Santa Fe Events
Santa Fe Commencement Address 2010
Santa Fe Commencement Address
Steven Isenberg
May 22, 2010
At this time of year in 1962, I was among thousands on the football field at the University of California at Berkeley to receive my bachelor’s degree and on my way to becoming what J.D. Salinger called “a lifetime English major.” It felt to me then, as I hope this celebration feels to you now, like the Thanksgiving Day of college life.
John F. Kennedy was in his second year in office, our first Catholic president. Here we are in the second year of the presidency of Barack Obama, our first African-American president. Kennedy and Obama, and their wives, Jackie and Michelle, had and have the shine of glamour and energy, the promise and vulnerability of youth and change. Both presidents recognized defining tests at home and internationally.
It feels as if your time in your twenties will be as momentous as was mine at the same age in the nineteen-sixties. If so, we shall share living young in periods of intensely competing political assertions at home, as well as ideological, economic and nuclear conditions of great consequence around the world. New shaping forces today mark the contemporary moment: climate change; dangers posed by fragile and failed nation states, as well as zealous actors organized and bent against modern life; and an ever-expanding universe of electronic communication.
That “technological shift,” according to Jason Epstein, is “orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to moveable type … six centuries ago.” All that promise, yet the Internet has been in the cold grip of censorship where authorities fear its content and power to connect their citizens to forbidden information and a wider world.
For all that cannot be known about our future, graduation prompts questions about what lies ahead. We ask ourselves when we are young and twenty how we may live best in our times. Are we equipped to join the world of work and achieve satisfaction and accomplishment, and how as citizens can we be of service? And how do we keep in full flower our identity, our creativity, our capacity for learning and our yearning for knowledge?
These questions arise from reflecting on our undergraduate experience. While I am not a St. John’s graduate, you and I share bonds. Having read a second bachelor’s degree in English at Oxford, I know the rich blessings of the tutorial system. In different ways, you and I have chosen to be part of a tradition that deliberates the works and thinking of great minds and assesses their character and claim. That tradition believes the humanities contain knowledge and contemplation, observation and imagination, around which a college education can be built. Whatever the arguments about this premise, the place of the liberal arts and humanities needs champions. Count me as one.
St. John’s has earned respect for its singularities, the impressive range of learning undertaken, how it is done, and the glories and demands of its distinctive tradition of what you read.
No one could look at those readings, your preceptorials and senior essays and not say: the St. John’s way is a calling to serious minds. What great pleasures you must have had here on your own and in the company of others.
As David Denby, the film critic, wrote after revisiting his Columbia undergraduate courses whose readings mirrored many of yours: “what can be achieved through culture is the greatest range of pleasure and soulfulness and reasoning power that any of us is capable of.”
Some ask how such an education prepares one for the life ahead. Others say that isn’t a question that ought to be asked because it narrows undergraduate education to a practicality when its goals are far more spacious. What then, as the years go by, warrants my faith in the power and purpose of a liberal arts education?
First, of the utmost importance is the fact that you have learned how to learn. One hopes as readers we can present a mind upon which nothing is wasted. You have made your way through unfamiliar subjects, overcoming unease through careful reading, listening and absorbing, then fashioning understandings in your writing until you felt confidence and skill growing in you, making you ready for the next adventure.
Your experience here has given you skills and sensibilities which, as they might have said in New Mexico in the long ago, will be in your saddle bags forever. That cast of mind, a readiness to learn and an alert curiosity ever alive, needs constant care throughout your life.
Second, many things have become part of your attentiveness: you have become sensitive to the place of language, temperament, memory, character, judgment and intelligence as shaping forces; you have learned ways of belief and action other than your own; and by testing your observations and judgments, you have learned respect for opposing views and a certain skepticism and self reflection about unexamined assumptions.
All of that helps to build resistance against what George Orwell called “our smelly, little orthodoxies,” no small task in a society with so much over-boiled and ill-informed opinion, on the air and in the air. The English poet and critic William Empson had an incisive turn of phrase for what a college like this can foster, “a mind constantly on the alert against itself.” What a perfect way to suggest the necessity to guard against the complacency of our own thoughts without subtracting from our convictions.
