News & Events 2003-2004

Commencement Speeches 2004

BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS 2004
Given by Robert Cooke, English Teacher
May 28, 2004

Forty-five minutes hardly seems enough time for an appropriate Baccalaureate address – wait – fifteen minutes hardly seems enough time for an appropriate Baccalaureate address.

When the shock of being asked by the Class of 2004 to speak at their Baccalaureate service had worn off to the point that I could calmly consider it, three things occurred to me:

Naturally, the first was the magnitude of the honor the class had bestowed upon me. I have given people quite a number of speeches of one kind or another over the years, but this is the first time I can remember having actually been asked to do so.

The second thing, that made the honor even more significant was that the speaker was chosen by an election in which all members of the class had participated. Of course, since few elections are ever unanimous, I want those of you who didn’t vote for me to know that I respect your democratic right of dissent and wish you a moderately successful future.

The third thing was my long-standing belief that, taken individually, most students are admirable young people who struggle nobly with the conflict between attempting to meet the daily challenges and requirements we place before them and the natural inclination of their years to become independent and think for themselves.

However, in groups such as the august one before me, students can be notorious conspirators, and this awareness on my part summoned up a truly Machiavellian question: might it not be possible, even within the realm of the most fantastic imagination, that the honor awarded me as Baccalaureate speaker, since it also included the anxiety of anticipating the event and the struggle to show up with something meaningful to say that no one had ever said before, could in reality be a cleverly disguised form of retribution for my never letting them write in pencil?

But we must not allow such dark thoughts to cloud this glad occasion.

To be sure of preparing something that would fit the description of a Baccalaureate speech, I decided to look up the word “Baccalaureate” to see exactly what it meant. This seemed the sanest thing to do since I was to be the one giving the speech. Among two or three similar definitions, I found a description that read, “any discourse or speech, especially a tedious reproof or exhortation.” Immediately I thought to myself, “I can do that! I have mastered the art of tedium. I’ve made a career of tediously reproving and exhorting whole classrooms of students for years.”

The idea for one of the observations I have chosen to make this evening – that being the critical need for the much earlier development of good judgment in today’s world, especially as it pertains to distinguishing between the artificial and the real – comes from a highly unlikely source. A few years ago I began awarding prizes of some dubious worth to students whose performance on a test or quiz or whose response to a particularly difficult question in class rose well above expectations and seemed deserving of more than the usual recognition. The prizes themselves, which ranged from free rides on the rollercoaster at Dorney Park to all-expense-paid trips to Bermuda (in a case of extraordinary achievement) were given and received in the spirit of good fun. In this spirit, a young lady who knew the game well wrote me a letter during spring break thanking me for her Bermuda trip and saying she never realized how rewarding knowledge of a nominative absolute construction could be. But one day after class a student came to me with an unanticipated problem that changed everything. Apparently the recipient of a prize the day before (which happened to be an old book with a personal inscription to me from Ernest Hemingway) thought he had the real thing! Needless to say, beginning with the winner of this rare book, I had to retrace my steps and make sure anyone who had ever received a prize understood that it was not as advertised but merely part of an enjoyable tradition intended to be funny. So far I’ve gotten in touch with everyone except a certain well-known basketball player for Duke who may possibly still think he has Edgar Allan Poe’s mother’s ceramic clock on his night table.

However, while remembering this refreshing diversion from the rigors of adverb clauses and SAT review, I thought how thin the line between trust and gullibility has become here at the beginning of the twenty-first century and how dangerous the failure to recognize that line can be. With the age of information has come a burgeoning of opinion and, to the detriment of us all, a widespread, almost universal, blending of the two. No one escapes the influence of those who wield this duplicitous combination to their own ends, but you who are graduating tomorrow are of an age most susceptible of all. Somehow the evolution of good judgment must be accelerated: the consequences of proceeding without it have take on life-altering ramifications they did not possess just a generation or two ago. Most of us who are older were saved from various calamities of one degree or another, not so much by good judgment but by either a strong intervening hand, our own instincts, or pure luck. Of these, the best bet today would seem to be your own instincts.

You have to be ready earlier. As much as I hate to say it, you have to grow up faster. To use a baseball analogy, when you are at the plate, the world no longer allows you to take as many pitches before deciding when or if to swing. Good judgment exercised in the blink of an eye was not something that just a relatively few years ago a rookie had to bring to the plate. But make no mistake, it is today, and the sad stories of those who do not bring such ready judgment seem to multiply with every passing year.

Right away you will be challenged to recognize instinctively the difference between ideas and ideology, concepts and causes, education and indoctrination. Writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Henry James knew that the artificial is more attractive than the genuine, the lie more believable than the truth. In Huckleberry Finn the king and the duke’s impersonation of the Wilks brothers is more convincing than the Wilks brothers themselves, and in James’s story, “The Real Thing,” two professional models are deemed more suitable by an artist than the actual couple he has been commissioned to paint. James makes clear that something is perfect only when it is false.

What I myself believe is the hopeless abyss into which both thinking and non-thinking people are now drawn is ironically an offshoot of the very technology that enhances the quality of our lives in so many ways. Thanks to the age of information, most of us are made conscious of far more than we can actually assimilate intellectually and emotionally. The result is that we often find ourselves not in a state of satisfaction with what we know, but in one of anxiety and frustration as the result of an all-encompassing, almost suffocating awareness. The result is a proliferation of opinion such as the world has never known. Everyone, it seems, is compelled to have an opinion on every subject, regardless of whether that opinion is baked, half-baked, or not even oven-ready. Alexander Pope had something to say about people and their opinions.

