By Stephen K. Levine
“The fist, too, was once the palm of an open hand.” Yehuda Amichai
On July 24th, 2015, The European Graduate School celebrated 20 years of teaching and learning. As part of the occasion, Evarist Bartolo, the Minister of Education and Employment of the Republic of Malta, addressed the audience of faculty, students and honored guests. Malta, a member of the European Union, has recently accredited EGS as an institute of higher education – a long awaited milestone in the development of the school. All summer long, the faculty labored over the accreditation forms, in addition to our intensive teaching schedule. Now that a representative of Malta was here in Saas-Fee, I anticipated a bureaucratic presentation that would be exceedingly long and boring. Much to my surprise, Evarist, as he asked us to call him, began by talking about the World War I poetry of Wilfred Owen and the meaningless carnage of men from nations that were foreign to each other, a slaughter that took Owen’s life as well.
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