Philosophy4

I have never had the privilege of meeting long time professor of English at Boston’s Roxbury Latin School, Joe Kerner, but after reading his valedictory speech on the occasion of his retirement from the English department, I hope that I do some day.  In his speech, he encourages the students in his audience to press on in their quest for a good and true life.  One aspect of his appeal that I find especially poignant is the ambition and sobriety with which Mr. Kener approaches his subject: he intends to see his students, not simply off to college, but off to the living of deliberate lives.  This intention, above nearly all others, possesses the power to rescue secondary education from a thousand petty, silly, and worthless benchmarks and learning objectives.  In rejecting educational cant, it seems that Mr. Kerner found a good and true way of fulfilling his calling as a high school English teacher, and that is why he is an educator we love.  What follows is a few inspiring excerpts from Mr. Kerner’s final address. It’s true inspiration for a new generation of teachers.

Good morning. Welcome back.

Thank you, Mr. Brennan for that too-generous introduction and for the equally generous invitation to open the Spring Term with some observations about life. Of course, if you’re old enough, people presume that all those years of experience must have yielded some wisdom worth sharing, although that’s a shaky assumption, at best. I recall a friend saying uncharitably of an elderly teaching colleague of ours, “He claims to have fifty years of experience. He hasn’t—just one year of experience repeated fifty times over.” In any event, the confluence of age and wisdom has long had a somewhat bittersweet taste. William Butler Yeats had this to say in his poem, “The Coming of Wisdom with Time”:

Or, as a wry Pennsylvania Dutch proverb puts it, not so poetically but no less poignantly, “We grow too soon old and too late smart.”

Anyway, over the course of my 36 years at R.L., I have listened to 107 opening of term addresses, always, until today, sitting out where you are, in those Puritan-severe seats, just back from a significant break in the routine of school life, sometimes alert and sometimes still half-asleep, eager or reluctant for a new year or a grueling winter season or a final sprint to graduation—hungry for whatever morsel of wisdom or truth might drop from the podium or a bit blasé, a bit skeptical, a bit disengaged. My first such address was in the fall of 1976, the speaker Headmaster Jarvis, the man who had hired me to come to Boston, still in his youthful 30’s, younger, in fact, than I was. I don’t recall the specific content of his talk—the issues of life and moral character he chose to consider that morning—but I do remember its soft-spoken, home-spun style, laced with personal anecdotes and informed by plain-spoken eloquence and wisdom. There was a rhythm to these low-key homilies, I discovered over the years—a rhythm that persists today in Mr. Brennan’s own thrice-a-year addresses. Mr. Jarvis’s often stemmed from a recent experience on vacation—a conversation among feckless teenagers overheard on an airplane or in front of a painting in the Louvre, a confession by a desperate R.L. graduate in the throes of a midlife crisis, or simply a boyhood memory from his early days in Painesville, Ohio—and from those stories he spun indelible lessons about life and how to live it truly. That they were indelibly imprinted even on less receptive adolescent minds came home to me a number of years ago at Reunions, when an alumnus confided to me, “I really thought I had successfully slept through all of Mr. Jarvis’s Hall talks, but then one day, in the midst of a life-crisis, words from one of them came flooding back to me, almost verbatim, and they made perfect sense to me and helped me through a bad time in a way that I would never have imagined possible.”

Just as I never imagined that I might one day be up here attempting to convey something indelible to you, half-awake or not. When Mr. Brennan first mentioned the possibility of my speaking to the school, I intended to follow the well-established pattern of those 100-plus previous talks. But then, in the meantime—as some of you know and many more are about to hear for the first time—I decided to call a close to my 53-year career, and while I don’t intend this talk to be a valedictory, it is, really, whether I intend it to be or not. So here goes—an opening of term and a closing of career address all in one—and I promise not to force the extension of the day into the uncharted realm of a G or H hall.

