Recent visitors to my upper Greenfield Meadows home got my wheels spinning back to my wayward early-college days, when liberty, freedom, and autonomy drenched each refreshing breath of rebellious Amherst air during the 1971-72 school year.

The visitors were my widowed sister-in-law Jan, four years my senior, from Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, and her brother-in-law Bud, a retired international litigator from Croton-on-Hudson, New York, four years her senior. It just so happens that my home is a convenient midpoint relay station for Jan’s visits to his scenic lower Hudson Valley home near West Point.

Both guests brought to my doorstep vivid memories from that turbulent era of protest and cultural upheaval – he a Sixties Holy Cross grad and Vietnam veteran, she a contemporaneous college dropout with a child who settled in a secluded, mountaintop, back-to-the-Earth alternative community in a place called Lost Nation.

Having participated in many similar interactions over 47 years of marriage, I always look forward to such discussions, which arise like steam from a teapot – some tapping into my soul’s deepest juices, which flood my consciousness through veins of youthful memories that love to bleed.

Bud, a reader, often shares suggested readings – as though I need them – sometimes with a gift book in hand. This visit was such a case. He thought I might enjoy late French historian Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, which he handed me on his way out the door.

“No pressure,” he said. “You can read it, discard it or pass it on. Your choice.”

Well, I gave it a shot and blew through it in a couple of days. Bloch was critical of his French countrymen for what he perceived as passive resistance to their German conquerors. The problem with the topic was that I’m no European or World War II historian and thus didn’t connect with many historical references that would be familiar to any French reader.

Long ago I chose to focus on my own place, our verdant slice of the Connecticut Valley, along with my genealogical connections to it and how it all relates to the larger American narrative. That, in and of itself, presents a lifetime of work, with little time for diversions and distractions.

Bloch’s wartime observations reminded me of those expressed by his fellow countryman and World War I veteran Jean Giono in his Refusal to Obey. His criticism of wrongheaded orders from feckless military commanders also brought me back to the writings of the bitter, prolific 19th-century American journalist, author, and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce.

But enough of that. The best development from our conversation unfolded after my guests’ departure, coming to me like sweet, inspiring lilac scent through a muggy May window. For some reason, thoughts of American philosopher Robert Paul Wolff came to mind. Must have been the Sixties vibes that carried me there.

I knew Wolff from my earliest days at UMass Amherst, when he was a new professor and I took a couple of his classes focused on books he had written. The first examined individual sovereignty and other political-philosophical concepts in his best-known book, In Defense of Anarchism (1970). Then came his philosophy of higher education itself in The Ideal of the University (1969).

Both were fascinating classes that captured my fancy during an otherwise distracted, uneventful first round of college.

Though as a working adult I had discovered and sometimes visited Wolff’s blog, The Philosopher’s Stone, I had lost track of it since the COVID crisis and was curious about his thoughts on today’s political climate. I knew he’d have something to say about ICE and unconstitutional acts, but soon discovered he had died a little more than a year ago, on January 6, 2025, age 91, at Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina.

Readers curious about Wolff will find no shortage of online biographical information about him. He was a giant in the American philosophical community, with prestigious teaching credits at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard, as well as UMass and others.

It was at Columbia, in 1968, that he gained fame for his controversial support of Vietnam War protestors occupying the university’s Low Library. His daring differences with the Columbia administration soon landed him in Amherst, where I became a beneficiary. I think my journalism mentor Howard Ziff alerted me to Wolff and encouraged me to check him out. Both professors arrived at UMass when I did, and I feel fortunate to have found and learned from them.

The timing was right in 1971 for Wolff’s UMass arrival. I have over the years told many people in casual conversation that such a lightning-rod academic would never, in my mind, be hired by our state university today. Had he been writing books like In Defense of Anarchism today or during right-wing TV personality Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News reign, the “news” entertainer would have been calling for his ouster and sending annoying lackey Jesse Watters to Amherst to harass him and school administrators with bright lights, cameras, and microphones.

I am grateful to have been there for year one of Robert Paul Wolff’s 37-year UMass tenure. A stroke of good luck placed me at the right place, right time to meet one of my two most influential profs, all the while enchanted by the scent of liberty and autonomy in the Amherst air.

May he rest in peace… and forever challenge authority wherever he may be.