Commencement Address 2021
Welcome parents and students, faculty and staff, friends, neighbors, and all others who are joining us today to celebrate the achievements of these students.
In the past several weeks, I have found myself repeatedly expressing the same sentiment in graduation cards and yearbooks. With little variation, I have written that I am envious of the adventures our graduates are preparing to embark upon. At a certain age, things begin to feel too settled and as though one’s own adventures have become little more than stories to be told and retold. The possibility of something genuinely new, possibly dangerous, exotic in taste, smell, and sound, seems distant and unlikely, but for them, the world has yet to be discovered.
The historian Will Durant wrote of youth that, “It bears law and order grudgingly. It is asked to be quiet when noise is the vital medium…it is asked to be passive when it longs for action; it is asked to be sober and judicious when its very blood makes [it] ‘a continuous intoxication’. It is the age of abandon, and its motto…is Panta agan — “Everything in excess.” It is never tired; it lives in the present, regrets no yesterdays, and dreads no morrows; it climbs buoyantly a hill whose summit conceals the other side. It is the age of sharp sensation and unchilled desire; experience is not soured yet with repetition and disillusionment; to have sensation at all is then a sweet and glorious thing. Every moment is loved for itself, and the world is accepted as an esthetic spectacle, something to be absorbed and enjoyed, something of which one may write verses, and for which one may thank the stars.”
Who would not be envious of this continuous intoxication? Cicero wrote in his Cato that, “As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.” That, regrettably, is as close to youth as us old folks get. We have, however, had our day in the sun, and it is with some sorrow that we have watched as a year of these young lives played out in the shadow of a pandemic.
Mr. Carpine was right in the awards assemblies when he asked students to reflect on the history they were living through, and it prompted me to recollect Thomas Carlyle’s comment that, “Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books.” As a kind of experiment, I thought back to the state of the world I entered upon graduating high school. Yeltsin had been elected president in Russia, peacekeeping forces were active in Bosnia and a war crimes tribunal at the Hague had indicted Serbian generals, 3,000 people had died in West Africa as a result of a meningitis outbreak, a bomb exploded in Atlanta, Georgia where the Olympics were being hosted, and a gunman killed sixteen elementary students and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. The world, while not shut down, hardly felt like a settled place.
I decided to extend my experiment: was the world better ordered or more settled for my father or grandfather or great-grandfather? My father joined the Marine Corps at seventeen and finished high school via correspondence courses offered to service members through the University of Chicago while studying in a hooch in Vietnam in 1969. That year saw increased violence between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and Britain’s subsequent deployment of around 600 soldiers. Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th president, Golda Meier became the fourth prime minister of Israel, Eisenhower died, De Gaulle resigned, and Abe Fortas resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court. His world was, by almost any measure, a much tougher place than the one I inherited in the 1990s.
My grandfather did not graduate high school, and instead finished the eighth grade and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps weeks shy of his sixteenth birthday in 1936. While he was helping to develop Glacier National Park and sending the bulk of his income to his mother in Eastern Montana, the Moscow show trials were occurring, George VI was crowned King of Great Britain, Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Act, the theologian Martin Niemöller was incarcerated in a concentration camp where he would die in 1945, Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific, the Duke of Windsor abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, Lord Halifax met with Adolf Hitler and began a policy of appeasement, and Italy withdrew from the League of Nations. His world was possibly tougher than my father’s, and certainly tougher than mine.
My great grandfather came of age in 1891 when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was publishing his Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and in the same year as Herman Melville and Arthur Rimbaud died. Mahler performed his Symphony No. 1 and Rachmaninoff his Piano Concerto No. 1. There was famine in Russia and an earthquake in Japan that is estimated to have killed 10,000 people. He likely knew none of this because at the age of thirteen he was rented out by his father in Illinois to a threshing crew that worked their way across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota to harvest wheat. His life seems likely to have been harder and more uncertain than my father’s or grandfather’s.
Each of these generations inherited a different kind of world with different sorts of circumstances and conditions weighing upon them. There was hardship and almost inconceivable poverty, and there were wars, violence, and oppression. There was also, however, great literature being written, music being composed, scientific discoveries being made, and wondrous events taking place that captured the interest and imagination of the people who lived through these periods.
We have almost certainly overused words like ‘unprecedented’ in the last fourteen months. Some of what has occurred is unprecedented, but the level or intensity of hardship imposed is not so entirely foreign if we are historically astute. As adults, a good deal of education is bound up with trying to impart some wisdom that will remain relevant in the world as it is for our children rather than as it was for us.
The English poet Edward Young wrote in his 1795 poem Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality that,
Wisdom, though richer than Peruvian mines,
And sweeter than the sweet ambrosial hive,
What is she, but the means of happiness?
That unobtain’d, then folly more a fool.
