Bishop Reilly, President McFarland, Trustees, Faculty, Staff, Parents and Guests, and – most importantly – you, beloved, and, I might say, very sharp looking Class of 2002.
I feel very honored and privileged to be up here speaking to you today as commencement speaker and receiving an honorary degree. I also feel a little stunned in a way, and that’s probably because of my remembering that my freshman year at Holy Cross came to such an appalling end, with a “D” in Greek and an “F” in French. You could have gotten very good odds on me as a future commencement speaker.
That year I went to summer school in French. Of course, I had an excuse-there was a special circumstance that accounted for my low performance-it was not stress. In those days, I think stress only applied to industrial metals. And, it was not low self-esteem-in those days, as Wilfred Sheed pointed out, there was another name for low self-esteem-it was called “humility.” No, it was a “proximate cause,” as Aquinas would put it. My brother’s friend was a senior, and he had a car-which he never used as a premed student because he was busy avoiding “Ds” and “Fs.” As you might have heard from some of the ancients, cars were not permitted to students other than seniors. Many other things were not permitted, including women, which was, of course, the reason we needed the car-mostly to travel to places with exotic names, such as Smith.
Looking around me today, I see that certain things have changed. I am not suggesting that you do, but if you did remove every female graduate sitting here and replaced her with a Jesuit, and then took a black and white photograph of it, you would have a clearer picture of how Holy Cross looked when I graduated.
Now to experience change by returning to a place of the past is one of the resounding themes of Romantic literature which happened to be my field of concentration in graduate school-a field, I should say, in which I often lay down and went to sleep. Wordsworth’s poem that we call “Tintern Abbey,” and in which no abbey ever appears, is perhaps the best known example of this theme of return. “Five years have passed,” he begins, “five summers with the length of five long winters”-as if he had attended summer school-and then goes on to express the decline he has experienced since his last visit to this rural place. In the process, he echoes another Romantic theme-things are not getting any better. The golden light that imbued the past is now so diminished, one may have doubt that it ever existed. “The light that never was on land and sea,” Wordsworth calls it in another poem.
But my return to Holy Cross today leaves me with the opposite impression. Maybe it’s because I am a kind of optimist. My kind of optimism, I think, is best expressed in a little Turkish proverb that says-the translation is: “When the axe goes into the wood all the trees think, ‘Well, at least the handle is one of us.'” It’s a hopeless optimism.
So, many would agree that there’s not just one Holy Cross-there are many Holy Crosses. Heraclitus would say that you cannot stick your toe in the same Holy Cross twice. And, most would agree that today’s Holy Cross is a more open, more variegated and progressive College, but I should add that I never minded those aspects of the other Holy Cross whose passing is applauded by others. For instance, I never minded that we had “lights out” at 10 o’clock every night. Without “lights “out,” we never would have learned to light-proof our dorm rooms with towels, newspapers, and tin foil-thus preparing us for any sudden recurrence of World War II. It was behind these drawn shades that we indulged in the nefarious act of reading. And, in some cases, we even committed acts of literature-heinous ones for the most part. I never minded the early morning Mass required every day, for it taught me how to sleepwalk in pajamas through snow. I never minded that the curriculum had not changed in a very long time, for it prepared us to face the modern world in its many heresies-the Manichaeans and Albigensians lurking down at the Greyhound station. As far as the absence of women, this can only be viewed as another opportunity for “character building.” I took comfort in the poet Philip Larkin’s comment when he said, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”
I was not bothered by any of this. In fact, I thought, one day, one of my classmates, probably a contributor to The Purple, would write a moving chronicle of these days, entitled, “The History of Medieval Worcester.” There is one small exception to my overall contentment-I don’t think it was a good idea for us boys to have maids who visited every day. These were women of advanced years, for reasons you can imagine, who made our beds every morning while we were busy discussing the intricacies of Thomistic philosophy or finding a new use for the dative case. They also picked up after us every day-a poor preparation, I now see, for what was then called “the married state.”
I want to leave these fond memories and move on to the heart of any commencement address where traditionally we find a directive, or at least a nugget of advice. I feel a little awkward in dispensing advice to a group of relative strangers-not to mention their strange relatives. No one wants to sound like Polonius trying to straighten out Hamlet. But I’ll take courage in the fact that very few people remember who their commencement speaker was, let alone what he or she said. In fact, I’ve only heard of one truly memorable and truly true piece of commencement address advice-It was from the speaker who leaned forward into the microphone and said to the graduates in an ominous voice, “You know, life in the real world is not like college. It’s like high school!” According to that wisdom, you were better prepared four years ago for the world than you are today, but we won’t dwell on that.
