Senior Banquet, May 1966
Let's admit that some of us have had our problems with you as a class. We've had a bully, threaten, cajole. For my part, I have both thrown some of you out of class or left myself. But for quite a while now, I think we've had most of the issues settled and that we have together been dealing with things that matter - with ideas, facts, theories, the reflection in literature of the significant experiences of men. I have come to have a good deal of respect for most of you: even when you were behaving badly, you were often very witty. Tonight, out of that respect. I should like to speak to you seriously: not as teacher to students but as one adult to other adults. And because I know you are capable of an intelligent tough mindedness and aren't afraid of the truth, I should like to tell you the truth as I see it and not offer to you a rosante and false view of your future.
What I intend, really, is to give you reassurance and my blessing - yet for a moment it may sound like a curse. It is customary to wish one's friends health, happiness and a long life. I wish you the first and the last, health and a long life, but I want you to have a great deal more than happiness. I wish you taste some sickness and sorrow, hardwork, disappointment, loss, a deep and abiding consciousness of death. I won't insist that all of these be actual; I will accept in part an imaginative experience. I do not wish you too much of any but I must insist on some. In short, I wish you - life.
Whether you can use these gifts or not remains for you to discover. They are valuable only as they are used. They can produce bitterness, selfishness and fear, but properly employed they will lead you to courage, love and a qualified happiness. Until you have tried them all, you cannot know your strength.
Cowardice is, after all, an unseemly and undignified avoidance of experience, isn't it? - and chiefly an avoidance of experiences feared but not yet known. The dentist's drill is in anticipation an instrument of torture, but we find its corrective pain not insupportable. It is a corrective pain. I think the death of someone we love is finally the most extreme anguish we can know. Yet when it happens, we mostly survive. Life may thereafter forever lose part of its brightness - no one would want this experience if he could avoid it but it is an experience which will come to most of us, nevertheless. And even from this we may discover that an essential inner core has been tempered, like fine steel. It seems to me that this discovery of strength is of the greatest imporance.
You will need strength - and not just because you are graduating in 1966 instead of 1866, 1766, 1666. You are always being told how difficult and trying our period is, how full of dangers and uncertainties. No doubt it is difficult, dangerous, and uncertain. But I offer you not the slightest sympathy on that account. Most periods are difficult and trying ones - and it is out of these periods that almost everything we value has come. You have also been born in and graduate into a time and place where there may be more problems and difficulties than there are in some other parts of the world. I congradulate you on that good fortune. There is so much to do, so many challanges to meet that you need never seek for causes to undertake and services to give. They are right here looking you on the face.
I should say of our period that if it is worse than any other, it is so because it has chosen to respect, to treat with dignity, the whine. The whine, the snivel of self pity, has no virtue at all. We see it all around us - the dirty bearded and blue-jeaned who have apted out of the human race, the insistence upon minority identification as excuse for personal failure, the treatment of all anti-social behavior as some kind of sickness.
Self pity and the whine are not like humility which comes of conviction and does not refuse action. The whine has no end, no aim, except self justification, an excuse for not acting in any positive way. It annihilates the dignity of the self. Indeed, if you can refrain from the
whine, you are probably fortunate in having chosen this period and place to be born in, to graduate in, to live, love and work in. For though it is no more difficult than many others have been, it is at least difficult enough. There must be difficulty. We need the oppositions - sickness and health, sorrow and happiness, loss and gain, tyranny and freedom, death and life.
We live in Time and as W.R. Rodgers, a modern English poet has it -
"Time and tide... are a shuttle, a tutoyer, a constant truck and traffic between two points ( in which the light is forever amber), a losing and finding of arrival and departure. To be static, to have no point of departure, no give and take of being, no systole of faith and diastole of doubt is death, death in the afternoon..."
"It was this eternal afternoon, this tideless torpor, this timescape flat as this eternal afternoon, this tideless torpor, this timescape flat as a sister's kiss, that afflicted the medieval monks so sadly, and which they called the sin .... of cloth. The prospect of a world without mutability (change) drained them of energy and hope. If only time had come marching along the road, quick - march, left-right, tick - tack, too - fro, to break up the apathy"
"How time stands still when we have nothing to reach for and nothing to withdraw from."
The time and the place are right for you and I have wished for you the necessary gifts - which you would recieve any way, without my wishing: not just a lopsided and useless "pleasant" life but the required portions of disappointment, sorrow and pain - something to reach for and something to withdraw from. Please note how much of action is here implied, a using and doing and a choice. We may not prevent some happenings - as one falls ill without willing it, loses his job, loses his religion - but we may yet in some measure determine what use we make of these events. And the possibility of choice confers responsibility.
