From the Editors

Pomona College is a strange place. It is an English garden oasis nestled in a desert landscape, amidst endless In-N-Out’s and Ford dealerships, filled with an assemblage of students from every corner of the country who have come to Southern California to do yoga and read Descartes, to learn Spanish or Mandarin. Every day, students wake up and walk by each other on the way to class, preoccupied with thoughts oscillating between today’s English reading and yesterday’s paper. We too easily lose ourselves in our own academic projections, but strangely decide that, between the classrooms and the dorm rooms where we endlessly read and write and calculate and think, conversation stops and the life of the mind pauses. That five-minute walk between the dorm and class is not a bridge between two isolated locations of intellectual activity. An insightful teacher once told me that our best thoughts come in our sleep or in the bathroom. Leaving the validity of that statement aside, the point is that thought is not circumscribed to a given locale or time of day, and often it is during the most routine activity at the most awkward time that we produce our greatest insights.

In some ways, Pomona is a haven for a variety of discourses. There is the routine: the digester, the small talk over lunch, or the late-night meandering conversation. There is the “academic” activity that goes on in classrooms between Bonita and 7th St., and the silent work that constantly goes on in libraries, dorm rooms, and laboratories. There are even the anonymous and fleeting rants plastered to Walker wall. There is the absurd experience, the extraordinary event, and the bizarre conversation. Yet when it comes to a written record of our discursive activity, there seems to be a common assumption that a newspaper is somehow a panacea, as though there is nothing more to be said beyond current events, opinions, sports, and arts. I have a problem with this seemingly foregone conclusion, because it is between the newspaper sections and after class that we have our most fascinating thoughts. It’s not these forums that are misguided, but the belief that discourse stops with the established venues of academic writing and news. Pomona’s Pruning Knife hopes to provide an alternative forum.

Pomona is the Roman goddess of fruit and gardening, and her implement is the pruning knife. Too often, the fruits of our mental labor are left to fall to the ground and rot. We started Pomona’s Pruning Knife to trim and gather the thoughts and ideas that lie somewhere between the newspaper and term paper. This is a forum for the ideas that involve life and school, class and party. It is non-exclusionary and yet non-inclusive. We have no agenda and no subject matter. We’re not sure if we’re a journal or a magazine. What we do know is that Pomona students are thinkers, and that a forum for highlighting their ideas that occur between the lines is long overdue.

Jacob Levi, co-editor




This project started as a column in TSL called “The Liberal Arts Life.” Each week I wrote about an idea that was somehow present on campus, as explained to me by someone who had some expertise and enthusiasm for the subject. I wrote about the big bang theory, a Brahms symphony, corporeal mime, and the possibility for political implications in art.

At the root of every subject is an idea that represents a perspective on the world. Those ideas are what I was after in my original column, and what I want to capture in this publication.

I was inspired by a series of four Thomas Cole paintings called “The Voyage of Life.” They depict Childhood, Youth, Manhood and Old Age.

The castle in the background of “Youth” spoke to me as a representation of that perfect idea or view of the world--the one we as young people seek. Then there’s the way that the painting as a whole visualizes the search itself.

I’m trying to recreate a certain moment from a Physics course I took last year. We were learning about Quantum Mechanics, and our professor did this cool thought experiment on the board. Suddenly I saw the bizarre implications of the endless problem sets and proofs contributing to a really interesting view of the world.

I’m interested in reading articles about any idea that can inspire such moments. And I think everybody at this school knows enough about some particular subject to explain why it is exciting.

I hope you’ll contribute an idea you love.

Rose Haag, co-editor