Introduction “A sentence starts out like a lone traveller heading into a blizzard at midnight.” Billy Collins, “Winter Syntax”

When I received the news from the senior class officers that the baccalaureate speech had landed in my lap, I was at once humbled. Then my thoughts turned anxious because every word would need to be perfect—perfectly chosen, perfectly placed. And then those anxious thoughts turned sinisterly dark—Mr. Heyes might be far more eloquent; Ms. Siraganian has scintillating stories about Audrey and parties; Ms. Wheeler is funnier and is in possession of a signature laugh. But then I thought, so this is what’s it’s like. After four years of assigning essays, I, myself, get to write one.

Mind churning: How many weeks until baccalaureate? One. I’m horrendous at math, so I have no idea how many hours that is, but I have to find enough of them in which to write.

Mind calming itself: Plan: arrive at school under cover of dark. Why not because most of the senior class thinks that I live in my room anyway.

Mind soothing: Pandora because I’m not hip enough to Spotify. Wynton Marsalis station cued.

Mind blank: To begin to compose, I need a map, a legend, especially if this speech is to be a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler (Fitzgerald).

Like the lone traveler, the writer, in Collins’ poem, I will strive to make a complete thought, if not several. In order to arrive at those thoughts, this speech is divided, essentially, into five parts. Each part will begin with an epigraph, and as you well know, or should know by now, an epigraph is a short quotation from a work used to reveal or comment upon the work or chapter as a whole.

Chapter 1

“In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahmin’s son, grew up with his friend Govinda.” Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

While you are without equal, Govi, this chapter, alas, is not soley about you; rather, these words encompass, if not embrace, the 172 members of the class of 2012.

In 2008, your lives changed in at least two ways. First, you moved from Blackford to Saratoga. Second, you were divided into advisory groups that hopefully, after having moved from awkward silence to comforting laughter, became a respite for you, a family that, for better or worse, understood the trials, errors, befuddlement, and success you experienced along the way.

The first significant memory of your formative years was neither in Nichols nor in the Fredge; rather, it was on Davis Field under a sweltering sun made even more simmering by the artificial turf. You played at games meant to bond you in fraternal union. Whether or not they did, those activities revealed the great capacity for thought, for grace, for competition, for resilience, for encouragement.

In September, you donned your fresh garb, packed every single book you needed for both first and second semester into your Zucas or backpacks and crammed the hallways. You were Milton’s angels struggling through chaos. In school meetings, you were the abject personified, receiving stern warnings for studying notes, for being the periphery. In class meetings, you were the potential of combustion but without the spark.

In short, you were exactly who you needed to be. You were friends making new friendships. You were eager students ready to prove your mettle, your worth, your knowledge.

You existed both within and without borders. “Not knowing exactly who to turn to when the rain set in” (John), you found yourselves spinning this way and that, tossed to the side one minute and chastised the next.

Just as the fig tree was and always has been, its veritable wisdom awaited, but it was not the fig that was unripe, it was you. Thankfully, you were with friends—friends who were also finding themselves just as you were discovering your own rivers and paths.

Chapter 2

"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay To mould me Man, did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?" Milton in Mary Shelley Frankenstein

In thinking about high school, I would argue students, parents, and teachers alike would agree that sophomore year must be one of the most awkward years known to existence. You haven’t quite figured things out yet; your body has either stopped growing or accelerates vertically; and if you’re one of the lucky ones who’s savvy enough to think you’ve got it figured out, you’re proven wrong on a continual basis by what it was you thought you knew.

Thus, the epigraph from Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that both champions and demonizes the creative temperament of humankind suggests that, at once, man realizes the fury he can unleash. His mind, as Shelley’s contemporary Coleridge suggests, flows like a violent river, his thoughts cascading like boulders into the pools of inspiration. Yet, this creature of sublime capability is a mad man. He could be a heralded poet recollecting in tranquility or the creator of grotesque machinations. No in between exists.

Your sophomore year still found you navigating the hallways, and the Zucas were more a scooter upon which to ride. You tried to mature, elevating yourselves above your place but you were still met with consternation and frustration. The echoes of speeches, some serious, some humorous, some lyrically potent, perhaps still reverberate in Nichols.

Most significantly, however, I think you began to look at “the man in the mirror” (Jackson) and make changes for yourself, maturing both inwardly and outwardly.

Chapter 3

“Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade–-the promise of a decade of loneliness, a [massive] list of [universities] to know, a thinning brief case of enthusiasm, thinning [optimism].” Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Whether or not this junior year was, indeed, a “dark time” for you individually, it was “the horror” for the world outside the Harker bubble. As you now scoffed at Zucas and bemoaned APUSH and Calc and fretted over homecoming and anguished over prom as well as a little something called college counseling, the world outside your single window contended with Deepwater Horizon, Occupy Wall Street, a political shooting spree in Arizona, Hurricane Irene, and tornadoes in the South.

