St John 's College Graduate Institute in Liberal Education
CONVOCATION ADDRESS

Cary Stickney, Director
June 19, 1994

Welcome to the twenty-eighth summer of the Graduate Institute in Liberal Education. Custom asks that the director give a brief speech on this occasion and that the speech should orient new students, re-inspire returning students, and remind everyone of the depths contained in that human possibility called "learning." This would probably be no trouble at all if it weren't for having to be brief.

I want to speak of what makes a good class or seminar at St John's. I am moved to try because I am pretty sure I was part of such a thing all through last semester, in a Graduate Institute Literature tutorial. I say, "pretty sure" because perhaps not everyone in the class would have agreed that it was consistently good and because it is not always the class meetings one leaves with an immediate sense of exhilaration and accomplishment that remain in memory as the best. Some of the best seeds take longest to germinate. But insofar as most of us both at the time and some weeks later agreed that it was a very good class, what did we mean, and what made it good?

First, that nearly everyone spoke at nearly every meeting. The texts we read here are so deep and so rich, they contain so many years of thought and effort, that our only chance to see more than a glimmer of them in a small number of readings and several hours of discussion is for us all to gang up on them, so to speak. We need one another. If each of us can say something of what we in particular found marvelous or absurd or intriguing, of what especially struck us in a reading, then together we can begin to see the complexity of the whole. Homer invokes the Muses, all nine of them, to help him do justice to his story, saying that he could never do it alone, "Not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths/Not if I had a voice never to be broken/And a heart of bronze within me. " None of us can do it alone either, but unlike Homer we do have ten tongues and sometimes more in our classrooms, if we will only use them all.

It is not only important as a way of making sure whole dimensions of a text do not escape us collectively; as hunters and beaters need to surround a large wild animal and all of them need to make themselves heard, both to one another and to the quarry if the hunt is to succeed. It is also terribly important to learn to think aloud. There is something deep in the remark Eudora Welty attributes to an old woman, "I don't know what I think until I hear myself say it." Neither does any of us. It is a very different thing on the one hand to think one's own thoughts in private during a seminar, perhaps even jotting some down, and on the other hand to speak them as part of the conversation. They become different thoughts; the very thinking of them is different. They are somehow more fully whatever they are as well as readier to change and the speaker is, too. If you don't believe me, just try it. And try not to write things down during a class or seminar. It distances you, makes you a little less a participant and a little more a spectator or a judge. Speak.

Second, we listened carefully to one another, with generosity and respect. To listen with generosity is to hear what is most interesting and powerful in another's words, to take them as saying the best thing they can mean. To listen with respect is to go beyond the politeness that blandly allows everyone an opinion and to ask for the reasons by which another's opinion could become your own. That is surely the point of the formality of calling one another "Ms" or "Mr. " At our best, which is the way good manners are intended to help us be, we treated one another as though any one of us at any moment might say the most important and insightful thing we had heard yet about the text or question under discussion.

This too, I think, is a necessary response to the books. Sometimes on an early morning walk one sees a spider web spangled with fine dewdrops. When the sun and the observer are both at the appropriate angle, the whole intricate structure of the web shines out like a tiny constellation at ground level; one step forward or back and it disappears into a few bits of fluff suspended by invisible threads, with here and there a dead gnat. Books, and people too may be carelessly approached or walked right past, without ever getting a chance to show themselves for what they are. Once one is aware of the possibility of seeing much more, one proceeds much more carefully, like a hunter who pauses often to look and listen, because the game could be anywhere. The hunter brings me to the third and most important point. One may hunt for amusement, as one may do anything to pass the time, even go to graduate school; but the hunter in the fullest sense is the one who may starve if he doesn't find some game, and who may lose his life if he loses his way, or if the wrong beast finds him unprepared. The most intent, boldest, and best hunter is the one who has the most at stake, to gain or to lose. I think the best speaking and listening, the best reading and thinking and writing at this college share a sense that our lives are at stake as we try to understand the books and each other and ourselves. I don't mean our physical survival primarily, though that is surely not so easy to separate from what we go on surviving for. How then are our lives at stake?

I think of Odysseus, who journeys in speech to the land of the dead and who needs to decide whether it is better to be glorious than to be alive, or if he can be both. I think of Antigone, who chooses death as the only adequate expression of her love and her shame, or of Medea, who can somehow know that she must destroy her children rather than herself. I think of Socrates, who amid the immense extent of his self-confessed ignorance is nevertheless convinced that there are some lives not worth living. I think of Jesus asking, "What will it profit to gain the world and lose your soul?" Our lives are at stake because of how much we don't know and how much we can change.

