Top Commencement Week

I have been an intermittent teacher all my life and when, as this year, I return to a university community. I find myself continually drawing comparisons, not comparisons between institutions but comparisons between something far more striking and instructive, comparisons between attitudes, tacit assumptions, the thought-world of students that I have known throughout the decades of my teachings: attitudes that we held in 1917, 1918, 1919 and 1930, attitudes that my students in the University of Chicago held in the '30s, and the attitudes which I see in the students around me this year. What a difference! What a difference!

Now the students today have been told sufficiently that they are living in an age which has variously been called...the Age of Upheaval and the Age of Anxiety...Current graduates have spent their lives then in our view in stormy or in threatening weather. They never knew, as we who were born about the turn of the century, that evenly-running world to which one of our Presidents gave the name of Normalcy.

Adapt to Conditions

When I go about my occupation of drawing comparisons, I become aware that those who live in troubled weather build or discover resources that we in 1920 felt no need to call upon. Like species among the order of the animal kingdom, they developed adaptations. These resources, of course, are not of their manufacture but they find what they need from the currents of thought and literature that are about us all, and it is how they assimilate it that is interesting to me.

I am talking about tacit assumption, basic attitudes of so deep a level that they themselves are often not aware. But what they are aware of is that many of the concepts to which we older persons clung are to them irrelevant, irrelevant and irritating.

The 20th century is shifting its foundations and it is altering its emphases with striking rapidity. The scientists and the poets and the writers have described this new mentality which is moving into place...

Attentive to Modern Men

I teach literature. I teach the consecrated classics but I am attentive also to the masters of modern literature and if I were not so my students would have waked me up to them. About five years ago a professor who was a friend of mine in a university far from here once said to me, "You know, when a student in my classes has written a brilliant paper on the 'Scarlet Letter' or on 'Tom Jones,' I invite him into my office to compliment him and to make his acquaintance, and we talk for a while.

Often, too often, the young man or woman on leaving my office turns and says to me, 'Well, Professor X, of course, we like these books we read for you, but what we are really interested in is T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound.'"

And the professor said to me, 'Now, what's the matter? I spent my life studying great literature. These books are purportedly in the English language, yet I cannot read five pages of them with any pleasure, to say nothing of intelligibly. I have no choice but to think that my most gifted students are either hypocrites, imitative snobs, or else just incult barbarians who don't know beauty and clarity when they see it."

Gulf Between Generations

Well, that is the gulf between the generations and it is up to us to be very attentive to it. Now, freshmen and sophomores stop me on the street and visit me in my rooms to ask me about these very writers. And that shows us that these writers are fulfilling a profound need for those who live in stormy weather. And I find three tacit assumptions within their work that are reflected in the best young 20th century minds, assumptions that he could not have grasped in 1920.

First, the young person today in the light of science sees himself not as one of many hundred thousands, not as one of many millions, but as one of billions. Secondly, a whole new tacit assumption in relation to responsibility. And, thirdly, a realization that the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things that they have in common.

Now, the multiplicity of the human creation. Kierkegaarde, the great Dane, the greatest of the Danes, wrote in his journal in 1844 that he had an anthropologist tell him that $4 billion men and women were living or had lived and died, men and women above the level of the aborigine. He put it in his journal and his reflection follows: "I carried that to an anthropologist friend of mine and he said. 'How childish! How childish! Three and four times that many fully responsible human beings have lived and died.'"

Learned to Count

Now it is a matter of fact that we have learned to count. Anybody can make figures, but since archaeologists, historians, scientists, physicists have poured numerals and numerals across us, this generation does not theoretically think in large numbers. The power of the mind to grasp ever larger quantities of units is a thing which the young have and we in middle age still do not have and really cannot have to the same degree. And one thing that follows from that is that they realize this mutipliciy of the souls that have lived and the presumable billions and billions yet to live and die.

Now I see that we of the 20th century, of the Class of 1920, were appallingly provincial and parochial. We were one of lots of other people, and that lots was a vague term with no resonance of any kind.

