Peter Robinson's Talk at Senior Vespers 2021

Because this is a celebratory address, let me begin in a most a traditional way, with an inspiring quotation. You will be pleased to note that it is I, the speaker, who is supposed to be inspired, and not you. Albert Camus, the great mid-twentieth-century French writer (he is the second-youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature) had much to say, but I will content myself with this:

 

Many people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.

 

I will do my best to keep you moderately awake by at least being moderately brief.

 

While I am appreciative of this opportunity to speak to you at Vespers—and this is the fourth time I have been invited—I am nevertheless surprised when I look around at my colleagues, especially at those who are leaving. Frankly, I would have much preferred to hear from them. Except maybe for Aaron Snyder; I heard quite enough from him, thank you very much. In the interest of brevity, let me mention just three who can serve as exemplars of this extraordinary group.

 

Sabina McMahon—You have no idea! Indefatigable, unrelenting in her commitment to students and to their emotional and mental health, she has transformed the School in ways that you students, with your brief Thacher life spans, can hardly imagine. She knows that the best we can do is found only when our best selves are free to act; she knew from the day that she became the dean of students that the constant pressure of adolescence, of academic stress, of social expectations are realities that must be addressed in concrete ways. She addressed them.

 

Iona Popa—my old student and player, she stands at the moral center of our School. Her life experiences are much more extensive than her age. Whenever she talks, in casual conversations, in English department meetings, at AWARE gatherings, I always lean forward and say, tell me more.

 

Ann Merlini—who has taught me much through her absolutely selfless commitment to her kiddoes in Middle School. I was a dorm head myself for 14 years—it is, by the way, one of the most demanding and absolutely rewarding jobs you can have at Thacher—no dorm head I have worked for is better than Ann.

 

I don’t want to slight anyone—I just picked their names almost at random. I mean, there are a lot more folks out there, all of them with tales to tell, inspiration to offer, insights to share. It is the last week of the year, but if you get the chance, seek them out.

 

But, to return to my point, why on earth did you pick me? My most salient characteristic, it seems to me, is that I am old. I have never been sure when old age actually begins; in fact, for the last twenty years or so, old age has started later and later in my mind, from 60 to 65 to 70 to 75. Now, I am beginning to reach a reckoning point: I am closer to 80 than I am to 70, and no one, not even the Bible, is going to say that 80 is anything but old. So, you must have wanted an old guy—and you got one.

 

So what can an old guy tell you? Gotta be something about the past because that’s all I know that you don’t. As I have pointed out before, your grasp of culture is an inch wide and a mile deep. If it happened after 2017 or so, you know about 50 times more than I do— earlier than that, however, the tables are reversed. So let’s go back.

 

As I think about it, I have lived my whole life facing existential crises in one form or another. I was born in 1946, about six months after we dropped those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that’s how I grew up. I remember 5^th grade in suburban Washington, D.C. We had just returned from living in London for two years where my father, who was a career naval pilot, had served as a naval attache in the US Embassy. I didn’t know much about America—I spoke with a decidedly lower class and deliberately adopted English accent, did not understand a thing about baseball, and had not attended school with girls since the first grade. Having four brothers did not help. So that fall, in the middle of the day, the air raid sirens went off, and everyone pushed the tables away from the windows and climbed underneath them. Everyone but me, who just stood there dumbfounded, feeling confused and very very alone. This was my introduction to nuclear attack drills. Now, I understood bomb shelters; we had a very large one in the back yard of our suburban home in London, but it had been designed to withstand the Blitz, which no longer posed much of a threat. My father used it to store wine, and we loved putting garden snails on the base of the high wall, watching them struggle to get to the top. Ah, boys.

 

Of course, our nuclear drills offered about as much protection from an atomic attack as trusting big oil to produce green energy would help the environment, but what did we know? Of course, any reasonable person looking back now would know, and you can’t help thinking that government and school officials, having seen the actual photographs from Japan, had to know, too. I mean, the whole building, based on the evidence, the windows, the tables, and all of the fifth-graders, would just melt.

