Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 5, 1999

As Flies To Wanton Boys

One of this summer's major events was the release of the new Star Wars film--Episode One: The Phantom Menace. It was like an old friend who has returned for a visit after having been away too long. We saw familiar characters like Yoda and a much younger Obi-Wan Kenobi. We met a new villain in Darth Maul. And we visited again the constant theme of the Star Wars saga, namely the struggle between good and evil, between freedom and oppression.

Virtually every one of you has seen the film, some of you several times. Although most of you hail from the Upper Midwest, the Carthage student body actually represents almost half the states and several countries. You have diverse experiences and differing perspectives on life. Yet, today, most of you are beginning your identity as a group, as the Carthage Class of 2003.

How will you communicate with each other? Each of you has your own story to tell. As unique as you are yourself. An intrinsically human, captivating story. Others could learn from you. But how can you tell your story, and who can understand? Have you ever felt frustrated by the inability of others to understand who you really are? Have you ever been frustrated by your own inability to understand who you really are?

Only by using shared reference points can any of us begin to connect with each other. Star Wars is something almost all of you have in common. Add to that: sports, television, and popular music, and there is not much left. But forget the outside world. When you look inside yourself, can you verbalize to yourself who you really are? Do you have the right words? Do you have appropriate examples, models, with whom to compare yourself?

When you were much younger, you may have had personal heroes, people you wanted to be like when you grew up. They might have been characters like Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, or Han Solo. Like our sons, you may have fought many Star Wars battles, launching raids and counter-raids on bases distributed around the house. Of course, such childish dreams are a thing of the past now. You are young adults. It is time to get real. Now is the time to acquire the skills for a good job and career. That is why you are going to college.

Or is it? What does it mean to "get real"? Are you too old to have heroes? Perhaps you are. At age 59, however, I no longer am too old to embrace my own heroes. Some I have known a long time; others I have met only recently. They come from stories I like to read and to hear. Please indulge me for a few minutes while I tell you about three of my favorite stories.

In this job, I regularly drive to the state capitol in Madison. The distance between there and Milwaukee is just right to listen to one compact disc. My favorite music for that political sojourn is a tone poem composed one hundred years ago by Richard Strauss. Its title is Don Quixote. (The disc concludes with a shorter Strauss composition called Death and Transfiguration. I sometimes wonder whether the parable was intentional: one leads a quixotic life followed by death--but then, one hopes, transfiguration.)

Most of you have heard of Don Quixote, although you may not be very familiar with him. He is the creation of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote almost 400 years ago at the beginning of the 17th century. Spain still was virtually at the height of its political and military power, thanks to the riches garnered from the native cultures of America. Moreover, the Spanish kings had a mission in which they devoutly believed. Against the enduring menace of the Islamic world, and facing the new challenge of the Protestant Reformation, they stood stalwart as the defenders of the true Catholic faith.

The young Cervantes apparently shared that idealism. By nature a reader and a writer, he volunteered as a soldier and went off to fight against the Moslem Turks. In the celebrated naval battle of Lepanto, a fever-stricken, 24-year-old Cervantes insisted on being placed at a post of gravest danger. He took three gunshot wounds, two in the chest and one that permanently maimed his left hand. After fighting more battles, Cervantes was captured by Turks on the return voyage to Spain and enslaved for five years in Algiers. He repeatedly failed in his attempts to escape, and was confined for long periods in chains until his family finally could ransom him. Back home, he endured poverty most of his life, drifting from job to job, occasionally being jailed, but more and more committed to his writing.

Such was the life of the man still regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language, and the first modern novelist in the world. His great work, Don Quixote, has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible. So the question is: what is there about the Don that makes him such a sympathetic character, such a popular portrait of humanity?

When we first meet Don Quixote, we discover an older provincial Spanish gentleman seemingly out of touch with all reality. He has read too many popular romances extolling the fantastic feats of dragon-slaying knights, and he decides that he himself must venture forth to right the wrongs of the world. Meticulous in observing every detail of the code of chivalry, the Don recruits as his squire a short, rotund, illiterate peasant named Sancho Panza who bumps along on a jackass named Dapple.

They wander the Spanish countryside lurching from misadventure to misadventure. Perhaps the most famous occurs early in the story when the Don mistakes a cluster of windmills for a group of giants. Mounting his steed Rozinante and grasping his lance, he charges a windmill, damaging it but almost killing himself. Yet, Don Quixote never has to admit to himself that he actually tilted with a windmill, or engaged in any other ridiculous exploit. He firmly believes in the powers of evil magicians to alter the appearances of the world around him. He knows he actually did fight a giant; it only looked like a windmill.

Like millions of others across the past twenty generations, love the Don because I behave so much like him. So much of life seems to be spent in absurdly impossible endeavors that subscribe only to their own logic. Yet one goes right on doing them. I also respect the Don because he knew who he was and what he stood for--and he believed that there is a moral meaning to the universe that makes the good worth defending.