Let me begin by telling you about a few of the heroes of my life—a few of my early influences as a reader, as a teacher, as an intellectual (although that term, self-applied, always sounds a bit pompous or as Holden Caulfield would say, “phony”). I grew up loving books—loving the sounds of words and sentences that told stories even more than the stories themselves. My father was a wordsmith, a punster, a turner of artful phrases, and I took pleasure and pride in my own writing from my earliest recollection—childishly ornate writing, florid and rococo, stylistic excesses that my first college English teachers took considerable delight in attempting to beat out of my prose, with only limited success. My early influences were Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain and Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy and, yes, of course, Shakespeare, and later, in college, when all of my classmates had Spanish bullfighting posters on their dorm walls and were halfway through bad novels in imitation of the lean, manly prose of Ernest Hemingway, I was trying to write with the dense, impressionistic lushness of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner—incorrigibly enthralled by the rolling cadences and rumbling resonances of the English language.

Anyway, backing up a bit, when I was in the 8^th grade—in a six-year high school in Millburn, New Jersey—my English teacher saw something in me, in my reading tastes and my love affair with words as a writer, that made her entrust me with her well-worn and much-annotated copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Her name was Georgiana Gilbert, a spinster teacher of indeterminate age (definitely old in my 13-year-old eyes except for the youthful glow that lit her face when she read aloud from her beloved books), and my first serious literary mentor. “Here,” she said, “this is a favorite of mine. I think you might like it.” She overestimated my precocity. I found Walden difficult and daunting (as a number of you in this Hall have found it in recent years), and I might well have raised the white flag of surrender at a number of points early on, but I plowed ahead, mostly to please Miss Gilbert, and discovered, along the way, sentences that startled me and excited me even when I didn’t quite understand their allusions to Homer or Hindu religious texts or grasp their philosophical complexities. Thoreau became my hero, first because he was Miss Gilbert’s hero and then because he could write as poetically and powerfully as I longed to write myself.

Miss Gilbert asked me to come in at the end of the day a few weeks after she had given me the book and wondered how I was liking it. I hemmed and hawed a bit, stammered a few lame reactions to Thoreau’s savage indictment of contemporary society, and then flipped to a page where I had folded a slip of paper as a place marker. There was a sentence, one that she had underlined and marked in the margin with multiple exclamation points, and not daring, of course, to defile her treasured volume, I had copied out, in my own neat cursive, this stunning and unsettling line—the author’s explanation for his two-year escape to Walden Pond:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear. . . .

Miss Gilbert recognized a “teaching moment” when she saw one. She asked me what I thought Thoreau meant by wishing to live “deliberately.” When I suggested that he meant intentionally, by design, rather than accidentally, haphazardly, she nodded approvingly and then probed further: “And perhaps to deliberate about life, to contemplate, to speculate, to meditate upon what it meant—to live thoughtfully as well as intentionally?” Aside from my father’s double-edged puns, this was my introduction, I think, to ambiguity—to the richness of the English language in which the same word can mean several things at the same time. I can’t claim that, from that moment on, I began to live my own life deliberately—independently and self-reliantly and philosophically like my new hero Thoreau…But I do believe this—that from that moment on, I began to read more deliberately, to savor sentences differently, to pause and puzzle over the surprising and original turn of phrase that stood language and life on its head.

…I certainly became a collector of sentences, a kind of literary beachcomber, drifting along the shores of the sea of literature, in search of the perfectly shaped and delicately tinted shell of language or the grotesquely gnarled piece of driftwood or the polished and re-polished shard of smoky jade-green bottle glass…Here, gratuitously—simply because no collector can resist pulling a favorite object out of the specimen case and holding it up to the light for admiration—here are some sentences that I think “shock and illuminate”:

Again from Joyce’s “Araby,” in which the protagonist, desperate for romantic glory, turns a mundane shopping trip with his aunt into a sacred mission, a crusade:

On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, barrels of pigs’ cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O’Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes.

