The ensuing outpouring and tributes from alumni and colleagues from around the world is a testament to John’s enduring legacy, and to the way he conceived of education itself. While he is best known for the Rassias method, the immersive and relentlessly interactive approach to language acquisition that he sought to bring to schools and organizations around the world, curiosity and engagement were his primary tools of pedagogy. Learning was worth it for its own sake, and teaching was edifying in its own right.

Everything had the possibility of being a teachable moment to John, and when he wasn’t going around play-acting, he was asking questions, peppering students and colleagues alike on topics for papers and presentations, giving encouragement to work or study abroad (“There is a whole world out there!”) and constantly asking “why?” “Why would the character in the scene act that way? What is he really saying about that moment? What does that have to do with the human condition, my dear?” He answered questions with queries, adamant that students claim an intellectual independence for themselves. The approach was hands on, but the expectation was hands-off. Your education was yours to undertake, yours to own, yours to interrogate and define.

John’s literal staging of open-ended questions, and his predilection for French theater and for tragedy in particular, made intuitive sense. The Greek tragedy played to John’s deepest heart, as he remained proudly and inextricably Greek in identity throughout his life, even if parts of his personality were in turn distinctly American and French. Language acquisition was for him a means by which to evolve and expand the self and one’s concept of the world. The intertwining of French literature with Greek classics provided a unique framework, a vehicle by which to share with his students the elements of his life that had made him the soul that he was.

The son of Greek immigrants, he grew up in New Hampshire and had served in the Marines during World War II, landing on Okinawa in 1945. He moved to France to complete his doctorate and study theater thereafter, followed by a long relationship with the Peace Corps in Cote d’Ivoire, and a career in university teaching. Antigone, like so many French plays of the 20th century, posed veiled commentaries on the war raging on France’s soil at the time, drawn from timeless tales recalling both man’s capacity for unfathomable destruction and for perpetual renewal. Through theater, he encouraged us to unpack a history to which we were the heirs.

John spoke little of his time in the military, but one does not face war unchanged. I always viewed his love of theater as a kind of catharsis, as a way of playing out the past and setting it free. John took the experience of war, in essence untranslatable to those who have not lived it, and created a life built on fostering bridges, communication, and human connection. To read tragedy with him was to witness someone have full acceptance of the deepest darkness of the human soul and, like Antigone, seek to defy the darkness by pursuing one’s higher good—to bury the past not to forget it, but to plant a seed for the future.