to fans the way they want.”
The show follows Ferriss as he attempts to
grasp in a matter of days new skills that usually
take years to master, “from speaking Tagalog on
live Filipino television to tactical gun fighting,”
writes Bell.
See what I mean?
Jana F. Brown, Editor
PETER FINGER
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