Personality profile

A perosnality profile on one of my roomates. Don't tell him I posted it...he's shy.


The thoroughly-examined life
By Alex Kurt
SJU junior Zach Hunter is arguably one of the great thinkers of the CSB/SJU community. He says he owes it all to his books

A giant black triangle looms in the background of the photograph, resonating in the early morning clouds.
“I’m standing at the top of Volcán Atitlán in this, and you can see the shadow in the distance,” says SJU junior Zach Hunter as he points to the picture. “That’s the highest point in Central America.”
The photograph, which Hunter took while studying in Guatemala last spring, is one of the only objects decorating the bedroom of his campus apartment. The dimly-lit quarters have no television and no furniture besides a desk and chair.
“I try to avoid a television because, frankly, my laptop provides enough distraction from homework,” Hunter said. “Plus, there’s not much that I’m interested in on TV.”
Instead, Hunter has adopted a habit rare among his peers.
“I’d rather read,” he said.

Great reads
Hunter said his love of reading pushed him to enroll in an honors Great Books course.
The 100-book reading list for the course, which Hunter estimates totals roughly $1,000 in value, is the reason a new bookshelf is among the room’s scarce decorations.
“The shelf they gave us with the room was too small,” Hunter said.
Hunter has utilized the shelf and its contents.
“I just finished reading Barrabas this weekend,” he said. “I’m reading Lolita right now, though I should finish that up by tomorrow and move on to something else.”
Despite the volume of reading, Spark Notes will never be a part of Hunter’s reading list.
“I’m a slow reader,” he said. “I take the time to read, to build up images. If I don’t understand a sentence, I’ll go back and read it again.”
He has made an impression on those he works with.
“Zach is probably the most judicious reader of anyone in the course,” said classmate Doug Trumm, an SJU sophomore. “He always, always has something relevant to contribute and it’s amazing sometimes to hear the things he says.”
Yet Hunter admits his work ethic can be far from flawless.
“After an intense phase of Tolstoy of Dostoevsky, I would continue to read a lot, but I might only finish half of each book for a bit,” he said. “It’s a vice I’m still trying to correct.”
Trumm said Hunter probably doesn’t even realize that he’s usually a step ahead of his classmates.
“Zach is pretty modest,” Rice said. “But he’s incredibly smart.”

A creature of habit
Hunter’s love of reading was instilled at an early age.
“My dad read me The Hobbit when I was little, and it made me wonder if there were other books by the same author,” he said. “I went to a bookstore and found three large books by the same guy. Of course, the author was Tolkien and my first great literary love was the Lord of the Rings series.”
Hunter said the habit was solidified in high school, where he discovered the work of Leo Tolstoy.
“I read War and Peace my junior year, and that’s when I really began to take interest,” he said.
Now in the throes of the Great Books course, Hunter is also working his way through a list of books compiled by literary critic Harold Bloom.
“The list is many pages long and it has hundreds and hundreds of books,” he said. “That’s a lifetime goal that may never be reached, or, if it is reached, it will be a long time from now.”
Though Hunter said he prefers literary or aesthetic reading, the humanities major will rarely turn down a book.
“Humanities is a broad picture of everything, which is conducive to my personality because I’m pretty much interested in everything,” he said. “I’m not sure how I’ll be employable. I’ll either have to focus on something or be a librarian.”

Books and the big question
Of those many interests, Hunter said, perhaps his strongest is religion.
It’s a topic Hunter has personally struggled with since high school.
“I had a very religious childhood,” he said. “Our church wasn’t fundamentalist, but it was in that direction.”
“My own religious upbringing was so narrow and focused, and I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t right,” he added.
Hunter was baptized as a high school senior, a decision he said he wasn’t committed to. But he wasn’t comfortable challenging his religious background until his dad did the same.
“Religion can be difficult to investigate because there is so much family and emotion tied into it,” he said. “But after my dad did his own dissent and found his own kind of intellectual approach to it, I started perusing the philosophy section of Barnes and Noble.”
There, he said, he found his first books on atheism.
“Frankly, I found their arguments quite convincing,” he said. “Eventually I had to come out with it and tell my family that I wasn’t a Christian anymore.”
“That was hard on my mom,” he added.
Still, Hunter said he is the foremost critic of his own beliefs.
“I’m interested in discussing it, not engaging in fierce debate or winning anyone over,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve read enough or thought enough about it to promote it.”
Again, Hunter will use reading as a means of guidance.
“I don’t think you should divorce emotion from this important of a subject,” he said. “But religion is the most interesting subject ever, and I’m going to keep reading about it.”

Enriching experience
Though Hunter enjoys a tranquil lifestyle in a simple living space, he’s no stranger to balance and adventure.
“I think you should be creative in living and doing things that are unusual and meeting new people and trying new things,” he said. “If you read, you get a lot of that vicariously, but I’ve been trying to do it more. I have that capacity, but sometimes I’ll get caught up in books or homework or something.”
Though there is no substitute for a real experience, Hunter said, reading enriches his experience nonetheless.
“Milan Kundera wrote that we each put up a curtain, and that’s what we think life is about,” he said. “Literature pulls that curtain aside. It reveals things you maybe knew were there, but hadn’t necessarily thought about.”
It is possible to learn more from fiction, Hunter said, than from any work of science or history.
“With literature, you can compare what Milton called ‘master spirits’,” he said. “They’re the works of many writers as it relates to the broad range of experience they’ve all had. To be able to encounter that is a privilege.”
Hunter points to a photo of a supernova on the floor.
“Reading these works is like being able to see these photos from the Hubble Telescope,” he says. “It’s a privilege and a blessing, and I’m lucky to have them.”