 

The real result was not to create a profound distrust in either the efficacy or the truthfulness of government agencies (that would come later) but to create a deep and lasting sense of existential angst, a feeling that has been rarely alleviated over the years. I did get used to the threat of nuclear war and uselessly hiding under tables, and then my father was transferred to Hawaii where he became the executive officer for a flight group that tracked Russian submarines on a triangular block from Midway to Hawaii to the Aleutian Islands. It wasn’t war, actually, but he was usually gone for a couple of weeks at a time chasing them Rooskies. And every day as I made the trek from the air station where we lived to school in Honolulu, I took a boat across Pearl Harbor where the rusting remains of the high antennae from the USS Arizona rose above the waters. Now there is a fancy memorial to mark the spot, but back then it was just twisted metal. It was hard not to imagine the 1,177 souls whose unrecovered bodies still remained entombed below.

 

And living on a naval air base kept the immediacy of war constantly on my mind. Jets flew by at all hours of the day and night. On three occasions in the two years that we lived there, there were fatal crashes: the sirens sounded, the air reverberated from a violent explosion, and black smoke rose ominously in the near distance. To be fair, I was on base for only one of those crashes, but that was plenty enough.

 

Those formative years were followed by real wars, by domestic upheaval, by expressions of racial injustice, political assassinations, gender discrimination, and an increasing sense of hopeless and irredeemable partisanship and division. And that was just the late sixties and early seventies. At every juncture, I was confronted with an existential crisis—was the world that we lived in about to end? It seemed not so much a question of if as a question of how.

 

And here we are in 2021, facing the apocalypse on so many fronts. The threat of nuclear destruction has definitely receded, although there are still huge stockpiles in the US and Russia. Pakistan and India are at odds, and both have nuclear weapons. North Korea has an itchy finger, and Iran seems lacking only the capability to offer further threat.

        

Humans have always been drawn to stories predicting the end of the world, and those threats seem to emanate most sharply from the deepest fears humanity is dealing with at any particular moment. We rightly feared war and the aggression of nationalism, colonialism, and expansionism, and that was expressed in our understanding of a nuclear holocaust. Not that it should have come as much of a surprise, we now rightly fear worldwide pandemics; we appear to have dodged the bullet this time, but indiscriminate population growth, populism, and the growing gulf between the wealthy and the poor, in individuals and in nations, suggest that while we might not now end the world we are on the path to kill millions more in subsequent pandemics. And the environmental catastrophes that loom so large are real and imminent, reflecting our distrust of the power of international capitalism, unrestrained economic growth, and, again, competition for resources (and the desire to expend those resources as quickly as possible).

 

Like my fifth-grade classroom response to the nuclear threat, someone should really know better. You are not going respond to environmental disasters and ongoing pandemic challenges by moving away from the windows and hiding under the desk, but that seems too often to be what we are doing, despite the fact that everyone knows that masks work, that internal combustion engines and coal plants fatally pollute, and that nations armed with nuclear weapons need to be monitored. And to push the point further, although we’ve lived with it uncomfortably since 1619, we have issues of racial justice, gun control, threatened authoritarianism, and income inequality that continue to plague us. They might not cause the world to end but in our continual denial to reckon with them, they threaten our ability to move forward.

 

Enough

 

Let’s shift gears and hold on for a moment. I would like for you to think about the structure of this speech. It’s important to consider what it is that you are listening to and to view it with a critical eye. These speeches do have a prescribed design; knowing that helps you anticipate and assess. You will note that I started with a light-hearted self-deprecation. It wasn’t actually funny, but it served its purpose. I then moved to tributes, another traditional aspect of this kind of address. Then, I presented the example, in this case a little personal history. It got serious, as you might have expected. Now, and pay attention, dearies, here comes the advice part: stay alert. I mean, it’s fair to ask what lessons can we learn from someone who has lived his whole life under the threat of imminent cultural and societal destruction, whether on the cosmic or on the local level? And that’s a hard question, really. I know that I am supposed to pause here and give you the advice of the ages, but I am pretty much opposed to giving people much advice because it always sounds so predictable and so empty. I suspect that’s because it is. Let me offer you instead some examples of my own responses, which most often look like platitudes except for the kind of ironic counterpoint that accompanies them. I have used them so often and for so long, I am sure you can quote them back to me. Certainly, Mr. Snyder recounted them clearly enough. We can start with my frequent response to the greeting, “Have a nice day.” I will often pause a little longer than might be expected and respond, “Don’t tell me what to do.” Now, in fact, I stole this line from Peggy Thacher, the grand dame of Thacher from the 40s to the 70s. She was the wife of Anson Thacher, son of the founder and a head of school in his own right. I actually live in the house that was built for them in the late 1930s. She is also the grandmother of Mariana and Mateo Thacher, She was a woman of great intelligence and wit, with a very sharp tongue. You didn’t want to cross Peggy, and I certainly kept a respectful distance. The reason I adopted this line is that I want to question the kind of meaningless chatter by which we attempt to sustain some kind of social politeness without really engaging. There is nothing wrong with the automatic thank yous and other performative phrases that we use to preserve a kind of positive framework as we move independently through our lives. It is important, however, to stop once in a while and recognize how essentially empty many of the words we use when addressing one another really are. After all, words without import do not advance anything, a point that is even more self-evident when we consider how little time we have. It’s not an earth-shaking observation, but every little bit helps.