My advice takes the form of a tiny injunction which can be put into two words. And the two words are: “Don’t graduate.” But, what I mean by this is, even though you are leaving the College, leaving The Hill-as we call it-your teachers and classrooms: Don’t leave behind the habits of study, contemplation and open-minded discussion and introspection that this College has encouraged in you. I am not talking about the “quiet habits of obedience” that lingered in Joyce’s young, Jesuit-stricken boy, Stephen Dedalus. If anything, I would be more inclined to encourage you to the habit of questioning these precepts you are asked to follow and even the authorities who insist on your compliance.
What I am talking about is critical reading and thinking as lifetime activities-not merely exercises performed in the enclosed context of a school. Finding yourself at the end of college makes you feel a little more adult. Many of you are ready to enter a career or the ranks of a profession. But, what I would ask, is that you continue to keep alive your inner schoolboy or schoolgirl-the one who never gets tired of looking things up and finding things out. I would like to convey to you the notion of endless self-schooling and perpetual discovery-a condition that would make the phrase “continuing education” a redundancy. To borrow an aphorism from my father, who, like most fathers was fond of aphoristic wisdom, ” Experience holds its graduation at the grave”-where, I would add, the commencement address will be replaced by the eulogy which none of us will ever hear.
My Holy Cross is different from your Holy Cross, and yours will be different from the Holy Cross of the future. But what truly defines the College, I suspect, has remained the same-the same system of ethics, the same strong academic focus, and, most important to me, the same insistence on providing a circumstance in which the values of study, inquiry and self-examination are fostered, honored, and even rewarded. Simply put, the College is essentially the same place it used to be-a place to read, a place to think. In fact, if you dismantled the modern university in reverse chronological order-from the way it was built in the Middle Ages-the students would be the first to go. No, wait, the administration would be the first to go-I forgot. Then the students, then the faculty. And the last thing that would remain would be the library-for in its earliest stage, the university was really just a gathering of people around a library-whether real or virtual now-a gathering of interested people around a campfire of written information.
It goes without saying that a heavy addiction to reading is fundamental to a lifetime commitment to your own continuing education. Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century wrote that the university has but one role to play-to teach people to read. By that, he did not mean making people merely literate but equipping people to read beyond the university-to read critically and intelligently on their own-to read without teachers. Teachers, remember, are simply people who have read these before you have-sometimes only by a few hours. And who claim the advantage of a superior reading. For Carlyle, the didactic lesson of the university is that each of its students should evolve into an auto-didact. No doubt, you will all keep on reading. But let me give you my sense of how that might go. I think it’s a good thing to devote some of your time to reading books that offer some resistance. These are books that sometimes require you to go back and read a paragraph-books that don’t make a lot of sense for the first 20 pages. But if you press on, there comes a point where you and the voice of the book become synchronized, and that kind of earned attachment has always felt more valuable to me than connections more easily made.
John Updike said that the real motive for reading is not to learn but to steal. And every writer would admit that thievery is one of the most basic qualifications for the job. The real craft lies in making sure you don’t leave any fingerprints lying around. But a more vital motive behind reading than learning or stealing is making room in yourself for the consciousness of another-whether “this other” is a character in a novel, the narrator of a biography or the voice of a poet. Our minds are enlarged by reading to the extent that reading forces us to make accommodations within ourselves for other points of view. By inviting in “the other,” we loosen our grip on the set of hidebound opinions that we mistake for the self. And we also tone down the ego that acts relentlessly as that self’s promoter and publicist.
Reading can be a radical act, especially if you are reading Kierkegaard or Jack Kerouac in a light-proof room in Wheeler Hall. Radical-not only in terms of society-but in terms of the self. One of the dominant themes of more than one great book is that books themselves are dangerous-it is one of the lessons of Don Quixote, who clearly read too many tales of chivalric adventure. And it is the lesson of Flaubert whose Madame Bovary is lured into a dangerous liaison by the promises of all the steamy romances she has devoured. But, in fact, books are not dangerous. What is dangerous, is either not reading at all, or just reading one book over and over again. Whether that book is the Bible, the Koran, or even “The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing,” one book-singular-is dangerous. Literature, particularly poetry, welcomes ambiguity; it welcomes uncertainty, which is why it is more trustworthy than cant.
I did not want the events of September 11 to throw a heavy shadow over my talk, but when you think about it, there is no room in terrorism for uncertainty and ambiguity. Terrorism is often driven by one book, and therefore it is threatened by all others.
So, don’t graduate. Or, at least, don’t let your mind graduate. What I am calling for might seem easy to follow because it simply asks you to continue to do what you’re doing. But there are presences that will mitigate against your desire to continue to cultivate your interior gardens. You may think of what this College has provided you as a kind of vaccination against the mental diseases of lethargy, narrow-mindedness, and, to use a good 18th-century word, dullness.
A recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly called these the forces of numbness-that is, digital and electronic voices and images that seek every day to infiltrate and redecorate our conscious habitations. This article goes on to point out that we live in “a vast goo of meaningless stimulation,” and because of the constant buzz of the media-not to mention the gluttered circuitry of e-mail, fax and cell phone-we find ourselves immersed in the largely fabricated world-insulated from the real, protected from its sharp edges.
Contemporary life has been compared to “the lobby of a high-end Ramada, Marriott, Sheraton-whatever you call a ‘whatever’ hotel. The ceaseless messages of sensations are expressed vividly in the sheer clutter of the television screen that wants to tell us everything that has already been done. Information cycles relentlessly, revealing a need to fill the pages, fill the time slots, fill the channels, the Web sites, the roadside, the building facades, the backs and fronts of caps-for everything must be saying something every minute.”
Dennis Potter, the imaginative British television writer who did “The Singing Detective” and “Pennies from Heaven,” once said in an interview that he thought that all of television was about the same thing-no matter what the show was. And then he turned away and didn’t give the answer. This drove me crazy. I started to wonder what it was that television was all about. And I thought to myself, I think maybe what he had in mind is that all of television is saying, “Everything’s OK. Everything’s fine. It’s gonna be fine.”
Strangely, if you look at contemporary fiction, you find that it’s saying the opposite: “Things are not fine, things are awful-painful, apocalyptic. And when you look at poetry-if poetry is saying one thing, poetry is saying: “Life is beautiful, but remember-yours is not going to last forever.”
What is truly disappointing about television is to realize that in its vast landscape, there is only one character I would hold up as a role model to you-the Class of 2002-a single character, a lone beacon. I am referring, of course, to Lisa Simpson. I would hold her up for her fierce curiosity, for the courage of her numerous convictions, her outspokenness, her sensitivity to environmental issues. Here is a character who will not graduate-not because animated characters never age-but because, for her, life is a learning experience. And then there is her patience in a family environment most inimical to learning-patience in the face of her father’s profound density, her brother’s cruelty, and even, yes, she must be included-her dear mother’s vacuousness. And let us not forget her commitment to the saxophone, regardless of the results. What I am saying, I think, in this regard, is find your own saxophone. There is one out there for each of you graduates. Your saxophone might be growing orchids or taking photographs of clouds-it might be learning sign language or driving an ambulance. Or your saxophone might be the saxophone itself-that would make things very simple. In any case, find your saxophone and play what you feel on it-even though it might result in your getting tossed out of the school band. That’s the lesson, I think, of Lisa Simpson. The only thing that worries me about her is the pearls-I just could never figure out the pearls.
My saxophone was poetry. I began playing it in high school, and I’m still playing it. For years, people would cover their ears when they heard me-and for good reason. My poetry was shamelessly imitative, heartless, humorless, merely clever at best. Why I continued to write as I stood in a driving blizzard of rejection slips I don’t know. But I did. And my first real book was published when I was in my forties. So, I stand before you here-a model of grim persistence. I don’t want to give the false impression that during these years of neglect I was laboring away at the desk, long into the night. Poems don’t require that kind of commitment or those kinds of man-hours. Max Beerbohm once said that the most difficult thing about being a poet is knowing what to do with the other 23 and a half hours of the day.
So, how to end. I want to end by sentencing you to a lifetime of education, and I want to wish you all the best of luck. And I really do think you’re very sharp looking today. And I want to end by reading two poems-one is a tiny poem by Langston Hughes-and, if I can put myself in the same sentence with him-the other poem is by me.
This is a little poem by Langston Hughes because I wished you luck-it’s just called “Luck:”
Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.
To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.
My poem is really an extension of what I’ve said, or a little embroidery maybe on what I’ve said about reading. When Nabokov was asked, “Who is your ideal reader?”-he said, “My ideal reader is someone who reads with a dictionary and a pencil.”-and, a very literal way of keeping alive our inner student lives, I think, is that simple habit of making marginal notations. When we do that, our pencil acts as a kind of seismograph-to register the mental tremors we’re feeling as we read. I’m not talking about the yellow highlighters-that’s a device easily abused-because there is a physical, I think, almost erotic pleasure in just doing that-and, so, there’s a tendency to just fill the book and just make it yellow. I’m talking about a slightly more judicious kind of notation that might go on, in which we create a dialogue with the author, and our reading becomes an interaction with that person. Such jottings are a sign of our presence, and the book we hold in our hands becomes, not just The Heart of Darkness, but my reading of The Heart of Darkness-the silent communication and conversation that took place between me and Joseph Conrad.
I’ll end with this poem which I said is a kind of extension of that kind of idea-it’s a little essay-type poem called “Marginalia:”
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive-
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!”-
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Hardy’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “My man!” “Bull’s-eye.”
Check marks, exclamation points and asterisks
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having once written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospel
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwrethed with Blake’s furious scribbling.
But the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”
Thank you and good luck to you all.