Whatever education we give, the wisdom it brings within our reach ought to aim to make happiness more realizable even in a world as uncertain as ours. To return for a moment to Will Durant, he wrote that, “Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.” I have been instructed by management to stop quoting the line from Aeschylus that “wisdom comes through suffering” (πάθει μάθος), but it seems to me that neither Aeschylus, nor Edward Young, nor Will Durant want us to be unhappy—they are not describing a normative condition as in “we ought to be unhappy in order to be wise,” but descriptive in that, “we are unlikely to grow, to create, to seek, and to discover the wisdom wherewith we can be happy unless we suffer.”
As uncomfortable as we might be as a school and a community with “we learn by suffering” as our credo, I think our students prove themselves to be the better and more hopeful expositors of it. As I listen each year to these senior theses, the themes are mercifully not sadness, melancholy, and suffering, but rather, friendship, love, purpose, and hope. Why these?
Human beings have, after many millennia, changed little. However much we might imagine ourselves to be dramatically individualistic, with regards to fundamentals, we want and are motivated by mostly the same things. Put another way, the impetus for a good life is the same even when the expression of it differs. Achieving a happy life, like achieving anything, can be done well or poorly; unlike pursuing other things, not pursuing happiness is virtually inhuman.
For instance, love, regardless of who we express it for or how, is human. Whatever form love takes, to be human is to love and to want to be loved. It is fitting that it should be so frequent a theme in senior theses. Viktor Frankl in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote of love that, “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
Put more simply, we need others to become fully ourselves. Sadness, struggle, deprivation, and the rest are part of the human experience, but we can transcend these together. That the messenger in this case is Frankl, a man who survived four different concentration camps including Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen), lost his unborn child, his wife, his mother, and his father, should land on love lends it credence as the quality by which we grow stronger through struggle. Joseph Addison, writing in his play Cato, has his character Portius say,
Marcus, the friendships of the world are oft
Confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure;
Ours has severest virtue for its basis;
And such a friendship ends not but with life.
I hope that this is a speech short on admonition, but what little of it there is, let it be this: choose your friends well because you will come to resemble them. A good friend, a true or real friend as seniors have put it in harkening back to the language of C.S. Lewis’ Four Loves, will advocate for our best interests. And, this is who I have seen them be for one another and it is not simply a sentiment they expound upon in a thesis. In other words, they get it.
Aside from love, one needs a purpose. Perhaps the most famous line of Frankl’s book is this: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” Next most famous is: “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” There must be some work we set ourselves to, some good we will do the world, something to justify our lives whether to ourselves or in exchange for the esteem of others. We cannot bear the notion that we will simply take up space and idly enjoy the amusements of a transitory existence. That is too bleak.
When I think about these students, the way that they have discussed texts, pushed themselves up mountains, done things that were well outside of their comfort zones; disagreed with one another and even with me…politely; raised objections, conceded points, managed their relationships and their various commitments, comforted one another, expressed compassion at critical moments, forgave one another…and us; the way that they have told stories around camp fires, pushed themselves to compete athletically; their gentleness around younger children, their maturity around prospective families and outside volunteers; their willingness to forego the thing they would have preferred to do in order to attend to something utterly voluntary but wholly noble; the ease with which they have complimented others; their work ethic and their humor, and the ease with which they laugh; their concern for others, their grace, and their eagerness to find a way in the world. I sense in them so much purpose that choice among abundance rather than a dearth of options is likely to be their problem.
Of the things that are important in an education, I feel confident, from their senior theses, to fireside conversations, to classroom exchanges, that they have learnt what can be taught, and that what remains, remains for them to discover in the exhilarating flush of independence. While I might have liked to work the docks and write philosophy like Eric Hoffer or fly over the desert at night in an open cockpit like Saint-Exupéry, or hunted pigeons in Parisian parks like Hemingway, or boxed for book money on ships like Louis L’Amour, or wine and dine my way around the world a dozen or more times like Anthony Bourdain, or set sail in the Orient like Joseph Conrad, I can accept that the window for adventure is closing in my life gratified that it is opening for them.
There is too much talk of how dark the world has grown, how it is mired in political and cultural quagmire, of how different it is from the world we inherited. Heraclitus’ line is true in more than a whimsical sense, “no man stepped in the same river twice” (πάντα ῥεῖ—everything flows). History is history because it is a record of changes. There is more than just gloom out there. It is the sum of our perceptions. The thing that will determine what it is to each of you is what Frankl identified as the last of the human freedoms: “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Too many are saying that the situation is hopeless. Do not believe them. Oliver Goldsmith in his oratorio The Captivity wrote,
Hope, like the gleaming taper's light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.
The night is not too dark for the hopefulness, energy, and buoyancy of youth. Adventure awaits. You are well-equipped for the journey. Do not allow yourselves to be made despondent by the last fourteen months, or the economy, or the state of the world, or the niggling of those who are envious of your youth. Be everything you have been here for us and the world will love you as much as we will miss you.
Congratulations to the Class of 2021!
D. Anderson
