Commencement Address
Robert Edwards
University of Maine
May 12, 2007
This is a blessed hour, a moment in time
of calm, satisfaction and stasis before we resume the excitements,
temptations and anxieties of the world. It's great to be here to offer
you, the educated men and women of the University of Maine, the warmest of
congratulations. And to those great patrons of education—your parents,
grandparents and step-parents—and to your faculty who exhorted, sustained
and taught you, thank you from us all.
As an invocation, graduates of the
University of and in this singular state of Maine, I offer you a
perspective from a traveler on Mt Katahdin:
From this
elevation, just on the skirts of the clouds, we could overlook the
country, west and south, for a hundred miles. There it was, the State of
Maine. …Immeasurable forest for the sun to shine on, that eastern stuff
we heard of in Massachusetts. No clearing, no house. It did not look as if
a solitary traveler had cut so much as a walking stick there. Countless
lakes: Moosehead, Chesunkook, Millinocket and a hundred others without a
name…The forest looked like a firm grass sward, and the effect of these
lakes in its midst has been well compared…to that of a "mirror broken into
a thousand fragments, and wildly scattered over the grass, reflecting the
full blaze of the sun."
This is Henry David Thoreau on Katahdin
the 8th September, 1846. I read his vivid, spare description of
the state to remind us of the beauty of our physical inheritance but
mostly to suggest another inheritance: the beauty and clarity of Thoreau's
language. As you well know, in Maine you become part of—are even formed
by—a particular linguistic tradition, a kind of terse, pithy style of
discourse. Its brevity is the soul of Maine's wit and humor, but I suggest
to you that the matter goes deeper: language and thought, their quality
and precision, are closely allied, and this clear, robust use of the
English language has been at the core of the peculiar contribution the
people of New England have made to American democracy.
In 1776, Yankee regiments may have been
the most literate army in the world, says David Hackett Fischer. "Nearly
all New England privates could read and write and were caught up in the
great public questions that were debated in kitchens, taverns and town
meetings." In fact, General Washington at first found us "an exceeding
dirty and nasty people," and he complained of the "leveling spirit" of New
England where "the principles of democracy so universally prevail."
This same spirit prevailed in the Civil
War. James McPherson notes that more than 90 percent of white Union
soldiers could read and write. Some officers were not greatly pleased. One
colonel wished for soldiers more like machines. "Our soldiers are too
intelligent," he grumbled, "for they will talk and they will write, and
read the papers." But this was a minority complaint, says McPherson, since
Lincoln and his generals, among them Bowdoin's Professor Joshua
Chamberlain, depended on a volunteer army that could articulate clearly
why they fought.
Now, why, on this beautiful day, all this
historical piety? Because language still matters. It matters today, this
cool form of communication, even in our era of the sizzling television
image. Sadly, language in the public domain is too often careless,
inaccurate and cheap. Think of the rudeness and put-downs on many
broadcast emails and much talk radio and television that replace
discussion with the amusements of the dog-fight. Think of the cost of
foreign policy by crude epithet, when we now find we must negotiate with
each of the three very different countries we dismissed as "the evil
empire." Ponder the recent statement by its spokesman that the U.S.
Central Command is dropping terms like "long war" and "Islamofascist"
because of what he describes as a new "effort to use language that
describes the conflict for our western audience while understanding… how
that language is construed in the Middle East."
So, implicitly endorsed by the U.S.
Government, which has spent much of the last month debating what the head
of the CIA meant by the word "slam-dunk," I suggest that it is our duty as
educated people in this democracy to speak and write the English language
in our professional and personal lives with clarity, accuracy and even
with some modesty. I'd propose two different avenues worth traversing in
seeking this goal—which I have sought with only middling success for a
lifetime.
The first road leads via the Founding
Fathers to Maine. Members of that great generation that drafted the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, The Federalist, and
many other enduring state and federal documents were well educated. Many
of them knew Latin and Greek. The curriculum of their schools still
resonated with the trivium of the previous age: the three
disciplines of grammar, logic and rhetoric—all subjects engaging the
skillful and precise use of language. Through this trivium our
road passes to the pure, spirited prose of E.B.White of Allen Cove,
Maine.
To read E.B. White is to scrape the most
cherished barnacles from one's writing and sand down to the wood any
glossy varnish of attempted eloquence. I know he had this effect on many
who loved, and were shamed by, reading his unadorned accounts of life on a
run-down farm here. White went to Cornell, and the professor who taught
him—and incidentally my father—English in 1919 was a man called William Strunk. Strunk published a little book called Elements of Style.
White, introducing its revised publication in 1959, describes it as "a
forty-three-page summation of the case for cleanliness, accuracy and
brevity in the use of English."
While not having endured directly what
White calls "the sting of his kindly lash," I confess I too have tried to
live up to Strunk's admonitions: to use the active voice; put statements
in a positive form; approach style by way of plainness, simplicity,
orderliness and sincerity. In the belief that even great creative feats of
language depend on a solid grasp of grammar and sentence structure, I
quote for you the heart of this workhorse, by Strunk, out of White, which
White calls sixty-three words that could change the world:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence
should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences,
for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a
machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all
his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects
only in outline, but that every word tell.