Strength and responsibility. One feels in Paradise Lost Milton's difficulty in the paradox of the "fortunate fall". Adam was disobedient and sinned in eating the apple, you remember, and so was cast out of the garden of Eden and condemned to the work and suffering that man has known ever since. And yet, in the new situation, with the possibility of choice, a greater good was made possible - eventual participation in the kingdom of Heaven. Frier Lawrence. in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, reminds us also that in small things as well as in the great drama of heaven and hell, the oppositions lie which may be turned to man's fatal hurt or to his miraculous gain:
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power.
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.
Two such oppose'd kings encamp them still,
In man as well as herbs — grace and rude will.
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant
Which is to say, the herb being properly used is a medicine, wrongly used a poison. (we don't drink iodine) Human experience, also, may be used to poison or to cure, to redeem, to sanctify.
Both Milton and Shakespeare assumed a sense of grace - that is, a knowledge of God - as an infallible guide. It may be that in a largely secular age, we no longer have quite so certain a guide. But it is also true that, that sense of grace did not spare man from strenous moral endeavor. It is an embattled soul that we chiefly meet in the literature of the past, one sometimes defeated. It seems to me a dangerous modern fiction that a renewal of faith would end all struggle and confusion and bring us into a placid and static existence. It did not in the past - and anyway we don't want static existence. We are not entirely adrift. There is still for most of us a common conviction about what constitutes right action. Is it that we don't know how to chose or that we refuse responsibility? We have perfected the evasion, the rationalization, the shifting of blame. It is easier to evade and cry out upon fate and lament the time in which we were born.
Pain has a variety of uses, and so has doubt. So have disillusion and loss. These may indicate the ills which need to be attended to, train us in courage, teach us the true meaning of health, show us the falsity of our judgements, measure the limitless extents of what we can bear. I think that health, happiness and a placid life give little exercise: the soul gets fat and flabby. When it is tried it whines and yelds. It has never had the opportunity to discover its strength or how vast a pressure it can bear.
I should like you to discover your strength and understand the responsibility of choice. I should like to see you exercising that strength and that responsibility. For if you will remember the necessity of the oppositions you can never quite despair; yet at the same time you will know that strength and responsibility are maintained only in action, in exercise. You will be costantly reaching for and withdrawing from (opposing).
In reaching for liberty, you withdraw from supression of liberty, foreign or domestic. In reaching for justice, you withdraw from injustice, whether commited against your friends or your foes.
You will see that you can never applaud the end and deplore the means, for it is the action, the means. The constant truck and traffic, the exercise which must chiefly concern us - and in which the moral being resides.
Your education should assist you in this exercise and choice, and your decisions and actions will be the test of what the school has given you, though not of the school alone. Nevertheless your failure will be our failure. There is no justification for an education which does not make your life better than it could have been without one. You have now some knowledge of the world of nature and the world of men, you have been trained to think clearly and carefully, you have encountered again and again the whole system of values on which our civilization is based. All this should help you to make your decisions and to use your experiences.
I think, as a very partial witness, that it may be particularly your humanistic studies which will serve you well in the emotional and moral exercise of accepting responsibility and using adversity. If you have really suffered with King Lear, your own suffering will not become bitterness but will enlarge into compassion. If you know the clean sanity of Ibsen, the stringent laughter of Moliere and the integrity of both, you will not easily accept sham and hypocricy, nor be yourself anything but honest.
A quotation from Milton may sum up what I have been saying:
... well hast thou fought
The better fight, who single hast maintaind
Against revolted multitudes the Cause
Of Truth, in word mightier then they in armes;
And for the testimonie of Truth hast born
Universal reproach, far worse to beare
Then violence: for this was all thy care
To stand approved in sight of God, though Worlds
Judg'd thee perverse...
On, though it is indeed presumptuous to put simply in the company of Milton, in a poem of mine - (at least it starts from lines and ideas of Milton's)
When the sharp lines of angels made division
Revolt found its classic definition, and neither
Was treason, to stay or to fall... allegiance
In either being to concepts equally good
There must have been angels choosing to stay
From sheer inertia who unjustly shared
In the righteousness and some rebels who would
Compromise their clear responsible vision
For a halt in the meteor fall
But most, having rigorously assayed
The two decisions, would, with a cool despair,
Accept inevitable consequences and all
The attendant miseries or blessedness
One has finally his own convictions
And no moral right to padlock these in the gray
Cells of a private consceousness,
Not to act and not to say.
I am asking a great deal of you, a morally strenuous and responsible life. But I dare to ask it because I think you can do it. May God be with you...
VIRGINIA GAIL CANFIELD
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