This semester, we have progressed from the Profile to the Review to the Report to the Argument.
In the Profile, I hope you captured that most basic sense of what inspires you in this world, although those ideas may be basic, and may be mimicked from the popular media and the pop psychology to which you have thus far been exposed.
In the Review, I hope you began to examine those inspirations in order that you may uncover the truths behind what is “good” and “bad” in art, in music, in writing, and in the entertainments, productions, and drudgeries of our human existence, discovering not only technical machinations but the value of the mind, which can function as magically as can the heart, as powerfully as can the soul.
In the Report, I hope you thrust yourself, however tentatively, however carelessly, into deeper caverns of critical thinking than you had hitherto explored. I hope you learned to place a certain measure of faith and a certain measure of skepticism in the “experts,” the minds which have become authorities simply for their practice and repeated exposure to subjects and thoughts. These scholars map the way for you the way the family chef passes on secret ingredients or a bricklayer teaches an apprentice the trick to building a better wall.
Finally, in the Argument, I hope you began what will become a life-long exercise of what is commonly known as “learning”—a piecing together of Fact and Idea. This kind of learning puts you in a powerful role, one in which you make, for yourself and sometimes for others as well, meaning. You construct some meaning out of, or else resolve the meaninglessness of, life’s competing forces: what we know within ourselves, what we know from others, and what we deduce from the crosshairs of their meeting. Casually, catastrophically, or some combination of the two, each experience makes the net beneath you a bit stronger.
If this journey meant any of the above for you, or if it meant a new kind of conversation among classmates--those whom you loved, those whom you hated, and those whom you grew to respect--I encourage you to reflect. Whether it’s a flicker of a memory of a stolen conversation, or a laborious study of a paragraph of your own construction, reflect on who you were, who you are, and who you hope to be. More importantly, I encourage you to congratulate yourself—not on a course completed or a task well done, but on an experience lived, for it was never me prying the hands from your eyes. This you have done, and this, if you so choose, you can continue to do.
I’ll leave you with my favorite quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “American Scholar”:
Meek young men [and women, I would add!] grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
If nothing else, my dear students, please remember that your ideas matter (if only you can figure out what they are), and that perhaps the best way of expressing your ideas, the best way of getting others to listen to them, and the best way to preserve them for posterity, is through the written word!
Go now! Write! Think! Create!
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