There is surely something to this, for
here is White himself describing the storm Edna in 1954, without a hair of
syntax out of place, while gently implying Maine's sense of centrality and
mild surprise that the world does not share it.
The storm grew
steadily in force, but in our neck of the woods a characteristic of
hurricanes is that they arrive from the southwest, which is where most
radio lives, and radio loses interest in Nature just as soon as Nature
passes in front of the window and goes off toward the northeast… The storm
did strike here about six hours later, with winds up to ninety miles an
hour, but when the barometer reached its lowest point and the wind shifted
into the NW and began to tear everything to pieces, what we got on the
radio was a man doing a whistling act and somebody playing the
glockenspiel. All the livelong day we had our mild weather to the
[radio's] sound of doom, and then at evening, when the power failed and
the telephone failed and the tide flooded and the gale exploded, we heard
the glockenspiel.
To this day when Wade Dow of Bridges
Point says that Jericho Bay "may kick up a bit," or his son Forrest
describes fog as "being able to see half way to Deer Isle," I think of the
enduring discrimination and fine calibration of Maine diction.
Now E.B. White was a moralist about
language. He saw it as a matter of right and wrong, perhaps overstating
because he thought he saw English disintegrating. But his message becomes
a bit dry and severe and not quite adequate.
Thus we come to a second avenue to a
grasp of the English language—and to a deeper sense of its currents and
rhythms. Here I know I'm taking a riskier road—more like Katahdin's Knife
Edge trail. We live in a multi-cultural society and an interdependent
world. We must respect other cultures and languages, but we as a nation
have always been filled with ambivalences about our own. The Founders
fought for liberty, but they fumbled slavery. We are at some level all
immigrants, and we still struggle painfully, in law and in conscience, to
come to terms with Native America.
I've come to believe, though, that if,
from ambivalence, shame or a fear of giving offense, a society becomes
ignorant of its own historic and linguistic roots and cultural treasures,
it does no one much good. Many years of working in Pakistan, and of
discussions with Muslim colleagues, have persuaded me that unless you have
some serious understanding of your own language, history and culture, it
is very difficult to think imaginatively and deeply about another culture
and its web of beliefs. I don't think this is nostalgia or linguistic
jingoism: no one explores the classic American condition of the cultural
immigrant in educated America in more achingly spare English than Jhumpa
Lahiri, a Bengali-British-American, in her novel, The Namesake.
Durable language and literature, from the
time of Homer and the oral recitations of the stories of Ulysses, have
always involved an antiphony between the local and the universal, and this
brings us once again to Maine and New England. The prose and the
linguistic discipline of E.B. White matter, but the second avenue to the
deeper layers of language leads us to the poets and novelists of New
England.
Robert Frost, not Maine but New
Hampshire, is somehow deep in some calm recess of my mind because he was
read to me at home and in school from an early age:
"Whose woods these are I think I know; His house is in the village
though
He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow."
Or the oven bird: "There is
a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird…"
Or, a corrective when I
lose perspective: "The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a
hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood
And saved some part Of a day I had rued."
Edward Arlington Robinson,
that rueful poet from Head Tide, kills my sentiment:"Miniver Cheevy,
born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed,
and called it fate, And went on drinking."
Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville, Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett: they all reinforce, and make
claims on, our collective identity. And our reservoirs of language and
meaning keep being recharged by today's Maine writers, such as Frank
Burroughs, Amy Clampitt, Anthony Walton. They all ring in the heart in a
domain different from that of clear prose, grammar and sentence structure.
Well, why has a fellow who graduated from
college 50 years ago run on like this to the graduates of the University
who face the future and will not retire until mid-century—around 2050?
Three reasons, I'd argue, for attending to language.
First: you will find it to be valuable in
your professional lives. It will also be good for the soul, from time to
time in your busy lives, to purify your prose and reconnect to the great
stream of New England language and literature that flows into the work of
other clear, resonant interpreters of our American experience—Walt
Whitman, Bob Dylan and scores of others.
Second, most of you are going to be
educators, for the bed-time stories you read to your small sons and
daughters will not only be their first invitation to language and
literature. Your readings can also lay a marker of quality and train their
ears to recognize beauty and honesty. They will soon enough be exposed to
the crudeness and violence society can offer. Peggy Noonan worries that,
"We are not giving the children of our country a stable platform…[but] a
soul-shaking sense that life is unsafe, incoherent, full of random dread."
It need not be so if you occupy their minds with stories that you choose ,
so that TV, radio, visions of violence, mayhem, abduction become not
unreal, but marginal to their view of the world.
Finally, by extension, I've argued that
to speak clearly, rejoice in articulate, witty argument, and delight in
the fresh, flexible use of English is good for the civility and the
vitality of our democracy.
Sons and daughters,
Bachelors, Masters and Doctors, of the University of Maine, go forth,
stand for the good—and write and speak well!
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