Unlike The Black Pearl, which met with a titanic disaster, you all persevered and remained buoyant. Partly due to your own fortitude and partly owing to your family’s love, you made it through the year. You survived the rumors that were arguably more egregious in their fictionalized portrayals of disasters than the realities through which you lived. You moved from the abject “savage wilderness” (Bradford) of New England to the Southern Gothic landscape of emasculation (O’Connor) and from the backwoods Mississippi (Huck Finn) to the blue gardens of the Hamptons (The Great Gatsby).

And last June, you claimed the nomenclature bestowed upon you since your birth—you became the class of 2012.

Chapter 4

“I, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” Albert Camus, The Stranger

For all the talk of dark times and junior year being the “worst of times” (Dickens), your senior year should be exalted as “the best of times” (Dickens). But it’s not. It may have seemed like one of the best years of your lives, but you have years of experiences ahead of you—years that will test your mettle. This is not to say, however, that this year isn’t the best of four years of high school because it has been—you have been spirit winners, Intel award recipients, soccer and lacrosse leaders in wins, winners in CCS basketball tournaments, recipients of performing arts accolades and foreign travel, accepted at prestigious college, and roamers of Disney Land.

You entered the year driving to campus just as you did your freshman year. Your car may have changed; the radio station different; the driver someone other than your mom and dad; but you entered and exited the campus though one and only one portal. That portal has transported you to numerous places, filled your heads with an exponential number of facts and figures and dates and names, led you to competitions, received you with a smile after victories and stared at you after defeats, and yawned after you returned home late at night happy in yourselves, full in your completeness.

In a few short days, you will no longer enter Harker as a student; rather, you will enter as a graduate.

Chapter 5

“[R]e-examine all that you have been told at church at school or in any book . . . “ Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass

In less than forty-eight hours you will be graduates, and the next ninety-six will become a blur, a frenetic pace of activity and gatherings and conversations. Ostensibly, you will be asked questions, and for better or worse, the same question will be asked over and over again. These people who ask the same question aren’t trying to insult you. Probably they are feeling just as awkward as you feel. If they offer advice, I pray it’s better advice than Benjamin Braddock received in The Graduate, but probably not. And so I replace the word “Plastics” with Apple and Facebook.

Take the time to relish in your achievements, but know that in three months you and your life “start all over again in the crisp fall” (Fitzgerald). When you drive onto your campus in August or September, make us proud; make your parents proud, but most of all make yourselves proud.

Take a class that’s far removed from your comfort zone just because you can. You may learn something that becomes a passion for you. If you don’t know what your major is, that’s okay. And even if you think you know what you’re major is, but then you find yourself confused, that’s okay, too. You can change it. Colleges and universities are supposed to impart knowledge. So argues the essayist and intellectual John Henry, Cardinal Newman, “Knowledge is capable of being its own end . . . that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.”

To that end, I trust that you will “re-examine” everything that you have been taught here. Push boundaries; disagree with a premise; enter into a counter-argument, but in doing so, never lose sight of the grace and tenderness and passion that brought you that point. Read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche side by side; listen to John Cage after having written a paper to Bach’s Goldberg Variations; attend your university’s theatre productions; join a club and be an active member; attend the campus lecture series; see a band or two or three; sit on the lawn and sunbathe; learn to throw a Frisbee; if heading east, make a snowman; if staying west, have snow sent to you; take a road trip with friends; skip a class to finish a philosophical conversation between and among friends; converse passionately about the merits of Bon Iver, The Weepies, The Shins, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and PHISH; attend at least one of every sporting event your university offers; play intramurals; talk to the girl or boy that just made you turn your head; take pictures, but you don’t need to post all of them to Facebook; experiment, but judiciously; As Tennyson urges, “drink life to the lees”; hug a friend; listen to your college radio station; try the house special; tailgate; send a handwritten letter home every once in a while; above all else, learn to think for yourself.

Be who you want to be, and if that doesn’t agree with you, then find, once again, your center, your inner voice; don’t settle for an imitation of yourself. Bend the rules, but try not to break them.

And as you wander your campus looking for the person you thought you wanted to become, the person you are, or the person you wish you knew, understand that you will always have a home here at Harker. More importantly, you will always have a home with the parents who, eighteen years ago, wept tears of joy bringing the son or daughter into the world and who ache with pride at the person you are today and blush with expectation at what the next chapter of your life will bring.

You may not necessarily always get along with them, understand their motives, or even comprehend the weight of the love they hold for you, but you are always loved by your parents.

I close with the following, at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road—a novel which I encourage you to read and return to countless times in your lives just as you should Homer’s Odyssey and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In the novel, the father, towards the end, pleads: “You need to go on. I can’t go with you. You need to keep going. You don’t know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see. Just go. It’s all right.”

As you go out into the wide world, seniors, it will be good; you will be all right. You don’t always have to be the best, but you should always do your best

Thank you and good night.