Barry E. Goldfarb

Santa Fe - Barry Eckman Goldfarb (64) of Santa Fe died peacefully at home in his sleep. Barry was a lover of learning and a consummate teacher. For his first 30 years he was a student beginning at Swifton and Bond Hill Elementary Schools and then Walnut Hills High School, and then earning degrees from Yale, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. The latter was a Ph.D. In Classics. His parents referred to him as a perpetual student. From there he became a teacher par excellence.

One student on Rate My Professor referred to Barry as "a madman who one day WILL be a late night talk show guest host who made me love math and Euclid and sometimes I saw God in those diagrams." His students from Penn State, USC and St. John's College of Santa Fe loved him and he reciprocated. He loved engaging people in conversations that could last two, three, even four hours, and then, like Socrates might have done, continue to converse with someone else before turning back to his manuscript on Plato.

Among his greatest joys was parenting his two dogs, Phylox and Argos, named from Greek literature. Recently, he turned his energies to mentoring his nephew, Jerry, and his niece, Tess. His two sisters Joan (Gordon) and Nancy (Michael) along with his brother, Richard (Beth) also survive him.

Barry died from health challenges that started when he was a young boy in Cincinnati. While the conditions were systemic and numerous, he would not allow them to define him. Rather, they led him to laugh often, savor life with a passionate intensity, and cultivate the life of the mind. While he sometimes could barely walk, hear, or see, he led students to Greece, studied in Paris and Cambridge, and traveled to see students in Nepal and Uganda. All the while a glass of good scotch was never far away.

Most of all Barry was a compassionate person who believed in excellence and knew that truth and beauty could be found in both the classics and his fellow humans.