Graduation Address
In addressing my words primarily to the Graduating Class, I am quite aware that the young do not particularly want advice: with the uncanny instinct of the young they know that wisdom is not portable. Even if they didn’t they would find it difficult to believe that those peculiar creatures of an older generation (parents, preachers, psychologists with heavy Viennese accents, professors) could possibly be wise because they look very odd and complain of slipped discs when there is any hard kind of manual work afoot. I have been too long stooped over books (and other things) to presume to any measure of wisdom. But this invitation to speak to you has forced me into some self–inquiry upon what has happened and where we are now.
Advice upon how to succeed in this world – in any world – is useful, no doubt; a stranger entering an unknown country would be a fool not to accept a few shrewd tips from an old hand. But I know nothing of matters of success and power; and so can offer, for what it’s worth, only some sort of report on the conclusions I have drawn – or inherited – in my own peculiar cycle of change. For growing up is a process of change. We abide and change; and the only trick is to find out how to change without loss of integrity, without destroying ourselves. If we are to do this, we need some anchor, some ground tackle. And if a motto is needed, I choose one of my favorites: Ubi Thesaurus ibi Cor – which is translated in the King James version, “where your treasure is there will your heart be also” – or in more contemporary idiom, “Mummy, I don’t think man can have made the universe.”
Most of you – if not all – will be going on to university, as a way of resolving the questions, “What am I to do? What am I to be?” A university is a strange country and a privileged one; and if in these days it is democratic doctrine to suppose that everybody has a right to a university education, I think it much healthier to regard it as a privilege. A university isn’t a canning factory. It’s a place where people can discover themselves and in a leisure and detachment that may never repeat itself put down roots of self-knowledge and discipline, and to cultivate that capacity for astonishment and humility which can enrich life continuously. An educated person is not a past participle: education is a life-long process never finished. It is often said that undergraduate training does nothing more than define the limits of one’s ignorance. It also shows us that, no matter how much a good instructor can help us, we are the only ones who can do the work: we have to teach ourselves.
For many young people, going to a university can be a terrifying experience, simply because for the first time they find themselves entirely on their own; they have to organize their own work, think for themselves, read for themselves, write for themselves. Many resist this: Peter-Pan-like, afraid to grow up, they sit with mouths open waiting to be fed. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed” – not because professors are stony-hearted, but because students are often looking for the wrong food. In a sense, teaching is not the job of a university. Most universities offer instruction in technical and semi-technical matters – engineering, medicine, the law, applied science (to choose only the most respectable) – and in these a little elementary instruction is advisable. (It is well that the bridge should not collapse from lack of sound calculation; and a surgeon is ill-advised to approach the lung through the aorta.) These technical activities are of great social importance, as is shown by their being not unremunerative employments. But they are scarcely human studies at all. They can produce highly skilled technicians, and that is admirable; but they need have no effect on the quality of the person. And I believe that the function of a university is to be counter-technical, subversive, iconoclastic; that it sets out to shatter assumptions and prejudices. A university can provide a kind of shock-treatment: it may annihilate a person and force him to make himself over into what he IS, in the dawning knowledge of what he is not, and of what life is. This procedure most often occurs in the study of language and literature, of philosophy, and sometimes of history; because in these disciplines there are, for the honest and resolute, no escape roads; and every question – because it turns on a peculiar meaning of fact and knowledge – becomes not an academic exercise but a matter of spiritual life and death, a drama of self-discovery, a drama of discovering the abiding values of life.
Let me be particular by considering my own field of work: the affectionate study of English language and literature. And in this observe that a knife can cut in both directions and most of the knives of knowledge have a little onion wiped on the blade. I am not arguing for English language and literature because that’s my job, my profession; but because, being the person I am, concerned for the drama of self-discovery and the discovery of our central modes of knowledge, perception, and discrimination, I find no other field of endeavour more likely to provide the setting for self-discovery.