Pope was a man who lived in the eighteenth century and wrote quotations for special occasions – weddings, graduations, dedications, ribbon-cuttings. Of course, at the time he didn’t realize this is what he was doing, but that’s the way it turned out. What has made him such a success in this field for two hundred and sixty years is that he condensed his advice and witty, perceptive observations into just two lines called couplets, which caused the special occasions to be much shorter and allowed those who attended them to get to the refreshments that usually followed much sooner. For example, instead of six or seven sentences about the proliferation of opinions and the need for everybody to have one, whether they need it or not, I could have just read a quotation of Mr. Pope’s,

Some praise at morning what they blame at night,
But always think the last opinion right

And then said, “Refreshments will now be served in the parish house.” But I didn’t, and that’s why Alexander Pope is more popular than I am on special occasions...and he’s been dead since 1744!

On the subject of how to deal with the unprecedented expansion of knowledge, speculation, and opinion with which we are confronted on a daily basis, one of Pope’s most famous couplets also applies. In it he refers to the Pierian Spring, which in Greek mythology was the source of knowledge and inspiration:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; (he wrote)
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring.

Again, the ceaseless flood of instantly communicated information has made our Pierian Spring deeper and richer than it has ever been in human history, but it has also created a surface whose proportionate width piques our natural impulse to explore and leaves us little time or inclination to plumb its depth. As I see it, we are inundated with a “little learning” that is proving to be much more of a “dangerous thing” than Alexander Pope could ever possibly have imagined.

Above all, you must beware of those you will inevitably encounter who seek to influence you in one way or another, but who themselves have drunk no deeper than Poland Spring. The Brooklyn Bridge is still for sale, and you are the newest generation of prospective buyers.

The fact is, our Pierian Spring has become a veritable ocean that washes up on the shore of our consciousness a seemingly infinite number of facts, discoveries, images, and contentions with which we cannot conceivably keep pace. Nevertheless, through some involuntary response, we feel almost a moral obligation to evaluate them all and arrive at a rational point of view regarding each. Not only is this a game we cannot win; it is a game we cannot even successfully play. Just when we feel we are on the verge of formulating a set of workable values for ourselves as individuals that will also be applicable to society in general, the tide returns to obliterate our sandcastle conclusions and replaces them with a whole new set of puzzlements and revelations. This is the “flux” that the philosopher George Santayana said was central to life and human existence, but I doubt he would have estimated its current at the speed we experience it today.

The answer may lie somewhere in the idea of stockpiling your inner resources and building a kind of stubbornness that will provide sufficient strength against the current to allow you to swim in the direction of your good judgment and common sense. Such resources will most likely be your only constant between one day and the next amid the flux by which we are all swept along.

Whoever first said “carpe diem” – if anyone ever did – it’s hard to imagine a person getting up one morning and just saying it – obviously didn’t realize that “seizing the day” is no more possible than catching our own shadow. It’s always either immediately behind us or one mere tantalizing step ahead. The present is something we remember, and revise in the retelling of it, and the retelling we call the past. The present is also something we can create in advance by imagining it as the future. But we can never truly appreciate the present because we are involved in creating it. We cannot “seize the day” because we are the day.

Nevertheless, I would like us to take a moment this evening and come as close as we can to catching our shadows in an effort to appreciate the school we are both leaving. In addition to instruction in the arts and sciences, schools provide a ritual of resistance in which you must participate on your way to graduation, and Blair is no exception. Rules, regulations, and requirements (even when they might seem excessive and unnecessary) have a common purpose beyond those individually stated, and that is to develop an inner structure by practicing adherence to an external one. And whether consciously or not, you have definitely benefited from the external structure offered by Blair.

I am in a good position to tell you something about Blair you may or may not fully realize simply because I have more to compare it with. The way I first saw Blair has not altered after eleven years of working as part of it. From the trustees to the headmaster and the administration, and to virtually each and every member of the faculty and staff, the concern for the place itself and for the students it serves is genuine and deep. Blair succeeds as well as any school I know (and considerably better than most) in sustaining its initial impression and fulfilling the goals highlighted in its catalogue. We might do well to play at catching the shadow of our appreciation for having shared in this experience here in the present moment and in future moments when we are far from the school itself.

There are always clear signs indicating the time to leave anything. Your intellectual and biological clocks, I’m sure, were signs enough for you and began ticking about two months ago according to my calculations. The signs for me were considerably different. One appeared on a college recommendation I had written in the space provided for “number of years teaching.” In what looked like Mr. Stival’s handwriting, I saw the words “half a century.” The other occurred when Mr. Hay asked me on the basis of our friendship and professional relationship if I would tell him what Nathaniel Hawthorne was like as a person. You will leave Blair for a world of opportunity, challenge, and uncertainty, where intuition and sound judgment will be your most trustworthy and indispensable companions. I, on the other hand, have been traded to Peddie for a science teacher and a lab assistant to be named later.

Naturally, I was flattered to learn that as many as eight or nine letters have been received by the school pleading that I be kept on and that I be given more responsibilities, both in and outside the classroom. But when I found out all these letters had been written by Mrs. Cooke, my whole life flashed before me, and the bright future I had envisioned began to dim.

I was going to use the words, “In conclusion,” but I knew a minister once who used them as a code for “I plan talking another twenty minutes” and who created more converts to the religion across the street than anyone before him in the history of the parish. Instead, I will close with a prediction which the Class of 2004 and I can both guarantee will come true as soon as we leave Blair: the Redskins posters in Room 310 will come down and pencil sales in the bookstore will skyrocket.

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