Senior Vespers 2011: Katherine Halsey
Teacher of French and English, member of the Horse Department, Thacher mom X 3, Katherine Halsey shared this with the Class of 2011 in late May.
Good evening to all, but especially to the senior class for whom this event marks the beginning of our countdown to your graduation on Saturday. I stand before you tonight with a full heart, deeply honored by your invitation to speak, and humbled by your gesture of loving generosity; in your invitation I have felt, once again, the embrace of the entire community-- a reassuring, grounding embrace that has sustained me in myriad ways over these past, sometimes incomprehensibly difficult 18 months. Your many kindnesses have carried me forward, and I am grateful beyond words.
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Thank you.
So, my heart is full as I offer these thoughts to you on the eve of your departure from this place, thoughts offered to you, the class of 2011, with deepest affection.
Graduation, commencement: an ending that contains a new beginning. This is a time of big transition for you, of journeys both literal and metaphoric.
There are so many things to discuss in this life, and our dialogues together over the past four years have taught me more than you may know, conversations that have been marked for me most memorably by your genuine curiosity and unflagging thoughtfulness.
You are an extraordinary group.
Speeches like this being what they are, however, (which is to say relatively brief affairs!), I have narrowed my scope and choose to speak to you tonight about memory and how it relates to what we know, who we are and who we become in this life..
Of course, you guys are still so young that on the "past, present, future continuum," if I may call it that, your past is relatively short (I have items of clothing that are older than you are!), and the present is fleeting; in your world right now, it is the future that looms largest..
But, this life inevitably arcs toward a balance that will see your past expanding, the present will continue to be a fleeting instant, and the future will shrink, slowly for most of you, but it will, nonetheless, gradually lose its overwhelming hold on your imaginations, to be replaced with an increasingly compelling fascination with your own past.
As young women and men on cusp of adulthood, you move imperceptibly every day toward this "tipping point," and your memories will become more and more important to you as you trace your own way forward on this arc. And, on the eve of your ritual departure from this place, your memories, whether you know it or not, are getting ready to kick into high gear in new ways.
The uses of memory are many; but here too, I will narrow my focus.
The manifestation of memory most central to your experience here has probably been as the key player in your efforts to absorb useful information you did not yet know (like those pesky verb conjugations, or various dates in history, mathematical formulae and random science factoids etc...).
But memory also serves in making meaning of what we do know. And this second experience of personal memory is often triggered by loss, loss which can take so many different forms, as we learned from Avery's creative Senior Exhibition. Soon, you seniors (and several faculty) will pack your bags, collect your memories and head out, head out into a kind of exile, a ritual removal—for you, the seniors, a rite of passage.
For all of you who are leaving, what you have known here, the people, the place, the predictable, the ordinary -- the invisible everyday -- what has become comfortable with familiarity –will become what you R E M E M B E R.
In Spanish, R E C O R D A R. In Italian, R I C O R D A R E. From the Latin
R E C O R D A R I: to pass back through the heart, L E C O E U R, the core, the center. We R E- MEMBER, or piece back together the fragments of our experience and what we know... to give it shape, the body of our knowledge. In French, S E S O U V E N I R--, from the Latin -- S U B V E N I R, that which comes up from below, from the gut, from the soul.
You will R E - M E M B E R ... Remember what you want to...what you need to...you will R E - M E M B E R what you have made yours.... what you have made of yourselves.... and maybe, too, you will R E - M E M B E R images of what you would like to become.
You will remember what you K N O W.
In French: C O N N A Î T R E-- to know by the senses, and S A V O I R-- to know by the mind.
We are tempted here at Thacher (and, I suspect, at most of the institutions to which you are headed next year) , not exclusively, but undeniably, I think, to concentrate on what we deem to be quantifiable, le S A V O I R, what we can know by the mind. It is expected in academic communities like ours that we will evaluate explicitly and implicitly each other’s learning, our expertise, our general mastery of facts and formulae.... I’ll hazard that many of us would admit to having spent considerable time here fretting about what we don't know, or can't remember... Fearful of the world’s response to lapsed memory, a failure to understand or to retain. Worried that what we don't know and don't understand will somehow conspire to humiliate us.
So we learn to dissemble, to hide what we do not know, or don't want to know. And, in this lurks a terrible danger, namely: that the “liar will become the lie,”-- that F E A R will teach us to hide from what we don’t know and close us off from the possibility of further discovery, of broader knowledge and deeper understanding.
Okay, here I'm going to go a little literary on you... but you K N E W that would probably happen when you invited me, right? So bear with me; I promise to bring it back round to you with in a page!