University courses in Honours English these days set out to produce scholars and teachers. But that isn’t the whole story. To be a teacher or scholar is not everybody’s cup of tea; but the study of literature is. Literature confronts us with a situation of a peculiar sort, and of a peculiar value. Take the example of a poem. It seems at first sight perfectly straightforward – print on a page, or sounds in the ear, words more or less familiar one by one. Yet when we read it properly we want to grasp exactly what the poem says, and all the poem says in precisely the tone of voice it says it. It’s the poem we want to know – this thing said. And to this there are no short cuts. Knowing about the poet, for example, may not tell us much about this particular poem. How do we know what is said? How can we know?
Poetry is the most highly developed and sensitive form of language there is. In finding out how to read poetry we find out certain things about poetry without which we can scarcely read it. We find that poetry is not a fancy alternative to something that can be said more plainly or simply in another way: it’s the only way of saying certain things. Poetry has quite its own way of saying things. And yet poetry is the prototype of all language; that it should ever seem otherwise shows just how far our use of language has degenerated. In learning how to read difficult, worthwhile, strong, simple things, we find that good reading demands submission, sensitiveness, knowledge; otherwise we cannot grasp the living thing this poem is, the universe this poem lives in, the universe this piece of writing stands for. So it is that poetry – literature – confronts us with a new order of facts.
Facts in any case are judgements about events that have happened; and judgments are personal even though events can be thought of as happening outside us. The facts presented to us in poetry are internal, personal; and – except for the tantalising print on the page – there is nothing much definite outside us by which they can be tested. So we have to learn to test them inside ourselves. And this is one of the discoveries often made in a university: to find how to look facts clearly in the face inside ourselves, and test them inside ourselves, knowing that there is no other way we can know them or judge them. In reading a poem well, one has to be made over into what the poem is in order to know the poem; and this needs a sensitive regard for what is one’s self and what is not. This is not a matter of scientific detachment. Rather it is a self-losing and self-finding; and this is also the finding of something living and valuable which is not one’s self. This is the direct opposite to scientific method; for scientific method is highly abstract and pretends – for reasons of method – that we can know things without getting mixed with them. But all we know is that we cannot know except by our immersion in what is known; we can never be certain that we know anything except through the colour of ourselves in the act of knowing. As we move away from abstractions and generalities to what is real and living, this becomes more and more important. I think one could manage quite handsomely without knowing that 2 plus 2 equals 4. There are other matters, less easy to formulate, that we must know because if we lack them we die. “Without vision, the people perish.”
Literature, then, is not a collection of allegedly “beautiful” utterances, but the only record we have of the “feel” of things, past, present, and future; things as grasped by exceptional persons gifted in language, richly endowed in experience. It is vulgarly supposed that we can make a clear choice between books and life, and the obvious choice is for life. In a way, I agree. Books are not life. But they are records of life, records of a brilliance and anguish that few actual lives can sustain. Poets, people of imagination, are precisely those who see all things in relation; they see the universe in a grain of sand because imagination is not a withdrawal into fantasy (which is enervating) but a resolute way of seeing and representing life, as it feels and is, which is nourishing. Imagination finds the forms of life, discovers the forms of language and sound and colour in which the life of feeling, thought, and desire fall. Any person who neglects books, and fails to develop the art of responsive, discriminating reading, does so to his own impoverishment. I can urge upon those in authority – even parents – the importance of encouraging children to read – constantly, voraciously, even indiscriminately. For this there is no substitute. It is heartbreaking to find a promising student who, from the point of view of reading, is almost illiterate when he enters a university. He may never catch up. Worse, he may always be hampered by a limited perspective, in danger of falling prey to propaganda or to the writing that purports deceptively to deal only in fact.
