A Letter From a Graduating Senior

It is February, exam period, and we (my schoolmates and I) are sitting behind the austere desks of Widener Library, studying. The silence is stunning. What if someone grew excited about his work, and spoke out loudly? But we are here to read, to transfer the contents of various books to our various minds: an African studies Shakespeare, a Jew is learning Greek, a bearded old man scans John Updike's latest novel; I, whose ancestors migrated to Indiana during the Civil War, am reading American Colonial history.

I am sitting here, on ground cleared by dedicated Calvinists in a library that was built because a large boat, the Titanic, happened to sink, reading of how English peasants who had journeyed to a new land are being oppressed by the Virginia aristocracy. They have written a letter of protest, nearly illiterate, signed by "one who has been in arms against the government" and another who "has been very busy in these times."

What were my ancestors doing in 1677, back there in Germany? Who are we, here at Harvard College in 1963, the vessels of countless traditions each of us now absorbing curious sequences of unrelated facts which will help to determine what we and our children shall become? The library is silent. The silence is summering. There is so much we shall never learn.

The Evolution of Harvard

"On this rock you shall build your church." On this rocky soil some dissatisfied Englishmen built a new land. "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people upon us." Soon after clearing the land they founded a college, on a strip of ground one-eighth of a mile long. The college was designed to train prospective ministers, who would mediate between these dedicated men and their vengeful, austere God.

But truth speaks in many tongues, divulging a new language to each age. Soon men no longer stood in such anguished need of learned interpretation of the Divine. Harvard College began to educate merchants, doctors, lawyers; more land was cleared, more buildings erected. Books were sent from England, and when the library that housed them burned, still more books were sent, opening up new possibilities for thought. Harvard graduates became revolutionaries. The College had helped to inspire a war and afterwards it began to train Americans.

Its founders had shriveled to remote memories, soon to become the authors only of strange words describing an incomprehensible subject, to be found on the pages of musty vellum books that were rarely read; and then on the pages of fresh new paperbacks, assigned to most freshmen. They had shriveled to names, rarely identified, of the new eleven-story building on the Charles, of the hall in which one studied mathematics, of the theatre where one could see the latest festival of Bogart films. They had shriveled to rectangular pieces of cement, embossed upon red brick walls, to be ignored or glanced at by modern young men, 4,200 at a time, whose ancestors had been subsisting in the corners of Europe while the land for the College was cleared.

William Bradford

"On this tract you shall build your church" (on this library you shall build your college). "After they had injoyed faire winds and weather for a season," wrote Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower's first crossing to New England, "they were incountered many times with corsse winds, and mett with many fierce storms, with which the ship was shroudly shaken, and her upper works made very leakie....So some of the cheafe of the company, perceiving the mariners to feare the suffisiencie of the ship, as appeared by their mutterings, they entered into consultation with their masters and other officers of the ship, to consider in time of danger....[whether] to return [or] cast themselves into a desperate and inevitable perill..."

The Mayflower landed in Plymouth in 1620. In 1914 another boat set out from England to America, this time facing no certain peril but promising pleasure, and it carried some Harvard graduates. When the Titanic hit an iceberg the news was quickly relayed home and filtered through the kitchens of the wealthy to the lower-class quarters in almost every American city. The news was large and radiant with symbolism, and it inspired a ballad:

And the rich refused to associate with the poor

So they put them down below Where they were the first to go It was sad when that great ship went down.

The news of the ship's sinking was relayed to New York, where a family whose son had graduated splendidly from Harvard College wept for days and then was persuaded to do something to commemorate his brief passage. "On Widener Library you shall maintain your University." The silence there is stunning. The African studies his Shakespeare. The Jew goes on with his Greek. Shall we ever learn what we need to know?

* * *

Harvard College is presently designed to inform our common sense, and give us the means by which we can render large masses of complex information comprehensible to ourselves and our community. Our Calvinist forbears, the intended ministers, were expected to interpret for their congregations a God whose universe was governed by established laws; the world the present Harvard undergraduate shall enter is somewhat more complicated. Consequently our common sense--the basis on which we judge things--takes a good deal of time to develop.

We do not work eight hours a day. Few undergraduates spend more than 20 hours each week preparing their lessons, and that leaves them much time to think about other things. Since they are not confronted with financial or professional pressures, they can spend time wondering about themselves. They exist in a community of intellectual superiors; upperclassmen, professors, men who have written good books; and they begin to wonder whether there is anything they can possibly achieve. Their questions grow increasingly insistent as they progress towards graduation and the choice of a career. Some people are temporarily paralyzed by the discordance they sense between themselves and the community around them. If they cannot amass all the available information, are they capable of learning anything?

A Retreat

Harvard, which exposes its undergraduates to ceaseless complexities, also provides them with unlimited freedom of retreat. Within this large community, anyone can associate himself with a group of like-minded friends, and comfortably ignore experiences which might radically challenge him. If the CRIMSON editor, a clubbie, or a Tocsin member does not grow very much in wisdom by remaining inside his chosen organization, he at least avoids the risk of altogether losing himself.

