Only Online: In Memoriam
James William (Bill) Whedbee, Ph.D.

Nancy B. Lyon Professor of Biblical Studies
September 24, 1938-January 22, 2004

From Martha Andresen, Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English

Bill and I had a pact. In more than thirty years of enduring friendship, we each had heard the other speak on behalf of our beloved colleagues and friends on countless occasions of introduction or remembrance: these were college and community events we cherished, that uniquely inspired our hymns of personal and collective praise. Many years ago we made a promise: we would do eulogies for each other! We laughed at what was unspoken: someone would have to go first, and the favor could not be reciprocated. But we always imagined a fair exchange--years and years away, some gallant, glorious gesture on behalf of the other in extreme old age. But last spring, on a radiant California afternoon at the end of spring term, Bill and I met by chance on campus, weeks before his diagnosis, and he revealed to me his troubling symptoms. Even then, I see now, looking back, he had intimations of mortality, for he flashed that rueful grin and said, “Remember your promise; be true to your word.” “No, no, Bill,” I protested, masking my shock with a tease about my end of the year exhaustion. “Let me go first!” I said. “You speak for me! I’m all talked out. I have nothing left to say!” Bill’s face was aglow with his transparent sweetness and kindness: “My friend,” he said gently, “You’ll always have something to say.”

And so I do: I do have something to say. I’m here to keep my promise, to speak on behalf of the Pomona College faculty, all of whom revered Bill, and many of us who will forever call him our matchless friend. He was so present among us: how to capture that presence in words?

To be true to my word to Bill is to be true to Bill and to words. For words, charged with insight and feeling, vibrantly enriched by historical and literary study, animated by resonance with present times and our own lives, were at the core of what we shared, what he shared with us all. Bill was of a man of his word, a man who loved words, a man of books who revered the People of the Book, who taught with unique brilliance and passion the Judeo-Christian sages and scribes, prophets and saviors, sinners and saints and their stories. The gift to me of our friendship was its chiming: Bill echoed the Bible, I echoed Shakespeare, and every conversation we had, no matter how sublime or mundane the topic, was a dialogue of such living voices, speaking to us as we wished them to speak to our students, an inexhaustible wealth of wisdom and beauty, caution and solace, mourning and celebration, laughter and tears.

To such exchanges and to all he taught and wrote, Bill brought a quality of mind that in itself was a treasure, something, to my ear—now ranging outside of Bible or Shakespeare—that Virginia Woolf captures in her character Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse: a scope of sorrow, an intensity of joy, a tremble of vulnerability, a bursting of strength, a beauty of person and soul, a mind that would “drop plumb like a stone, alight exact as a bird,” this “swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth which delighted, eased, sustained—“. To me, that was Bill: that depth and precision and grace of insight and articulation. Yes, for many of us, faculty and staff and students alike, it was to Bill we turned when we sought understanding and affirmation of our lives’ truths, wrested from the jaggedness or blessedness of real experience, sharpened but never fully contained by our book learning or professional expertise. In Bill we confided; it was Bill who remembered and cared, Bill whose swoop and fall of the spirit upon truth always found the words we needed to hear.

In our last conversation, some weeks before he died, Bill was able to speak to me with this quality, despite moments of what he called his “drifting.” We spoke as old friends and forever colleagues, reflecting again as we had some months before on the close rather than the beginning of our long-time Pomona careers, sharing honestly our pride, our regrets, lamenting that so much was unfinished, yet marveling at what we called our “gifts in time.” “Bill!” I then exclaimed, “where did the years go? How did we become senior Senior Faculty? Listen to us! We sound like old Jack Falstaff and senile Justice Shallow in the orchard in Henry IV, part 2—do you remember that exchange? Waiting for the new order and the triumph of the young heir—the king is expiring, and Prince Hal will soon ascend the throne—two ancient friends reminisce about their long-ago London school days at the Inns of Court: ‘Jesu, Jesu,’ says Shallow, ‘the mad days I have spent!...Ha, Sir John, have I not said well?’ Falstaff replies, ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.’ And Shallow says, ‘That we have, that we have, that we have, in faith, Sir John, we have…Jesu, the days that we have seen!’” Bill and I laughed at this, but there were also tears: “Yes, my friend,” he said, “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