“If you had written that, you could die happy.” It is a remark I sometimes make to a class about a poem or story, but more often pointing to a single sentence so apt—so perfect in the precision of its images, so exquisite in its shape and sounds and rhythmic tensions, so electrically charged—that it takes one’s breath away or, as one of my former colleagues was fond of saying, makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck. Here is another jewel from my collection—from the end of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the narrator’s description of the once-unspoiled Long Island, now populated with the mansions of the rich :

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

If you had written that, you could die happy. It’s hyperbole, of course—not meant to be taken literally (although if I had written the whole of The Great Gatsby or Melville’s Moby Dick or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, I think such a feat might well redeem all of the other things in my life that I haven’t done or haven’t done well—and I could die happy). My hope, of course, is that the hyperbolic mention of sudden, happy death will shock my students—startle them into listening to the sentence more closely, to apprehend it as I do, to savor the craftsmanship of its cadences, the dance of its inflections, the static crackle of its originality. Students have always looked at me a little oddly when I make this statement, and as I grow more and more anxious about the future of literature, the future of serious reading and serious writing, I believe—perhaps paranoically—that the number of odd looks and the duration of the disbelief or incomprehension behind them is a sign that my anxiety is valid: the fate of the sentence, that cornerstone of literature, is indeed uncertain. In the plugged-in pace of the modern world—linked in and networked, multi-friended and twittered at—who will have the patience as a reader to pause and ponder, to sound out and savor such intricacies of language, such poetry, to hear and heed the sirens’ song of such alluring sentences, when all of our devices are jingling and beeping and twitching to tell us that the world is going on out there, that plans are being made, news is breaking, scandals are being exposed, babies are being cute and teenagers stupid on YouTube, relationships are forming and dissolving, life is happening without us?

Why does it matter so much to me whether literature as I have known it and loved it survives—beyond the fact that I have devoted my life to it? The only other time that I have addressed the school in this formal way was in 1999, on the occasion of my being honored as the first George Norton Northrop Professor of English. My inaugural lecture was titled, appropriately enough, “What Literature Is and Why It Matters,” a title that pretty much sums up the theme of my remarks. What I said, in effect, was that serious literature stretches our life’s boundaries, expands our life’s possibilities, allows us to live lives vicariously that we can never experience ourselves firsthand—historical lives, foreign lives, fantastical lives; noble lives, criminal lives, “mean and sneaking lives,” as Thoreau once said. Serious writers create in words worlds so real that our feet scrape along their cobblestone streets or jungle paths, create human characters so real that we walk in their shoes as they grope their way through existence, trying to figure out how to live and what to live for—just what Thoreau hoped to discover when he moved out of Concord village in 1845 and took up residence in a 10’ X 15’ cabin on the wooded shore of Walden Pond. Literature, in short, provides us with an infinite number of lenses through which to view life, examine life—examine our own lives. That is what Thoreau meant when he spoke of living deliberately. That’s what Socrates meant when he set down his timeless admonition: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

When I came to Roxbury Latin in the fall of 1976, the entire English Department was new. It was a time of some considerable upheaval in the history of the school, certainly in the English program, which seemed quite scattered in its focus and unclear in its purpose. My new colleagues and I (Mr. Randall, fresh out of Harvard, among them) occupied the little space behind the Farnham Room, then the Library—our desks on top of one another under the sloping ceiling, grading papers and preparing classes cheek by jowl, like an office of 19^th century scriveners. On a Friday afternoon, exhausted from the week’s work, a clumsy malapropism from a 9^th grade essay read aloud would send us into paroxysms of giddy hilarity; when one of us muttered something under his breath, the rest all looked up as if we were expected to respond, to pick up the conversation. We shared favorite books and deep thoughts and of course sentences, classroom successes and frustrations—and we began to invent the English program that still, by and large, informs the teaching of literature and composition, the attitudes and approaches to reading and writing and critical analysis, here at Roxbury Latin. Among my first major tasks as Department Head was to describe the mission of that emerging program and the philosophy behind it for the School Catalogue of 1977-78. The opening sentence—the departmental manifesto–has remained virtually intact over the past 35 years: “The teaching of English at Roxbury Latin is founded upon the classical concept of the “examined life”—upon the belief that a lifelong commitment to intellectual, aesthetic, and moral exploration and growth gives existence meaning and character.” We believed then, and we continue to believe now, that literature is a vital ingredient of the “examined life”—that the study of serious literature, that reading deeply and thoughtfully in the great works of the greatest creative minds over the course of human history is essential to living deeply, living deliberately and deliberatively. That is why I care so passionately, and sometimes now so desperately, about the survival of literature…