There is no senior here who has not submerged some of the questions that disturbed him in freshman and sophomore year. Some things, whether they are academic or personal, one shall never learn; nor, a senior realizes, should one attempt to absorb all of life in a few years. But some of us have been frightened into submission. As a freshman one is shocked when he encounters classmates who can discuss Rousseau's Social Contract, or Ulysses, or Freudian theory, with absolute fluency. One constructs long summer reading lists, or projects complex plans of study, which are never completed. By the middle of sophomore year one has grown desperate over the amount of reading one must still do in order to become a fit candidate for a Harvard education. One buys book after-book, and after hastily trying to master them fears that he has absorbed nothing. He difficult to realize that one must grow in common sense before one can grow in knowledge.

Submit to Ignorance

By junior year we often submit to our ignorance, ruling out of our possible education books we cannot understand and accepting as truths the cliches of the classroom or the text-books. We are likely to avoid difficult intellectual questions, for to think about them honestly might be to change our conception of ourselves, our potentialities, our futures. We are nearly self-assured but beneath pose often lies the feat of confronting new information.

Our style of arguing, so frightening to freshmen and sophomores, proceeds by assertion and by reference to obscure, half-absorbed ideas. We cease to listen carefully to other people, fearing that our painfully developed sense of our own correctness might gradually begin to erode.

With each year we increase our investment in a certain set of assumptions, which we call our truths. For a time, late at night, we continue to question ourselves, and Wonder if we have grown old too soon. But even this process involves a certain risk, and some of our inner voice are quickly silenced.

Is this maturity? A man must undoubtedly deny himself certain possibilities, of experience and knowledge, but where does he draw the line? A senior chooses a career that would have revolted him as a freshman: has he gained judgment or lost self-respect, No one can think himself a giant after four years of Harvard College, but are the choices to which our seasoned opinions lead --of friends, of politics, of careers-- the measure of increased wisdom or of defeat?

Yet it is not all so bleak. Most people gain some common sense and information in the process of surviving Harvard College, With each flaw he finds in himself, and with the strength he derives from unexpected sources, the undergraduate gains a kind of tolerance. He finds books and ideas, once opaque, that have managed to fortify him, and these are treasured. Certain experiences and people yield him greater pleasure as he comprehends more of what lies behind them.

Soon we shall graduate. Commencement, as the ceremony is called, means beginning, and one enters the world nearly naked, knowing far less than one ought. But graduation seems more like death than birth, for it is a time of summing up, of departing into the unknown. It is the death of close friendships which may be be recalled but shall never be restored; it is the limiting of possibilities, the narrowing of hope. Of all the futures that once appeared open, we must now choose one.

During four years at Harvard College one fights many fights, and there is no way of determining victory. Yet in the last days before graduation one has the terrible sense of something irretrievably lost. Is it one's youth, or one's self

Submit to Ignorance

By junior year we often submit to our ignorance, ruling out of our possible education books we cannot understand and accepting as truths the cliches of the classroom or the text-books. We are likely to avoid difficult intellectual questions, for to think about them honestly might be to change our conception of ourselves, our potentialities, our futures. We are nearly self-assured but beneath pose often lies the feat of confronting new information.

Our style of arguing, so frightening to freshmen and sophomores, proceeds by assertion and by reference to obscure, half-absorbed ideas. We cease to listen carefully to other people, fearing that our painfully developed sense of our own correctness might gradually begin to erode.

With each year we increase our investment in a certain set of assumptions, which we call our truths. For a time, late at night, we continue to question ourselves, and Wonder if we have grown old too soon. But even this process involves a certain risk, and some of our inner voice are quickly silenced.

Is this maturity? A man must undoubtedly deny himself certain possibilities, of experience and knowledge, but where does he draw the line? A senior chooses a career that would have revolted him as a freshman: has he gained judgment or lost self-respect, No one can think himself a giant after four years of Harvard College, but are the choices to which our seasoned opinions lead --of friends, of politics, of careers-- the measure of increased wisdom or of defeat?

Yet it is not all so bleak. Most people gain some common sense and information in the process of surviving Harvard College, With each flaw he finds in himself, and with the strength he derives from unexpected sources, the undergraduate gains a kind of tolerance. He finds books and ideas, once opaque, that have managed to fortify him, and these are treasured. Certain experiences and people yield him greater pleasure as he comprehends more of what lies behind them.

Soon we shall graduate. Commencement, as the ceremony is called, means beginning, and one enters the world nearly naked, knowing far less than one ought. But graduation seems more like death than birth, for it is a time of summing up, of departing into the unknown. It is the death of close friendships which may be be recalled but shall never be restored; it is the limiting of possibilities, the narrowing of hope. Of all the futures that once appeared open, we must now choose one.

During four years at Harvard College one fights many fights, and there is no way of determining victory. Yet in the last days before graduation one has the terrible sense of something irretrievably lost. Is it one's youth, or one's self