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To Dream, and Run

A frisky dolphin and tempering anchor represent the motto of the Aldine Press—festina lente or “make haste slowly”—in the Reading Room window honoring Venetian printer Aldus Manutius.

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As the sole siblings on a Southern Illinois farm, John and Carla Barnwell were close—close in age, close in their keen interests in science and reading, and close as generally best friends tend to be.

“In all of the spare time in between chores, John always had a book,” Carla recalled of growing up with her older brother. “It was really all about learning.”

So when John headed off as the first in the family to go to college, he chose Illinois, and Carla soon followed. “His first day at Illinois, the first thing he did was walk up to the Library from his dorm at Townsend Hall,” she said, “and [he] just stood there, kind of looking down at the Quad and thinking, ‘Wow, you know, how lucky am I to be here.’”

With Carla’s arrival two years later, he did the same. Among his first acts to initiate her to campus, she said, was to “show me this amazing Library because he was really all about scholarship.”

When Carla ’78 LAS, MAS ’85 BUS, decided to honor the life of her vibrant brother, she and her spouse, Eileen Gebbie, MA ’00 LAS, chose to dedicate the Aldus Manutius printer’s mark window in the Library’s Reading Room in John’s memory. John ’75 LAS passed away in 1990, having been diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 2 at age 11.

The window, overlooking the Library’s outside main entrance and positioned behind the Reading Room service desk, is a perfect choice. “We must have walked up the Quad and through the east doors of the Library, under Window No. 11, hundreds of times to go study right up until the Library closed,” Carla recalled of the campus days she and John shared.

“On weekends, that was always followed by literally running from there to the midnight movies in the Auditorium or at the McKinley Foundation or the YMCA, often to see something from the French New Wave. We got tickets to special showings of the American Film Theater releases of plays made into movies, shown at the Co-Ed theaters.”

John and Carla Barnwell at approximately 5 and 6 years of age

 

A window into John’s world

That full-throated embrace of what life can offer is embodied in the phrase “To dream, and run,” which Carla and Eileen had inscribed on the window’s commemorative plaque. The wording “is all about the way John lived life,” his sister said.

“John was a serious romantic,” Carla said. Knowing that his condition inevitably would shorten his life, he nevertheless ran full bore ahead. A keen opera buff, brilliant scientist, dedicated teacher, Shakespeare devotee, and consummate host of salons for friends and classmates, he was determined to not let his disease slow him down. After finishing his doctorate in chemical physics at Harvard under the tutelage of a Nobel Prize laureate (in a mere seven years, despite undergoing five craniotomies), John took a position at Bowdoin College but was unable to stay, due to his health. Carla cared for him in his last years at a rehabilitation center in Chicago while she was teaching chemistry and physics at a downstate high school.

But joyful memories remain, and the opportunity to celebrate John, who “was wildly curious about all kinds of things,” is appropriately noted with the dedication of the window.

“For me, this gift is a celebration of siblings and of service,” said Eileen, who never met John but understands the impact Illinois had on the sibling pair, both of whom focused their careers in academia (Carla later taught at the U of I). For Carla, the printer’s mark—a symbol of the printed word—“would have meant so much to John; he was very much into books in all kinds of areas.”

The siblings on John’s graduation day in 1975 from the University of Illinois. “I know what the Library at Illinois meant to John,” Carla said. “It was a huge stepping stone for him from off of our little farm [to] being the first one in our family to go to college.”

Mottoes that matter

The 27 printers’ mark windows, a stunning feature of the Illinois campus, begin on the staircases leading to the Reading Room and go on to grace the walls of the room itself, offering natural light and inspiration to the dozens of patrons studying there. Each window bears a trademark or emblem of an early printer in Europe, serving as an artful reminder of the tremendous impact books have made on the civilization of humanity.

The Aldus Manutius window holds additional significance, as Manutius, founder of the well-known Aldine Press in Venice, was known for both innovation and excellence, somewhat akin to qualities needed for serious scientific endeavor. His printer’s mark features a dolphin curved around an anchor, a symbolic representation of the press’s motto—festina lente, or “make haste slowly.” Remarkably, the same phrase is used in physics—John’s field of study—where the festina lente limit applies to descriptions of atomic trapping.

And the phrase is not unlike the manner in which John Barnwell himself conducted his brief but impactful existence. “He knew he wasn’t going to have a long life,” Carla said of John, who died at age 36, “so he worked diligently to read, learn, do research, and teach,” the very principles a library aims to underscore.

“He simply loved life and learning everything he could about it,” Carla said of her brother, who—forever optimistic—would attend the opera, score in hand, despite having by that time lost his hearing. That simply was John’s way—dreaming, running, and making haste slowly in whatever time he had.

I know what the Library at Illinois meant to John. It was a huge stepping stone for him from off of our little farm [to] being the first one in our family to go to college." ~Carla Barnwell