hard time getting my act together
No motivation to pack for the weekend or do anything of consequence. Overtired and hearing beginning at 8am, can't do much but polished off two cadbury caramel eggs to boot. As it turns out, I didn't get the Feb speaker gig, but just the same, I am actually fine with it. My speech was typical me - a bit pretentious and serious. Meanwhile Feb graduation is a pretty silly sort of day and it didn't exactly fit the mood - but the speech was still good and now I guess and wait and see how mine compares in two weeks. I had to introduce to two of the committee members - my apparent "classmates" - so I am sure that didn't bode well. It's hard to go in swinging when you don't have any advocates in your corner - just the same, it's one of those rare times when you actually feel like you gave it your best, chin up, and you can accept that it's not suppose to be your day everyday.
Today certainly wasn't Aaron's day - he's in the hospitial with an apedicitis. Get well soon, bucko, we'll miss you this weekend.
Life goes, and so do we - just how we do it is a small mystery.
Anywhere here's the speech, for those of you in the mood for something pretentious and serious. Since I am going away for the weekend, I think I can justify a long post - it'll tide you over, unless you are one of my hate-reader maschoists.
Can I just say that I am so glad we are doing this our way. For me, this is an occasion to blend nostalgia with anticipation, a clearer view of the future finally visible through a lens sharpened by the past, a time not only to say �good-bye� but also �thank you.� For all of the hard work that preceded it, we have arrived at a moment reserved solely for celebration. Look around and remember this, for all of the effort we have put forth to sit here today, for all we have earned and accomplished, moments like these do not come often or soon enough.
As Febs, I like to think that we are blessed with being slightly out of sync. At this point, you have probably come to terms with what being a Feb means. At the very least, you have developed your own clever way to enlighten the rest of the world as to why your transcript looks the way it does, and if you are enterprising, why you are the better for it. People will tell you that your outlook is influenced by being an optimist or a pessimist - and surely the idea that the glass is always half-full or half-empty means something special to a class that calls itself �02.5. To people outside, Febs might be the kids that edge ahead or dwindle ever so slightly behind. But for us, those of us who have come to embrace Feb-ness as something more than an admissions classification, we are not bound to see things in such concrete black and white terms. Can a half be just a half? I think we are all neutrally charged ions just buzzing around and glad that our fates have not been decided for us.
Being a Feb will forever allow you the perspective to do things you might never have otherwise done. Before I came here, it made me aware of my own pace, helped me learn that valuable lessons can come from outside the classroom, and it got into my eighteen-year old head and showed me that I had a lot more growing up to do than I thought. And now, a quick four years later, it has taught me that it doesn�t really matter when you come to a place, it matters how you leave it.
And now we are leaving it. We are among the first graduates in the nation to go forth into this most uncertain new year. Today, we lay down a new track and everyone else has no choice but to follow in the path we have left in the morning snow. We are leaders and we are first. Today is also a day to enjoy being half-a-step behind. It has nothing to do with quickness as any self-respecting Feb will tell you. We are the type of people who consciously avoid the congestion of a stampede or doing things the way everyone else does. We are patient. We realize there is no reason to rush because things are set to begin when we get there. We knew that we would get there when it was our time. That time has finally arrived. Wherever you imagine yourself today, it is certainly not lost somewhere in the middle of the pack. That is not the Feb way.
Preparing to leave this place, I have done a lot of thinking about what I learned here, this is after all one of the primary reasons I came to college in the first place. But I have also tried to remember all of the reasons I came to Middlebury specifically. To that end, this fall, in order to complete my major in political science, I took a long overdue class called �the philosophy of liberal education.� Under the direction of one of my favorite professors here, we spent the majority of our semester considering the Ancient Greeks, the historic purveyors of our kind of education. But rather than expound the lofty-sounding merits of Plato�s Republic or convince you that we would all be better off ruled by philosopher kings, for this occasion, I have chosen one to talk about one of his lesser known contemporaries, a twentieth-century British philosopher named Michael Oakeshott. His writings in particular resonated with me, especially the book The Voice of Liberal Learning, because it hits close to home and he has assembled all the right words for a day as important as today. His pages drip with a lyricism I cannot justly convey: he is a lover of learning and his essays, appropriately, are sonnets.
On this matter of the liberal arts, I will default to Oakeshott and a commencement speech he gave thirty years ago, to a crowd I imagine looked and felt very much like this one: "Liberal learning, that is; the invitation to untangle oneself from a time, from the urgencies of the here and now and listen to the conversation in which human beings forever seek to understand themselves."
In other words, Oakeshott calls liberal learning the permission to disregard the trivialities that weigh down daily life. College is a time and place reserved for the monumental, the beautiful, the ideal, the perfect, the most excellent examples of what we are when we are at our finest. It is the way to know the self, quietly, in a world that is otherwise very busy and loud.
Conversation is a recurring theme in Oakeshott�s writing and language has a similar revered meaning for Middlebury College graduates. Not only for the English majors or linguists among us, language is our common academic denominator. You leave here with a refined ability to communicate an expanded capacity to express your self. In a sense it is vocational - our grammar has improved for the better, our accent perfected � Middlebury has trained us in the language of life. Like language, Oakeshott offers that �learning is never fixed or finished, it has to be used and continually modified in use.� Do yourself justice, in all of your future transactions, use and recall the languages you encountered at Middlebury.
At this point in our lives, we have reached a level of linguistic proficiency where we are finally able to communicate effectively with others. Oakeshott calls liberal learning �the human inheritance.� The riches endowed to us from Plato have passed through many hands over many centuries, and this morning, symbolically the gift is bestowed upon you. Our teachers, books, friends, mentors have provided substance for our speech, but Middlebury has given us the ability to speak. Before you can express yourself, you first need to know something about the self. Today commemorates the process and a place that has a hand in drawing out your most important thing, your voice. With this voice, you have the means to make a difference. I posit to you that the most significant thing you can share is the human inheritance, sharing of yourself.
Learning a new language is political, it is not partisan, but it is a factor that divides inclusion from exclusion, it pushes observation into participation, transforms potential into reality. It is a responsibility you now bear to be included and to include others in the conversation of human beings striving to understand themselves. Ignorance will exclude you. For the rest of your life you might feign disinterest, succumb to apathy, but you are no longer ignorant. You are included and much is expected of you and from you.
In closing, I want to share with you one of my fondest memories from my liberal education class this fall. My professor told me to never mind all of that talk about the real world, to ignore the people that concentrate too much on what is �out there� because that is just business. But as for our activity, our academic exchange, our study, and the sum total of things happening here at Middlebury, I prefer to think of this as what is real. I hope that you will as well.
Congratulations to all. Middlebury thank you and good-bye.
posted by lmjasinski at 12:44 AM