…How, then, ought one to live? It is, I sometimes think, the only question worth asking, the fundamental question that all serious literature prompts. Don’t get me wrong. Except for an occasional parable like Tolstoy’s, novels and plays are not prescriptions for living. Even serious writers are not preachers or pamphleteers, offering up neat moral lessons that we can hang up, on plaques or in needlepoint, on our walls for daily instruction. But I do believe that all of the human striving and strife they evoke, all of the false values and frustrated dreams, all of the love misshapen and misunderstood, all of the so-human characters they bring so vividly to life, permit us—invite us—to turn back to our own real lives with a new sense of how people do struggle to live in the world, how they might live differently and more meaningfully, and with the central question of our own lives renewed and illuminated: How, then, ought I to live? If life’s many pathways and confusing possibilities are as I perceive them with my own eyes and through the penetrating eyes and piercing words of these literary observers, if what seems honest and honorable and valuable to them and to me is genuine and real, and if life will end all too soon, how, then, ought I to live? How, then, will I use the brief span that I have been allotted on this earth. Who will I be? Whom will I serve? What will I devote myself to, give myself up to?

In several of his term-opening addresses over the years, Mr. Jarvis recalled the inspirational words of a coach, a basketball coach, I think, from his Ohio boyhood, who would send his team out of the locker room by urging, “Don’t have no regrets, boys.” What he meant, I imagine, was what all coaches hope to see from their teams—what R.L. squads are famous for—that they would play with such heart and grit that, win or lose, they would have nothing left to give, nothing in reserve, nothing not spent, exhaustingly, in the noble effort. He meant what Thoreau meant when he said, “I did not wish to live what was not life….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms . . . .” “Don’t have no regrets, boys”—a sentence with its own kind of eloquence, a sentence worth adding to your collection.

When I was in my first year of teaching, the father of one of my students—a highly successful New York banker—took me aside after my back-to-school night presentation about his son’s English course. With genuine concern, he said, “I hear you graduated from Princeton. Very impressive. Surely there’s something more important you plan to do with your life.” I was too nonplussed and too polite to offer a very articulate response. Perhaps I wasn’t sure myself, at that point, what I did plan to do with my life. Now, fifty years later, I should like to tell you—and that well-meaning advisor, in whatever corner of the Underworld is reserved for the shades of wealthy New York bankers—that I have no regrets, that I have lived a life I have loved—among great books and provocative minds and exquisite sentences, among dedicated and idealistic colleagues—kindred spirits—and among young people like you whose minds and hearts and souls are still largely open and receptive, still wondering and searching, still shaping and re-shaping themselves. I feel fortunate, blessed in fact, to have found and fulfilled such a life’s mission. Of course, I don’t expect that kind of missionary zeal to dissipate all of a sudden. Who knows, next year you may find me up on a soapbox on Boston Common, preaching to the lunchtime overflow from downtown offices or to the occasional nanny with her sleeping charge in a stroller or just to the ubiquitous pigeons hopeful of any crumb of bread or truth—preaching about the shortness of life, warning that the end is near, or just reciting favorite sentences from The Great Gatsby or Walden, from Hamlet or Heart of Darkness.

Here, at long last, is the valediction, my farewell address. My hope for all of you, as I prepare to take my leave of this place I have called home for 36 years, is that you will become lifelong lovers of serious literature, collectors of exquisite sentences, that you will ask and keep asking the essential question of the “examined” and the responsive life—How, then, ought I to live?—what must I do and become to live honestly and nobly, passionately and compassionately, humanly and humanely. And I hope that, in the process, you will discover something you love enough to devote yourself to it for as long and as ardently as I have.

If I were a man of few words, as you know I am not, if I were not a profligate lover of language, as I most certainly have always been, I might have done all this quite differently. The bell would not have rung, your teachers would not be grinding their teeth over another first period class cut short, and you would all be out of here lounging about, luxuriating in your extended free time before the start of Mod 1. Here, in an alternative nutshell, is what I might have said—with apologies and homage to my heroes Tony Jarvis and Georgiana Gilbert and Henry David Thoreau; here—just to prove that I could do it if I really wanted to—is the Twitter version of my talk today (and you can count the characters):

Welcome back, boys. You’re all going to die. Read deeply. Live deliberately. Don’t have no regrets. And have a great spring term.