John Benjamin Cronin
The Summer Hills
Friends, Classmates, Fellow Humanity!
A very wise professor here once said to his class that the platform upon which I stand, upon which we shall have graduated, rather more resembles a gallows than a dais; and yet it is a gallows beyond which new life springs. But I come here not to bury the Class of 2005, nor to praise it, but to say one last true thing before it is finally swept out of this place. As Nineteenth Century New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett wrote, at the end of an idyllic summer in Maine, “So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”
Our experience of this place has been so multifaceted, so diverse and complicated, that to distill it in a few moments of oratory seems pretentious, if not impossible. But it is also true that for all the fragmentation of our experience, certain things hold us together in spite of ourselves.
We have, for instance, lived through interesting times.
Our first Tuesday of classes, nearly four years ago, dawned as beautifully as any late summer day may hope; and the sun departed that day in a crimson funereal horror, hair rent, teeth gnashed, tears wetting its cheeks. We sat transfixed before common room televisions as the placid Nineties crumbled in death and flame, before our eyes. Some were touched personally, others less so — but all soon became enveloped in the awareness of a new and terrible era, the end of decades worth of innocence.
If the Fates had been kind, that day would have been worth a lifetime’s dosage of tragedy. Yet if the study and experience of History show anything, it is that the Fates are not kind, that History is not kind, that it drives us on like a mad charioteer towards precipices we can hardly bear to imagine. The times we live in, you will recall, proceeded to get more interesting. My country invaded another, far away, half way across the world; and whatever one thinks of the politics of that still-unfolding event, it is enough on a day like this, when politics — for once — takes a back seat, to acknowledge the enormous sorrow and absurdity of war, of all wars, and also, on occasion, their tragic necessity. Whether one sees more of the former or more of the latter in this contemporary adventure, whether one is for or against it, we all must open our eyes to its reality, and recognize that the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty, the elect and the damned — and so many languishing in a living purgatory — have been swept up all in a maelstrom not of their making, a storm which may blow yet for years.
The times, you will recall, continued to stroll along their interesting path. America divided, nearly in two, over whom to elect last November. In a way not seen since the Sixties, students volunteered for campaigns, walked door to door, telephoned total strangers, in short, engaged in the majestic hurly-burly of democratic politics. And if it is true that many of us at Williams preferred one candidate over the other; if it is true that on the morning after, I saw many faces, crying soft tears, it is also true that the lasting potential and power of politics was demonstrated to our generation. Whatever your thoughts on the election, its candidates and its outcome, I urge you to remember that politics can change and save us, that just as surely as it may undo us, it may revive us, not only America, but all humanity.
Our generation bears a unique historical responsibility. T.S. Eliot famously wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” and historian Modris Ecksteins has called the Twentieth Century “spring without end,” a catastrophic cavalcade of ideologies that sought to destroy today for an apocalyptic, utopian tomorrow. It is our responsibility to make sure that the Twenty-First Century sees no such cavalcade, that it becomes not spring never-ending but summer triumphant. Our republic is an Enlightenment republic, and a republic it must remain. Today, the project rooted in the 18th century against which the fascists and communists of yesteryear railed finds new enemies, enemies on the left as well as the right, enemies that threaten it deeply. Some label the Enlightenment’s credo of reason, freedom and progress as inherently oppressive, the product of a racist, paternalistic society; others, from the opposite direction, have decided that reason, freedom and progress are themselves the emblematic badges of a decadent, heretical society. They are both wrong. Humans truly are bound together by universal values, by a universal dignity that precedes the artificial boundaries of race, class, country and religion. It is a dignity and a universalism of which the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and the U.N. Charter speak, and which I and others defend today. Against the zealots of the postmodern and jihadis foreign and domestic, I urge you: defend the universal Republic!