The study of the literature of any language, for anybody not a complete cabbage, establishes certain recognitions. Most of these run counter to most of the assumptions and social pressures of our own times:
(a) It confronts us with the vision of everything being related to everything else. It shows us that value does not reside in things-in-themselves but arises from our relationship with persons and things. (b) It teaches us that all knowledge is subjective; that is, that knowing happens inside us and has only a mysterious connectionwith the outside world. Knowledge begins in an observing person and ends by changing the person. (c) It shows how all human life is infinitely complex. Therefore we have to learn not to be frightened of complexity. The simplest recognition always comes last. In life there are no classes for beginners. (d) It impresses on us constantly that we should seek diligently for fruitful questions and let the answers fall where they may. A good question stimulates thought, and like the threat of the gallows wonderfully heightens perception. An answer, unless it be the answer of decisive and considerate action, is destructive; it can be a narcotic blocking further thought and perception. There are no final answers worth having; and one should always beware of the truculence of certainty whether it be in politics, social theory, psychology, or surveys of public opinion. (e) Literature can bring us to recognize that the end of knowledge is not power, but awareness. Insensitive action is brutality. Actions, like words, are coloured by desire and intention. There is nothing more difficult to conceal than our intention in acting, even though the person acting may not understand his intentions. Only the discerning, those with a sense of style, will notice this. A pure style, in writing or behaviour, can flow only from a pure intention. What we love decides what we are. And in deciding what we are to be – if indeed we have any choice – it is well to take stock of our affections.
The primitive state of man, we are told, was confused and threatened on all sides by the menace of unknown powers – storms, predatory animals, disease, death. We are also told that in the course of time we have learned to pool our human resources and by the help of science force back the jungle and the tigers so that we can now live in peace, unmenaced by the unknown. But life is extremely vulnerable as well as astonishingly persistent; life is always on a razor’s edge. If we have pushed back the tigers and made life a little less brutish, the menace remains. But the danger is now inside the camp, and the responsibility rests with ourselves; for the chief predators are people, and the tyranny of “ideologies,” and everything that would turn us into mechanisms, reflexes, or ciphers in a survey. And in that warfare there is no end. Technology (which is very different from science) has performed impressive feats. But we should recognize that technology controls only what is inhuman; that its products are neutral – good or bad depending on how we use them and why. The prevailing worship of the man in a white coat with clipboard standing in a posture of befuddled adoration by an electronic computer is a curious one. Do we seriously suppose that there are any short cuts to living? If we read John Donne, who took death seriously, we find what it is to take life with profound seriousness.
The life of the spirit demands imagination (a sense of the reality of things) and inventiveness (the willingness to grow and change). Imagination is a faculty of embracing, including reliving, living; it discovers form and meaning not by removing all barriers (which is fog) but by interposing deftly chosen limitations and obstacles. In this sense imagination is the image of the ideal life, or of prayer, or of the way works of art come into being, or of the way memorable actions are thoughtlessly achieved. In a university you may pick up the habit and instinct of imagination – it cannot be taught. You may discover the sense of relatedness that can see every single person as the centre and image of his own universe; you may see every action as literally changing – or capable of changing – the whole intricate universe of all living things; you may find in your capacity for astonishment and a refined discrimination the universe of past, present, and desire coming into focus upon the luminous instant of your own awareness; you may learn to live and suffer and delight in the lives of others, discovering yourselves by losing yourselves in a life as specific and humble and unique as the crust on cheese, the scent of an apple, the lilt of a phrase. You may also discover – and I hope you will – the sympathy that can embrace and understand anything whatsoever; that can enjoy the small honest achievements for what they are without ever losing sight of the masterpieces or the mountains, reserving anger and destruction only for what is shoddy, meretricious, cynical, formulated, presumptuous.
Choose carefully. Give plenty of room and time for what is, in the world’s eyes, useless. I am not arguing for a world of academics: God forbid. But there is a kind of action that exists to preclude thought, in the same way that there are kinds of thinking that paralyze action. To be one’s self is to be unique; it may mean being idiosyncratic, even eccentric, and thereby perhaps an offence to society – or some parts of it. But no matter. Each of us has his own exploration to make; and nobody can do that well without knowing himself and becoming himself. And that takes humility; because whatever has been discovered before in human knowledge must be discovered over and over again. “And the end of our exploring,” T.S. Eliot has written, “is to come back to where we started, and know the place for the first time.” And Yeats, thinking no doubt of the solitude that all men of excellence must from time to time endure, said:
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.
But at the end I can only use the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson. When an Italian friend of his consulted him in a matter of the heart, Johnson said: “I know nothing to surpass the blessing of a virtuous marriage” – and added: “and therefore I know not how to advise you.”