French literature is a very glorious and splendid treasury, but really it is about 60 million Frenchmen, isn't it? The masters of modern literature are engaged in describing multitudinous man, and at once we see a violent shift of values taking place. In one sense the individual shrinks in this vast chousing and in another sense his assertion of his validity takes on a new urgency and seeks a new authority.

A New Kind of Anxiety

When we now say, "I love," "I believe," "I suffer," or "I mean to be a success," and hear it fall into the human universe of billions, it is, of course, threatened with absurdity. And yet the young know this to the very marrow of their bones in a way we did not used to know it. It arouses anxiety when one feels one is only one example among so many, but it is a new kind of anxiety.

It is a metaphysical unease; it is not a nervousness. And it drives them to find a new basis for their individual assertion. And can't you see how easily bored they would be with many consolations which we older ones found sustaining? No wonder that Shelley is unfashionable to them and Carlyle unreadable. They are full of this kind of assertion and the assertion to them is on the wrong ground.

The second tacit assumption is this matter of responsibility. The young of today are not haunted by the notion of a Golden Age. We who were born about 1900 remember that span of security. We who lived through the late '20s and early '30s, the liberal movements, were filled with a notion that if we strained and strained and strained we would pretty soon usher in a Utopia. These young have not that impatience. They have not that regret. It is not a matter of disillusion nor does it mean that they are indifferent to social betterment.

It is that for them it is self-evident that human beings contain large elements of cruelty and of ignorance, themselves included. Think what they have lived through and think what they have not lived through! We in the '20s would never quite have grasped that. We mistook our good intentions of Christian civilization for irreversible achievement.

Alive to Complexity

Now the modern student is all alive to the complexity of man in himself and others. He is profoundly interested not only in good but in evil, and he assumes that life is difficult, morally difficult.

In the '20s we used to talk about our expectation of happiness. You can't imagine how seldom you hear the word "happiness" today, except colored by derision, and with this has come a whole shift in the concept of responsibility. His last responsibility is to himself and not to systems. He is engaged in responsibly exploring himself as we never were...

Thirdly, science has made one more contribution to the 20th century thought-world. It has broken down the barriers between race and color and environment and cultural background. To the great surgeon with the patient on the operating table it is of secondary importance whether it is a cousin of his wife or the sister of an Oriental potentate or the derelict found by the police the night before.

A Matter of Indifference

To the engineer in telegraphy it is a matter of indifference who sends that cable which goes half about the world in a few seconds. To the historian of culture, the myths of the creation of the Eskimos or the Tahitians are now side by side with those of the Book of Genesis.

Those things which all men hold in common are beginning to outweigh enormously those things which separate them. That was not new to Goethe or Pascal or Burke; but in this sense it is astonishingly new to many of my own generation. My young friends in Cambridge have shown me over and over again that to them it is as simple as breathing that all societies are but variants of one another, that somehow all wars from now on are civil wars and the human adventure is much the same in all times and all places.

Now, my friends, it is disturbing to have lost the feeling of belonging to one reassuring community, to New England or the United States, or to Western civilization, to be sustained and supported by one of these localizations. But they are gone, they are going and they are gone in that sense of being a psychic nest, and the scientist and poet took them away.

One Expression of One Life

Yes, when T.S. Eliot juxtaposes a line from Dante with a cry from the Sanskrit epic poems, it annoys my friend, Professor X. But the students understand very well that what he means is that all literature is one expression of one human life experience. And when James Joyce plays upon 24 languages as upon a clavier they don't find it preposterous. All the languages in the world are but local differentiation's of one planetary tongue. These concepts are very full of something frightening but they are also full of promise.

Oh, it is a lonely and alarming business to feel one's self one in the creation of billions and billions, and especially lonely if your parents seem never to have felt that sensation at all, but is exciting and inspiriting to be among the first to hall and accept the only fraternal community that finally can be valid,--that emerging, painfully emerging unity of those who live on the one inhabited star.