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All who knew him well loved George for his abundant humanity. His appetite for language and ideas was gargantuan. His rare and absolute delight in the achievement of friends was his stock and trade. He was a faithful correspondent whose only fault was in using too few words. "For him," wrote Peter Sanger, "thinking was the entertainment of guests, and everyone who loved letters and ideas was his guest." (Taken from a personal letter written to Gertrude Sanderson.) When friends travelled to Antigonish, he always insisted on treating them to supper, whether at his favourite restaurant, The Lobster Treat, or at his home, where he presided over the barbecue looking like a happy Franciscan. His get-up was usually more accomplished than his cooking, however, because he never allowed himself the focus to ensure that things were properly cooked. Having guests, discussion, drinks, his birches, the land's expanse down to the harbour were all more important than tending the barbecue. He was much better at serving the wine.

The most insightful criticism I ever heard or read about Marshall McLuhan came from my discussions with George while I was writing about the McLuhan/Louis Dudek connection. Dudek was a high priest of ideas, opined George, thus expressed his ideas with rage and solemnity. With people, however, he was joyous and playful, a happy deacon. McLuhan, by contrast, was playful with ideas, not with people. With people he was timid and impatient. For George, this made McLuhan the Shaman and Dudek the Guardian in the classic Mircea Eliade anthropology. A more insightful contrast I have never encountered. I included it almost verbatim, crediting George, in the piece I wrote on Dudek.

A better knowledge of Eliade's morphology would allow me to place George similarly; however, I suspect he was a hybrid figure, one defying easy categorization. He was part Shaman, certainly, yet also part trickster, a mixing of cultural metaphors that his iconoclasm would allow. It was as a teacher that I first encountered him and will always most strongly remember his many sides.

George always made a grand and scowling entrance to the classroom. For some reason, students at X in the early 1980s didn't take a seat immediately when they arrived at the classroom. Perhaps as a holdover from more pious days, we waited for our professor to arrive before seating ourselves (when I lectured in India, students rose when I entered the room). Not that any of us were that reverent, but that was the practice. At "The Annex," where many upper-level philosophy classes were held, we had a building-length view of the corridor as we waited in the hall for George to arrive. He'd emerge, winded, from the east door in a beige trench coat carrying his tattered soft-leather brown briefcase and two large coffees stacked precariously one atop the other. One day, I swear, he balanced four, two in each hand, a week's worth of caffeine in tow while an elbow pinned his briefcase to his side. He'd scoff at us at the door and make a great hullabaloo about why we hadn't already arranged ourselves. "Then we'd miss your entrance," some smart ass would say, and from there we'd be off, his scowls melting into playfulness. As those of us in the teaching profession know, the walk from one's office to the classroom is often the hardest part of the job.

My strongest recollection of George's classroom was how miscast we all were, for the old saw about schooling being wasted on the young becomes truer for me every day. It is both the paradox and tragedy of our system. Not that we youth were unclever or dispirited. From the cast of characters in our class that year came one Rhodes Scholar, five lawyers, two professors, a priest, and one national-level journalist. But like all children in their late teens, we sulked and drifted and skipped class, a few even nodding off to sleep as George stood before us at 8:15 AM like a low-level cleric delivering early mass to a few faithful high atop a hill. Now that the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, and I am looking down on children of the same moody faith, I empathize with my old teacher the more, for he was as miscast as we were to play the role that each had been given. You see, to begin, none of us were readers. We had read, yes, but none of us had read with the kind of discernment and discovery that George had. How could we? We had barely passed the age of consent. None of us were thinkers either. Many could and did hold their own in witty repartee with him, and most were clever enough to pass our apprenticeship, but none of us, at 19, had thought much about the world and even less about the world of ideas that lay before us. What must it have been like for George, whose thought had by that time made him happy and humble, to share his knowledge with children? He did what so many in his position do: he amused himself, delighted in the connections that lecturing triggers, and did a lot of his own thinking in self-directed talk, much like his mentor McLuhan.

But he was lonely. I understand that now. And he was too tough-minded and honest to take on acolytes that may have cheered him along the way. I recall one member of our class who was aspiring to enter the priesthood. He had all the attributes. He was kind, cerebral, soft-spoken, gentle, and concerned about all the right places, always ready to speak passionately about Africa, Vietnam, Poland. But he was angry with George, the one man who'd had the courage to tell him privately that he wasn't tough enough to be a priest. I understand that too now, not just the courtesy of frankness but the lesson of what must lay behind conviction. How could nineteen year olds know that? Yes, he was miscast, and lonely, as many in his role are.

But he was also inventive. One of the ways he showed his Newmanesque contempt for institutional practice - for the system, that is, not its students - was in the setting of exams, which at X followed a strict systems approach to measuring thought. George was too intellectually rebellious to let Taylorism of that sort pass, and, as a graduate of the Louvaine, his contempt was honestly derived. McLuhan's method of giving credit for each thought in an answer was too labour-intensive for him, however, so he opted instead for an extreme form of concision. The rule, he said, was that answers must not exceed the length of questions. It was that simple. Lucky for me, I knew enough at the time to save those exams. A typical question was as follows: "Describe the primary ontological difference between Plato's and Aristotle's metaphysics in ten words or less." He was serious. He'd stop reading at the end of one line. The questions invited either bewilderment or invention, the latter of which he always set the table for but rarely dined on. What, after all, could a nineteen year old add to the mountain of scholarship he'd already read? By changing the grammars, he at least afforded himself the possibility of surprise. Again, he was amusing himself.

The real test, as I've since learned, was in the way he structured study. He'd allow each student to bring into the exam one sheet of paper with notes inscribed. The smaller the script, the more notation could be carried in. I remember one student from North Sydney asking if he could bring a magnifying glass to the final. At the end of the exam, George would ask students to submit the one-pager along with their answers. The method was ingenious in its simplicity, allowing for a display of effort without the unfavourable conditions that the exam occasion posed. The solution was an odd mix of iconoclasm and human concern - typical George.

Yes, he introduced us to McLuhan and Walker Percy and Lao Tsu. I did a doctorate on McLuhan partly because of George and made India my secondary study after he introduced us to the sacred texts of the Upanishads in Philosophy 230. But it was his coffee addiction and quirky inventiveness as a teacher that I remember as his student. That, and the long sentence he served stoically in the classroom.