4 20 62 https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/2fb47b31fc950ed0c6333a505daa7576.pdf 6d4c33d3ddd3435aff4b3e4d0c7a5cca PDF Text Text 1     Commencement, May 21, 2016 St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM “CHANGING THE WORLD” Eva Brann, Tutor, Annapolis Parents and Relatives, Fellow Tutors and Mr. President, Board Members and, above all, Santa Fe Seniors and Graduate Institute students! Some of you will remember that radiotelephone distress signal of old: “Mayday, Mayday.” It had, alas, nothing to do with the “merry month of May.” Our seniors, who have all learned a lot of French, will recognize the call right away: “m’aidez, m’aidez!,” help me, help me! All over our continent there are the same weekend events this month: commencements and graduations. Those organizers who think of this day as a beginning for you, as launching you into a new, the so-called real world, will have the printer put “Commencement” on the program. Others will interpret this ceremony as the entering into a higher kind of being, by the bestowal of the degree (gradus in Latin) of a Bachelor of Arts, in fact, of the Liberal Arts, and for them it will be a graduation. For us, your tutors, this day also has two aspects. Yesterday we were to each other, by the custom of our college, Mr. or Ms. From today and forever after, you will be to us Joan or John, and eventually we too will be given our first name. (To be sure, I’m in fond communication with certain alumni of my first graduating class, that of 1961, who cannot bring themselves, silverhaired though we’ve grown together, to call me Eva. —Well, we’re working on it.) This first moment, this transmutation from the style of cooperative respect between tutor and student to the affectionate familiarity of mutual friendship, is always poignant to me, and I think also to the alumni in their first hour. �2     For the tutors, too, there is a beginning—the beginning of an absence. Last week in Annapolis, the seniors I’d been with in seminar commenced not being on campus—gone off into the world. I went there on Sunday to meet a fellow tutor, and we confessed to each other a sweet nostalgia—“nostalgia” because those quondam-seniors were still such vivid ghosts, “sweet” because it is the way of our college that we don’t become estranged from each other through the phases of our lives. Be you known to us as undeflectable paragons of virtue or as irremediable scamps—when we see each other again, we’ll be, so to speak, on the same page right away, some page of those great books we’ve read together, in the midst of that lifelong, uninterruptible conversation we began here. And the truth is that our post-graduate friendships don’t much depend on actually having known each other. Sad to say, I know very few of you, but who doubts that we can be in the middle of satisfyingly significant talk within minutes of having met, not least because Annapolis and Santa Fe are—what a miracle!—Siamese twins living twothousand miles apart. But back to the mayday distress call. All over the country, speakers who accepted the invitation to talk to you on this last and first day, feeling as touched and honored by it as I was, soon began to agonize (somewhat as, to compare small matters with large, seniors do about the choice of their senior essay topic) about a fit subject for this great moment—one that alumniabout-to-be, the chief addressees, will find congenial and that our honored guests can listen in on with interest—the parents or grandparents or aunts and uncles who made all this possible and the brothers and sisters and childhood friends who put up with it all.—I won’t specify what there was to put up with, but I can imagine. So we call for aid on whatever power will come. As for me, I remembered a recent conversation, actually with one of our graduate students. I’ll transcribe it from my memory, abbreviated. �3     Student: “How will my St. John’s education help me to do what I want?” Me: “And what’s that?” Student: “I want to change the world.” Me: “For the better?” Student looks totally abashed; I’m a bit abashed as well, for being a smart-aleck. But he took it well, and the ensuing conversation was illuminating to both of us. At this point I want to assure you that at a thousand schools this May speakers will be alluding to this conversation. They will bid the graduates “Go forth and change the world,” or alternatively, “Go forth and make a difference.” I say, let us have a little last-moment language tutorial. Let us, Johnnie-fashion, analyze the sentence “I want to change the world.” But no, it’s not a real class conversation because in a St. John’s class you and your tutors were committed to making the best possible sense of what the people around the table and the books on the table were saying. But I, in all candor, will try to show that “I want to make a difference, I want to change the world” aren’t very sensible sentences. So here goes. This announcement has three parts: first, I want; second, to change; third, the world. So, first, “I want.” “I want” is about me, and if what I want is to be a “difference-maker,” it’s about my self-satisfaction. Recall yourselves as Juniors, when you struggled with Kant on morality. No one expected you to get it all. (In fact, there are some books we ask you to read largely so that you can reread them later in life, on the logical hypothesis that you just can’t read them for the second time unless you’ve read them for a first time.) As regards Kant, this much may have stuck: He thinks that doing right is not doing what you want but what you ought, and that, in fact, the only proof of your doing as you ought is that it hurts some, that your mere wanting is thwarted. So when it’s the world I’m planning to change, maybe “I want” should yield a little to “I should.” �4     Second, “change.” Why exactly “change”? There are many others modes of action besides this current mantra. There’s protecting and maintaining, activating and fulfilling, restoring and reviewing. Talk of mere change is just terminally vague babble—vague promise and vague threat. Its antidote is specific thinking expressed in adequate language. That very requirement, thoughtfulness and its articulation, was an explicit aim of the Program, to which you devoted the last four years. Third comes “the world.” It’s