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Posters came up, as they do for all events, announcing author and Holocaust survivor Lore Segal’s reading from her forthcoming book “The Journal I Didn’t Keep”. My attention was caught less than I now wish it would have been. Although I hadn’t realized it at the moment, I had recently read and thoroughly enjoyed one of her stories published in The New Yorker.

“Three liters of first-rate beer,” according to alumni Seth Richardson ’90. Beer, both a refreshing (and safe!) beverage as well as a gift from the goddess Ninkasi, dates back at least 3,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia (in modern Iraq). Our protagonist’s proto-Venmo request was (hopefully) handed to the local keeper of beer in exchange for a jolly night out.

On a dark and snowy night, the Middlebury community gathered in the warmly lit Robinson Concert Hall to sing about Love. Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, a tenor-pianist duo from the UK, performed a selection of “Lieder,” German romantic poems set to music, by Brahms, Mahler, and Schumann. The program was built around Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” or Poet’s Love, which he wrote in 1840 after being smitten by his future wife, Clara Wieck.

My motivation to be a vegetarian, on the other hand, is far from reasonable. Whether it was to prove that I can deny myself meat, to better understand vegetarians, an amusement at my own whims, or perhaps a secret desire to prove that vegetarianism at Middlebury isn’t worth all the complaints it receives, I am not sure. All the same, on January 4, 2019, I gave up meat for a month with the vague thought of a bloody carnivorous celebration on February 1.

Claude Debussy, the French composer perhaps most famous for his piece “Clair de Lune,” died in 1918. To mark the 100th year since his passing, the Jupiter Quartet came to the MCA last Friday to remind us why we love art and the impressionists in particular.

We are in another age of heroism. With every great struggle of each national and international drama, protest, activists and general outcry fill the air. Hope for a better future may seem, at times, in short supply,

Yet the question remains, why Bach? What about 300 year old German religious music is important to celebrate in 2018 at a secular American college town?