Toni Morrison has likened this phenomenon of repressed memory, or maybe more aptly for you unacknowledged or unspoken memory to a "veil," the veil between what is said and what is unsaid, what is known by virtue of having been acknowledged and enunciated, as opposed to what has been hidden behind a film of repressed memory when the memories are too hard to bear. These difficult memories can be public or private, ones that were played out on an historical stage, or experienced more privately in the intimacy of our relationships with others.
In her novel B E L O V E D, (which a good many of you had the chance to study this trimester), Morrison explores the ways in which these public and private memories overlap to shape the decisions we make and frame the lives we lead. The complex interplay of the R E-membering or repression of what we know has everything to do with the meaning we are able to make of this life, how we "write" our own private stories, as well as the ways in which we inevitably participate in writing our country's, and even our entire world's story.
And here we come back to you, you who are the authors of your own lives. As you head out from the safe embrace of this place, into your own more fully fledged adult lives to write your own history, Can you hope to learn to see to the C O R E, to le C O E U R, the H E A R T of your own experience, both private and public, and to make a practice of bearing witness to your many truths?
I think so. I would like to suggest to you tonight that it is by R E-membering what you have been taught (or simply allowed) to D I S - member in our prevailing culture of conspicuous consumption and instant gratification, namely: your soul, the meeting place of the mind and the heart. Our fullest intelligence, the integrated heart-mind, the mind-heart. We become people of integrity when we learn to value the whole of our intelligence by allowing the mind to inform the heart, and the heart to inform the mind, by giving voice to what we know, and by bearing witness to what we see, even when that means speaking truth to power, often at some risk --indeed, by risking the loss of our own comfort, in not only standing up, but in standing by—in putting our bodies forward to be counted.
We must piece back together what we know with intent -- with intent to let the
souvenir, the memory, subvert the comfort of our complacency.
To R E - M E M B E R is a demanding task, as those of you who know Morrison's
Sethe can confirm. Here is Emily Dickinson’s sense of what the Heart’s role
might be:
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The Heart has narrow Banks
It measures like the Sea
In mighty - unremitting Bass
And Blue Monotony
Till Hurricane bisect
And as itself discerns
Its insufficient Area
The heart convulsive learns
That Calm is but a Wall
Of unattempted Gauze
An instant’s Push demolishes
A Questioning -- dissolves.
The heart and mind, then, together, invite you to push out on the
limits of what you know. To rip through the unattempted gauze, that veil of
"willful blindness," -- for it is in being ripped open by these moments of
epiphany, a sometimes painful process, that we let the light in.
So, ready (and you are ready!) to wrestle with your fear of the unknown and of the inevitable losses that leaving entails, seduced by the spirit’s curiosity, you dare to leave.
As you head out, R E M E M B E R:
That perfection is a seductive illusion. Resist the temptation to focus solely on the
outcome of what you do, whether it's a course assignment or a sports competition; champion, rather, the process, the journey.
When you sit down to write an essay, R E M E M B E R that the guy who invented the genre (I am not making this up!) was a 16th century French guy named Michel de Montaigne, who called them E S S A I S, from the French verb E S S A Y E R, to try, because that's what they were: short expository pieces in which he tried, attempted to write his way into insight and understanding. Make it a point to do the same: approach everything you do with a genuine openness to discovery.
As you go, listen to and trust the logic of your hearts, their convulsive, passionate pulse.
Grow your minds. Push out into the unknown with a commitment to
honor what you learn by standing for what you come to know.
Build time into your lives and protect it, -- not just free time, but time freely given, to recollect, to reflect, to question e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g .
Nurture your souls.
As the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote in a letter to a young friend:
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love
the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in
a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be
given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the
point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then,
someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answers.”
So, here we are, preparing to send you off, for we know that we have to let you go in order to get you back. We will miss you. You will miss each other, maybe even us! But, I hope you will R E M E M B E R one of the many subtler lessons of the Honor Code: namely that presence is about so much more than sharing physical space with someone. Presence is grounded in relationship. We are with each other, support and influence each other even when we are physically separated: we carry each other in our hearts. There is powerful presence even in absence if we can open ourselves to it.
To the Class of 2011: as you head out from here I wish you:
Time freely given, time to live the questions, deeply, and to love them if you can, for it is by living the questions that you will be able to map your way forward into your own futures and then, occasionally, back home to us.
Thank you.
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Senior Vespers Address: Katherine V. Halsey
KVH Vespers
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