Now, with the Enlightenment having had a sufficiently good word put in for it, I think it necessary to move from the macro to the micro, from world-history to Williams-history. During these past four years, this College at the feet of mountains has been a study in the way in which the past and future seamlessly intertwine, mixing good as well as bad, old as well as new. In a physical sense, what was for one glimmering moment an utterly verdurous campus, unvisited by construction projects, has become a land of putting up and pulling down, a campus of big shoulders. I’m sure many of us remember Baxter and its attendant lawn, replaced now by that glaring pit; or the understated classical elegance of the old Adams Memorial Theater, itself given way to a rather pharaonic testament to the power of donors. A friend of mine approached much-beloved Morty, and complained about the lack of public space, or at least the lack of public space free of jackhammering. To which Morton replied, “Got any money, kid?”
New and old have intertwined during our time in less obvious ways. With a dreary regularity, divisions based on race and class and sexuality have manifested themselves. Frequently the worst of the old Williams — arrogant and reactionary — and the worst of the new — arrogant and revolutionary — battle it out in an annual melee of hyperbolic rage. Is there no place for reason, for amity and comity, between these two extremes?
Class runs as a subtle current through the mainstream of Williams life. For a student like myself, on financial aid, it is readily apparent, from the price of drinks at Spring Street’s two bars to the material loftiness of cars and clothes. But we do not live on cars and clothes and alcohol alone! The higher spirit of meritocracy floats above all of these. Like a certain rival of ours, who absconded with our library in 1821 in search of another valley, Williams must strive for a diversity that is truly broad, in which the central role of class is recognized. Merit does not flow in blood lines, nor does it accompany inheritances — it is distributed at random through the whole mass of humanity, even those without access to an SAT preparatory class. It is incumbent upon us to recognize this.
What makes such a recognition so essential is that Williams at its best may serve as a cauldron of talent that transcends narrow boundaries and creates a community of free and like-minded souls, striving together towards something not necessarily known, but glimpsed and alluring. It has done so for me, and I hope it has done so for you. Let us all hope that it shall continue its rolling meritorious boil for a long time.
Merit, of course, is important, but it is not what makes Williams distinctive. The entire university system incubates merit, each institution in its own way. Indeed, I will be so un-nationalistic as to say that even Wesleyan and Amherst serve much the same function. But what truly makes this place distinctive is its physical location, up in this mountain valley, far from the madding crowd. Henry Thoreau remarked on this after visiting Williams, saying “It would be no small advantage if every college were thus located at the base of a mountain.” It is a comment which the College has reproduced in so many advertisements and brochures that seeing it will leave the practiced Williams eye a little queasy. But this does nothing to diminish its truth. These mountains, these hills that surround us and fence in our little valley with their beautiful, almost amorous shapes, truly set this place apart, from other campuses and from the outside world. This has no doubt been a source of dissatisfaction to those of you who remember, a little wistfully, the bright lights of New York and Boston. But the cities shall pass; the hills will not. They have stood in mute witness to ten thousand years of human history in this valley, and they have watched over us as well — in the throes of first adversity, in the ecstasy of final triumph, watched us glow and sorrow in first love, old love, new love and true love; they have accompanied us, unmoving, through every season under the sun. In the fall they explode into a vibrancy made poignant by its ephemerality; in the winter, sere and white, they are Ethan Frome’s country. In April and May a slow vernal tide works its way up their living sides, while in the summer, they simply exult. And now, they will see us off, out into the world.
William Cullen Bryant, the 19th Century poet who, like us, graduated from Williams, wrote about New England’s natural beauty and its spiritual reverberations in the human heart. In “June” — a poem, appropriately enough, on dying in June — he wrote “of the gladness of the scene” ... beneath “the circuit of the summer hills.” Remember this gladness. Remember the smell of the ferns and the flowers, the rocks and the streams, remember that primal spark of intellectual excitement, your professors’ knowing funny eyes; remember your heart and your hopes, dreams and fears, all the years of our burning youth spent throbbing beneath the circuit of these summer hills. And when all in life is gray and wintry, return in your mind’s eye to the mountains of flowery June, the years when together we were young and blossomed in their shadow. Go now, my friends, always remembering, out and over and beyond the hills, into your new lives.
John Benjamin Cronin, Class Speaker
Williams College Commencement, June 5, 2005