 

Let’s move, then, to this familiar phrase, one that I use regularly: “Every day is a holiday,” this followed by a little pause and then “if you’re doing what you love,” then another pause and the finale: “And if you aren’t, you’re a damn fool.” Now, a quick quip and a personal expression of the need for commitment to a fulfilling activity is not much of a response to an existential crisis, but maybe it could be. Through repetition, I always hope that students who hear me will, in time, actually think about that. It’s not really a lesson, and it’s certainly less elegant than Thoreau’s observation about how most men live lives of quiet desperation, but I’d rather you came to that idea all by yourself. Note also that this little part of the lesson is also affirming and optimistic. It expresses my faith that if you learn best how to live, you will consequently know what to do.

 

Let’s end this segment with a little piece of imagined conversation:

Often, at this point, a short conversation ensues about how we don’t really communicate very well and are content to pass each other by with empty phrases that hide the truth. It doesn’t go very far in the moment; again, I am always happier to have students think about it on their own. And, of course, we simply don't always have the time or the energy to delve into the complexities raised by the question “How are you?” an inquiry the answer to which can lead almost anywhere. Don’t always ask it casually or quickly or automatically. It is disingenuous, especially given the complex and difficult times in which we live, when no one, in all honesty, and at all moments, can respond with a one-word “great.” If you want to have a relationship (or if you already have one), wonderful, but be aware of what doors you are threatening to open.

 

What else is this about? Well, maybe you noticed that I did not actually answer the question of how I am; I only criticized it. Partly, that’s because the truth is that it’s really not any of your business. The role of the student is to learn from the teacher not about the teacher. We are not related, and we are not actually friends. In fact, if you are looking for an honest assessment or solid, objective advice, be wary of those who are friends and of those who love you. Wanting you to succeed is not always the same thing as helping you succeed, especially when success can take on many short-term manifestations. It’s not that friends and families are, by definition, wrong in the advice they offer, only that a little distance can make a real difference. “None of your business” might just be exactly what you are looking for.

 

So, here is what the old guy wants to leave you with. And if it sounds like advice, well maybe it is. If you feel anxious most of the time, learn to live with it. It doesn’t go away; whatever it is that you worry about—the world, the nation, the School, the self—they are all vulnerable but all are really worth saving or at least making better. If you aren’t just a little anxious, you wouldn’t be in a position to care. Things get better, things get worse, but nothing is perfect and it never will be. Remember the lesson that Thacher taught you in your first trimester freshman year: you start every day shoveling manure. You will find it to be true your whole life. And in a related thought, don’t make being happy your goal in life. Choose instead something over which you have more control. Happiness is just a potential by-product of a well-managed life, and let me emphasize the word “potential.” There are certainly no guarantees. You might wish at times that you could be as happy as you were back when you were a kid; maybe daydreaming about being someone’s dog or cat seems appealing as you check adorable images of puppies and kittens on social media. They seem happy but that’s because they don’t know anything. You do, and there’s no forgetting. And, finally, for God’s sake, do something you love. In my case, frankly, that’s teaching you. I’ve been doing it since the fall of 1968, and I will be back doing it next fall. I take great solace in noting that fully a third of the senior class spent their final term at Thacher writing and analyzing poetry—and what on earth could be better than that?

 

Thank you.