Our conversation concluded; Bill was spent and it was time to say farewell. In parting, Bill gave me—and Pomona College—his blessing. First, he said simply: “It is important that good friends say such words to each other.” And he added, again with that rueful grin: “The old order passes; we yield to our betters.” I smiled too: once again we understood each other perfectly. We knew both the gifts and the limits of time: that if we looked ahead at Pomona to as many years before us as we have enjoyed years past, we couldn’t possibly equal what our younger, amazing colleagues have achieved only in their beginning and middle years. We yield to our betters! Can you know with what joy and gratitude we say this? This gift of celebrating so accomplished and promising a young faculty, of rejoicing in dazzling new hires, of entrusting this college we have loved and served to so brilliant a future in such able hands?

But with all due respect, I must say this too: we don’t come much better than Bill. And Bill knew something that we spoke of often: careers like lives have their seasons, their times and their timing, their rhythms of both fruition and seeming fallow, their sometimes mysterious blossoming perhaps later rather than sooner, perhaps in the service of life as well as art: who can know? Bill and I used to say: before we can work on a text, the text has to work on us—and sometimes that work takes time. Maybe a lifetime. And more: whatever our own timing, our best gift at this college—what makes us a rarity in this world--is the gift of our time, the quality of our presence, even when those gifts are sacrificial. Our doors are open, our minds and hearts are receptive, our energies are available to all who ask, and we don’t keep time: hours to prepare and evaluate, to mentor and advocate, to govern and serve, to read and write, or simply to catch our breath after a teaching hour that for some of us—Bill above all--is as a supremely performative act, a sustained effort of mind, soul, voice, and body in relation to our astonishing students. Where is this recorded? Perhaps inscribed only in the lives we seek to touch and serve. Bill’s generosity with his time was legendary. And equally admirable was his own trajectory: in the last years of his life, how brilliantly Bill found his scholarly voice in his book on Job! And how perfectly, in his private life, he found joy with his wife Tamara as well as comfort and pride in his son David’s own blossoming. As friends and colleagues, then, Bill and I sought only this: humbled by our own sense of imperfect timing, uncertain lives, and unforeseen dimensions of the mind’s unfolding, we wished to extend to our younger colleagues, as well as to our students, a measure of the generosity and faith that the College had accorded us.

What makes Pomona College great? Bill made us great. Each of us makes Pomona great: distinct in our gifts and service but alike in clear values and common purpose, that shared trust of teaching and learning, that unbroken legacy of older to younger, of past generations to the present and future. Recently I experienced a great Pomona moment. Exiled from Crookshank Hall, presently under renovation, I awaited my turn to teach in Pearsons 102 one sunny morning last fall, listening to Jerry Irish conclude a class in Religious Studies that Bill had visited until he was too ill to do so. Sitting in the wings, waiting for my cue to enter, I heard Jerry’s gifts: the learning, the passion, the receptivity and resourcefulness, and more, a mission that was Bill’s mission too. For when the class concluded, Jerry bounded out and exclaimed to me in words to this effect: “Somehow we have to engage our students and move them to engage fully themselves, to find the courage of their convictions, to own and invest and activate their knowledge and their faith—whatever that knowledge and faith may be. Timidity is their impediment, and it is ours. You do your best, my friend; so do I—we are joined in this; it is the work we are called to do.” How Bill would have smiled at this; his presence was there, in that moment; I know, as he is here with us now.

And now, dear Bill, our parting words are Shakespeare’s:

Haply [we] think on thee, and then [our] state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate,

For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings
That then [we] scorn to change [our] state with kings!