Valediction to juniors, 2011
At the end of a year, I like to say a few words as a summing up of our time together. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should take a moment to gather ourselves and look at the broader picture of what we have studied, thought, and done.
We have met most days in room 537 of the Tunstall division of Norfolk Academy, and we have dedicated ourselves to the study of American literature. We have also worked at the craft of scholarship with words, and, as such, we have been concerned with the particulars of how words get put together in scholarly ways. Those concerns have led us through grammar, rhetoric, literary terms, vocabulary, research, poetry, prose, drama. You’ve written in class, out of class, on a computer; you’ve written literary analysis, research, autobiographies, argument, and, finally, a tome of philosophy stating your beliefs and values.
This is a photograph of the writing you all have done this year. It has been my privilege to get to read it, to help you shape it, and to watch you grow into stronger writers. The two most precious things you can ever give are your love and your labor. This stack of writing represents love and labor for all of us, and I include my love and labor as well. I love teaching, and I am lucky to get to do it. I would even do it if it were illegal. May the work you have done be preparation for labor you do in your life. May the love you have shared this year come back to you many times over. Even though life, as Thomas Hobbes infamously suggested, may be “nasty, brutish, and short,” we all still wish for more of it than we get.
I feel that way at the end of this year, I too wish for more time even though “the spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering” and “The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm – “. There is much more to say and do, but our time has come to an end.
We have studied American literature for a year together, the same year that you have studied this nation’s history, and I hope that you have linked the two in your thinking. Which character, I wonder, do you feel the most like at the end of this experience? Are you like Hester Prynne, someone who has endured a difficult punishment? Are you like Jim, finding your freedom at the end of our quest something that you actually had long ago? Are you like Tom Buchanan, ready to push on to the next party without a care for the situations behind you? Are you like Darl, muttering yes, yes, yes, yes as they take you to the asylum?
I always ask myself which character best resembles my frame of mind at the end of the year. More often than not I am Huck, ready for a new adventure, headed towards some new frontier. At the end of rough years, I’m more like Dimmesdale, ready to give a Last Lecture and collapse. In the Hollywood movie, I would be the teacher who made some stand for an ideal, opposing a tyrannical administration with a John Proctor like tearing of a document, screaming something about my name. I imagine that my last year of teaching, I’ll be like Prospero, breaking the last piece of chalk and heading to a scholar’s retirement in Milan. At the end of this year, I feel most like Nick in The Great Gatsby. As much as I can register complaints about Nick’s unreliability, his half confrontations, his meandering career and relationships, I admire his complexity of thought, his powers, of observation, and his fascination with people and the larger social forces that drive them both to success and destruction. Worried about Mr. McKee’s lather and a few fingers into the evening’s second bottle of whiskey, Nick muses “Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life” (35). Nick’s position, both “within and without,” is the perfect one for a novelist and a scholar. If you care to examine the “inexhaustible variety of life,” and only those who wish to deaden their minds and souls would not want to examine it, then you need to move beyond the parameters of your individual point of view. Whitman’s notion that every atom belonging to him as good belongs to you is not only scientifically correct, but it reminds us that we all share the same contingent and limited selves and bodies we know to be less an example of e e cummings’ “hypermagical ultraomnipotence” and more of a frightened girl in a waiting room like Elizabeth Bishop who writes:
I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Many of you have had an incredible year of achievements in the classroom, the theater, the athletic fields and courts and tracks. Many of you have struggled with incredible problems in academics and in life. I have not known all of the life problems you’ve faced, but I have known some of them, and I can intuit the rest. There is not a human being who does not have to face demons from within and without. Your demon may have been something you didn’t see coming, and it may have been a demon that tempted you just to be mediocre, silent, and unremarkable, like someone waiting for life to start happening. Some of you have had to face more than your fair share of those demons in what can seem like a very early stage. I would point out to you that you are still here, despite the best efforts of these demons, and not only are you still here, but you’re smarter, more experienced, and equipped with some habits of mind that will serve you well to solve problems in and out of class. Your demons grow weaker with every new development of your mind and sinew.
I want you to know that I am still here, too. I want you to know that there’s a man in room 537 of the Tunstall building who wishes you well, who will always have a book you can borrow, who will always help you look at your writing and make it better, who will help you find what he can. A mentor of mine, the great English teacher Karl Martin Hames, once said, “The deal’s for life, Kidd. I’m here to help you whenever you need it. Just make sure you teach and help others, too.” At my very best, I am but an imitation of this great man and his love for his students and their learning.
Mr. Hames was fond of grand pronouncements, of unsupported generalizations he would shout at us, and as an homage, I offer these final thoughts to you:
May the French always like it sweaty, and may all your revisions improve the original draft to the point almost of perfection.
Like Huck find someone in your life worth going to hell for.
Like Hester learn that you really can refashion how you’re labeled.
Like Gatsby devote yourself to a quest, but know that you can’t change the past and know that the means are as important as the ends.
Like Miranda realize that today really is a brave new world with wondrous people in it.
We won’t finish examining Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and let’s let that remind us that there’s still a great deal of work to be done. I hope that you keep reading and thinking; reading the books that challenge and stimulate your mind, and thinking about the questions that can make us better and more complete people.
Someone not here today may ask if they missed anything. I’m usually greeted in the hall with that question, and I want to hand people this poem:
Did I Miss Anything?
Tom Wayman
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here we sat with our hands folded on our desks in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth 40 percent of the grade for this term and assigned some reading due today on which I’m about to hand out a quiz worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course has value or meaning Take as many days off as you like: any activities we undertake as a class I assure you will not matter either to you or me and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what each woman or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the hereafter This is the last time the class will meet before we disperse to bring the good news to all people on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom is a microcosm of human experience assembled for you to query and examine and ponder This is not the only place such an opportunity has been gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here
From Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993, 1993
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/013.html
Wayman’s poem, as delightful and instructive as it is, leaves me feeling like sardonic wit might strike the final note, and I don’t want that to have the final moment in these words. I’m proud of you all, and I also worry for you all. I’m a lot like Linda Pastan, who, in this poem with which I’ll close, remembers the first time her daughter gets her bicycle to go straight without training wheels:
To A Daughter Leaving Home
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
- Linda Pastan