The attributes of mind you have acquired will serve you in the workplace and in the decisions that you make as citizens or in matters of the heart and mind that form private life.
Some books you have read will stay long with you into what Henry James called “the meditative after-taste of perusal.” As an example, George Orwell’s Road To Wigan Pier showed me the power of first-hand reporting about coal miners’ lives at home and down in the coal mines. He reminded a nation that the British lived on coal, yet knew little of the daily lives of those who raised it from the earth. The best reporting today carries on from Orwell’s insistence on detail, his power of noticing and taking the reader to places that ought to be known.
Whether in the brutal snobberies of colonial life as seen in Burmese Days, the battlefront of guns and ideology in the Spanish Civil War as reported in Homage To Catalonia or the vivid picture of the poor in Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell placed a demand on his readers’ conscience. By his memorable and muscular prose, we learn how the power of close observation and the fresh telling of a story reveal hidden truths of our own time.
The great novelists, about whom many of you have done special work, let us know by their precise creation of circumstance, character and action, the workings of other minds, representations that teach us the subtle dilemmas of the intersection of public and private life.
I know some of you read Middlemarch, so let Henry James remind us of George Eliot’s achievement: “All these people, solid and vivid in their varying degrees, are members of a deeply human little world…The constant presence of thought, of generalizing instinct, of brain, in a word, behind her observation, gives the latter its great value and her whole manner its high superiority.” What fine qualities he praises, and how finely he does so.
We can find—and indeed many of you have found in your special studies—imaginative sympathy and observation, and brain, among the writings of the most persuasive of philosophers and insightful historians, ancient and modern, as well as Justices whose Supreme Court decisions you read. Justice Brandeis represented that in writing of how “the makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness” by concluding, “[T]hey conferred against the government, the right to be let alone—the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
And what of the world of work we choose to do and how we it carry out? I have held many jobs, mostly without knowing what would follow from one to the next, yet finding in each new job how much is drawn from the reservoir of experience and learning.
I have an old fashioned belief that for all my shortcomings of knowledge in many spheres, my undergraduate education in the liberal arts gave me a generalist’s passport and a willingness to seize the day rather than follow a well-drawn plan. A friend of mine once said about the many jobs we held, that we had crawled under the wire where the borderline was fuzzy between amateur and professional. Perhaps this also will hold true for your generation which is even more likely to have careers of many dimensions, including some jobs that are as yet unthought-of.
Today I am the Executive Director of the PEN American Center, the largest branch of the world’s oldest human rights organization, dedicated to the protection of free expression and the promotion of literature through an international literary fellowship. Its credo may well find you a friend to its goals. In the words of PEN’s former president, the playwright Arthur Miller, “[PEN’s] originators believed…that the most convincing example if not proof of humanity’s essential oneness was the universality of the best literature.”
Through my life a river runs that began at Berkeley and I believe, albeit a different tributary, is one that runs through the aspirations and workings of St. John’s Santa Fe. So let me leave you with this quotation from a sterling American writer, Joan Didion:
“I was still unsettled by the familiar questions: What was I doing with what I had learned? Why had I not learned Russian, Chinese, Physics, the Colonial History of Africa, the Kings of France? What Berkeley had to offer me was infinite. Why had my ability to accept been so finite? Why did I have so many questions? Why did I have so few answers? Would I not be a more finished person had I been provided a chart, a map, a design for living? I believe so. I also believe that the world I know, given such a chart, would have been narrow, constricted, diminished; a more ordered and less risky world, but not the world I wanted, not free, not Berkeley, not me.”
Didion captured what many of us feel when looking back at our undergraduate years, so keep it in mind if one day you have such thoughts. Then you may borrow her wonderful resolution and embrace of our choices and say to yourself, had it been otherwise, “It wouldn’t have been St. John’s Santa Fe, it wouldn’t have been free, it wouldn’t have been me.”
Thank you for this privilege and congratulations.