A memorial for Charles Greenleaf Bell is set for this afternoon in the same room at St. John's College where the retired tutor lectured on "symbolic history."

Bell, who lived in Santa Fe from 1967 to 2006, died Dec. 25 at his youngest daughter's home in Maine at age 94.

Born Oct. 31, 1916, Bell grew up in Greenville, Miss., where he studied the skies with his telescope. He earned a physics degree from the University of Virginia in 1936, then went to Oxford University in England as a Rhodes Scholar and turned to the study of literature.

He taught at Iowa State, Princeton (where he knew Albert Einstein), the University of Chicago, St. John's College in Annapolis, Md., and, beginning in 1967, at St. John's in Santa Fe.

He also published three volumes of poetry (Songs for a New America, Delta Return and Five Chambered Heart), two novels (The Married Land and The Half Gods) and an autobiography (Millennial Harvest).

In Santa Fe, Bell, his wife, Diana, their two daughters and three others from Charles' previous marriage lived on Upper Canyon Road. Diana, known as Danny, taught elementary school and wrote children's books. In 1996, both Danny and Charles were named Santa Fe Living Treasures.

Charles had a Southern accent, blue eyes and white hair, and was known around Santa Fe as an intellectual force. Although he had begun collecting examples of symbolic history as early as 1939, in Santa Fe he began a series of lectures on the subject. His "shows," as he called them, used thousands of photographic slides and audio recordings to illustrate the works of artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Jelly Roll Morton, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dylan Thomas, Gustave Flaubert, Igor Stravinsky, Walt Whitman, Edward Hopper, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró.

After formally retiring as a tutor at St. John's, he distilled his show into 39 videotapes, entitled Symbolic History Through Sight and Sound.

"He never really retired because he kept on having groups," said his youngest daughter, Sandy Colt. "He had a Dante group and a German group, and he kept on showing those shows every week. ... He was always working on that symbolic history that was really his life's work."

In an interview with The New Mexican in 1988, Bell said the purpose of his show was to stress "the essence of the now."

"My original notion was to write a big five-volume study of culture," he said. "What I'm trying to do now is an actual study of history, as if it were the history of spirit, the spirit of man. ... That's why I call it symbolic history, because history manifests itself in every art as if it were symbolic of something deep in the transformation of possibility."

A few of those tapes will be shown after today's memorial, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Junior Commons Room of St. John's College. Colt said the memorial will include a short slide show of photographs from her father's life, a recording of him reading three of his poems, plus stories from friends and colleagues.

Bell's wife, Diane, died in 2004. Survivors include daughters Nona Estrin of Montpelier, Vt., Charlotte Samuels of San Rafael, Calif., Delia Robinson of Montpelier, Carola Bell of Santa Fe and Colt of Belgrade, Maine.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.