I don't know how to make this point strongly enough. To be alive is to change; not indeed blindly or aimlessly, but steadily and constantly, not only to grow but even to stay the same. For a creature with a mind, to be alive is to be changing one's mind, thinking new thoughts and rethinking old ones. The awareness of one's own possibilities of change can be frightening because they include the possibility that one could abandon or betray the very things one should cleave to most faithfully, or that one could come to have trouble even recognizing oneself; but to pretend that one has finished changing in any but trivial ways is to wish oneself dead. If the books and the conversations cannot frighten you then they cannot exhilarate you either, for both feelings are connected with their power to change you. With fear may sometimes come anger, even as more often, I hope, with exhilaration and wonder there may come laughter and friendship toward those who share this journey and help by their speaking and listening to make it possible. It is a remarkable thought that for eight weeks we should have frequent opportunities to talk seriously with each other about the things that matter most to our lives and that our conversations should be guided by some of the greatest thinkers and writers of the past thirty centuries. It is even more remarkable that the only way in which these conversations can truly satisfy us is if we see that they are changing us, making us not only more alive, but somehow better.

Socrates tells a strange story at the end of the Republic. It is about the rebirth of the soul. He describes a crowd of souls waiting to be born again and choosing from among a great number of paradigms or patterns of different lives. There are lives of wealth and power, lives devoted to honor or beauty or pleasure, lives of poverty or of crime, even lives of animals. Every sort of mixture is available. And, says Socrates, since the life one leads will determine the quality of one's soul, in choosing a life these souls are choosing what sort of souls they will henceforth become. On what basis will they choose? Socrates' informant has told him, "it was a pitiable and ridiculous and wondrous choosing, for most chose according to the habits of their previous life. " One who had led an upright life merely by habit, because of having been born into a well-ordered family and a city in which to do the right thing was often the path of least resistance, then chooses a life of wealth and power--the life of a tyrant in fact--without much examination of the pattern. After his choice is made he looks more closely and sees that this life will involve eating his own children, among other evils. Most of the ill choices are made, we are told, by those whose previous lives gave them small practice in suffering. It does appear possible that a soul, spurred perhaps by memories of suffering, could look beyond its habits and choose after careful examination on the basis of insight or wisdom. We hear, for example, of the soul of Odysseus, last in line to choose a pattern, that "from memory of its former toils having flung away the love of honor" it went seeking a long time after the pattern of life of a private citizen uninvolved in great affairs, and that when at last it found one, neglected by the rest, it chose it gladly and said it would have done the same if it had been given first choice.

John White, a tutor at the College, points out that this story is not meant as an appeal to belief in reincarnation, but is an image of our present condition. We are all of us choosing day after day what kinds of lives we wish to lead and what kind of souls we will become. This seems to me to apply with special force to those who deliberately and explicitly set out to learn and grow, as all of you are doing. You will have the chance to examine many patterns, and I hope you do not find yourselves chained to the habits of your previous lives, or enslaved to the love of honor--for there may seem a kind of dishonor or shame in admitting ignorance or accepting that you may be wrong or that you have failed to understand something important, and such admissions and acceptance will surely be required of you often. Indeed they are essential to living conversation. Of course there is no real shame in honesty, and part of the pleasure of the hunter's feast is in everyone's having admitted their previous hunger. I hope, too, that you are not altogether unpracticed in suffering, for to face a real question is a kind of suffering. It is painful to want very much to understand something and to know that you do not, at least not yet. It is in some ways like being in love without knowing whether you are loved in return, or ever will be. There is a great temptation to pretend that you don't care after all, that any question worth attending to would be one you already had a pretty good handle on, or that anyone worth loving would be bound to love you back. But nothing will come of such posturing, no new insight, no living love. If on the other hand you can bear and acknowledge your neediness, find the fullness in your emptiness, then you may be reborn into a better life. Perhaps it deserves to be called a rebirth even if we only find ourselves slightly less attracted to the life of a tyrant than we were before, or slightly less in love with honor, slightly readier to live for the sake of things that can be shared without being diminished. I wish all of us fear and exhilaration and whole-hearted involvement in the labor of our rebirth, and a good appetite for our common feast.