a big space in which to thrash about. In choosing it as the venue of my action, I’ve pretty much committed myself to the silliest of all maxims of action— another current mantra. It goes: Only if x happens, can y occur. Filling in the most common variables for this formula: “Only if the world changes radically, can little kids learn to love reading,” in other words, never—guaranteed. The implied lesson is: Forget about “the world”— stay local and avoid stymieing preconditions. And now the usually missing fourth part to the saying “I want to change the world,” namely, “for the better.” Your four years with us were, I think, above all intended to give you a head start in answering for yourself the most crucial of human questions: What is good? For making anything better without a view of good seems to me just groping in the murk of possibility. So, you’ll recognize two of the ways that the Program and the College were meant to help you with making the here better now. One was that we, students and tutors together, read remarkable books by unusually gifted authors, books that offered us various, often contrary models of the good life and its conditions. You may often have thought that our, the tutors’, intention was to throw you into a permanent muddle. But, of course, the opposite was our hope: It was that you would find in your reading the elements of your own firm view of what is good �5     universally and therefore what is better in particular. This crystallization is surely still in process for many of you. But my experience of six decades of alumni tells me that it does happen, perhaps over the next score of years. Much more will go into it than what you learned here, but that learning will, so alumni often say, be the informing reference of your experience. That ability to specify the universal is the second of the two ways our Program readied you for great deeds. Now, in the spirit of that specificity, I owe you an example of what I think of as actual action, local in worldly coordinates but grand in human scope. Most of you will, I’d guess, work in an office at some point. Proper offices have watercoolers, Xerox-rooms, galleys with hot-plates. People spend as much time there as they dare. So post a note: “Would you be interested in reading some poetry together during lunch hour? I propose Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning.’ Copies are on the counter. Let’s meet next Wednesday in Room 666. Bring your lunch, I’ll bring cookies. Expertise inessential. Signed…” If no one turns up, which is unlikely, keep trying. Something will come to pass. Incidentally, don’t you eat yourself all the cookies (which are essential). Before I finish and let our seniors receive their degrees, I need to say that what I’ve done here isn’t quite right: I’ve told you what’s what and you’ve sat silent, except perhaps for an occasional guffaw. All my points were left unquestioned—deep metaphysical maxims such as cookies being essential to meetings and expertise inessential to poetry, and large practical claims, such as local happenings having more actuality than global commotions—Don’t let it happen to you very often, though these occasional one-way ritual performances are also necessary to human life. �6     So then: I wish you a life of genuine action and of actual happening, a life of as much happiness as you know what to do with—and a bit more. Go forth, find a place you can love, and help to make it “what it was always meant to be.”* Go forth and change the world—for the better. Thank you.                                                                                                                         *  To ti en einai, “essence.” Aristotle, Metaphysics. (I bet that no other graduation speech in this country sported a footnote, least of all to Aristotle.) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Commencement Programs and Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Text A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Page numeration Number of pages in the original item. 6 pages Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Commencement Address, Spring 2016 Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-05-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource text Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource pdf Relation A related resource <a title="Audio recording" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/498">Audio recording</a> Language A language of the resource English Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Santa_Fe_Commencement_2016_Eva_Brann_Speech Description An account of the resource Typescript of the commencement address given on May 21, 2016 by Eva Brann at the end of the Spring 2016 semester in Santa Fe, NM. Commencement Deans Tutors https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/6998381ef7d5480a664240c7c66d952c.mp3 89338496e3a2b9a9042764c1d6c5293d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Commencement Programs and Addresses Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource St. John's College Meem Library Sound A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data digital Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 00:21:12 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Santa Fe Commencement Address, Spring 2016 Description An account of the resource Audio recording of the commencement address given on May 21, 2016 by Eva Brann at the end of the Spring 2016 semester in Santa Fe, NM. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brann, Eva T. H. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available St. John's College Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Santa Fe, NM Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2016-05-21 Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource St. John's College has been given permission to make this item available online. Type The nature or genre of the resource sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource mp3 Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context lec Brann 2016 Santa Fe Commencement Speech Relation A related resource <a title="Typescript" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/show/536">Typescript</a> Language A language of the resource English Commencement Deans Santa Fe