In creating Don Quixote, Cervantes actually had a more limited hero in mind. He set out to destroy the pulp fiction of his day, and he did succeed in satirizing the fantastic romances of chivalry so effectively that they lost all popularity. In their place, Cervantes' wit and humor kept readers amused for hundreds of pages. Observing a student in fits of laughter while reading a book, Spain's King Philip III remarked: "That man is either crazy, or he is reading Don Quixote."

Long before the end of the book, however, the Don and even Sancho have grown far beyond Cervantes' original intent. Cervantes poured too much of his own life and wisdom into them for them to remain only laughable buffoons. It is no wonder Richard Strauss composed beautifully romantic music about Don Quixote. In our own century, the musical The Man of La Mancha extols dreaming "the impossible dream." The foibles of the Don are hardly heroic--or are they? His sheer humanity will inspire our descendants, even as they have our ancestors. In learning about him, we forge a common bond with both the past and the future.

You may not yet know much about Don Quixote, although I trust you will. You do know, however, about the Jedi Knights of Star Wars. Actually, Yoda and his compatriots share a similar code of honor with Don Quixote. The Jedi and the Don have their knighthood, their chivalry in common. The Jedi's belief in the goodness and power of "the Force" resembles the Don's own faith in a Divine Order. It is solely the reality of "the Force" that legitimizes the Jedi's existence. The Don would understand when Obi-Wan Kenobi whispers to Luke to shut off the computers, to trust his feelings, and to use "the Force."

There is a second story about men who hardly seem very heroic. Indeed, they are old, vain, and foolish, impulsive and easily deceived, unable to distinguish between people of good character and bad. Until they are utterly destroyed, they avoid all responsibility for their own mistakes. Many people suffer because of them.

In the same year that Don Quixote appeared in Spain, William Shakespeare began work on arguably his greatest accomplishment, King Lear. The play is a tragedy if ever there was one. Although most of the principal characters eventually die, the real tragedy lies in how they live. Yes, a few characters exhibit pristine quality, but the others demonstrate the worst of human conduct. Greed, deceit, betrayal, lust, torture, and murder--all are there. Few people ever repent, and then only at the last minute and very weakly.

The two foolish old men are King Lear himself and the Earl of Gloucester, who is the mirror image of Lear. Gloucester falls into betrayal by a bad son, and, in turn, betrays his good son. An educated nobleman, he ignores principle, follows anyone with power, and trims his sails according to the shifting political winds. Before long, his craftiness fails him. Gloucester's erstwhile lord grinds Gloucester's eyes out with the heel of his boot. Gloucester is cast out from his own estate and wanders the countryside, led by an old peasant who takes pity on him.

Gloucester's tragedy lies not in his physical blindness, however, but his spiritual emptiness. As he wanders, he rails:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Gloucester deals with his misfortunes by claiming, in effect, that there really is no meaning to life at all.
The gods do not even care enough about humans to be against us; on a mere whim, they amuse
themselves by torturing us.
Gloucester's empty life resembles Lear's. Failing to learn much from his sufferings, the king falls into insanity instead. Not too long before his death, Lear cries out:

When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
At the outset of the play, one of Lear's daughters, who knows everything about him, says of her father: "He hath ever but slenderly known himself." Only in the last moments of their lives do Lear and Gloucester forge some positive identity for themselves by discovering the love for others that lies within them.
The failures of Lear and Gloucester have been a horror to me ever since a college professor graphically depicted them forty-two years ago. Earlier this summer, as I was thinking about your impending arrival today and your familiarity with the themes of Star Wars, Lear and Gloucester focused my attention on
Anakin Skywalker.

In an interview with Bill Moyers this summer, George Lucas said: "...the issue is, how do we get Darth Vader back? How do we get him back to that little boy that he was in the first movie, that good person who loved and was generous and kind? Who had a good heart." The fall, wandering, redemption, and return of Anakin Skywalker is the theme that unites the entire Star Wars saga.

Even in that period of his life when Anakin gives himself over fully to the "dark side" as Darth Vader, in my opinion, he remains a far more attractive personality than Lear or Gloucester. Anakin never doubts the Force. He employs it for evil, to be sure, but he never whimpers that humans are only "flies to wanton boys." He continues to believe that there is a moral order to the universe. He has the fortitude to recognize that he himself is on the "dark side."

One final story, very briefly now. It is one many of you know about from your days in Sunday School or Bible class. Some six centuries before the birth of Jesus, King Nebuchadnezzar¦s soldiers destroyed the temple of Solomon, left Jerusalem in ruins, and brought thousands of Hebrews into exile and slavery in Babylon.

Nebuchadnezzar is one of the most fascinating characters in all of scripture. The man who had destroyed Jerusalem's holiest icon repeatedly wrestles with the possibility that the Hebrews' god just may be the right one. He grows dependent on a Hebrew prophet, Daniel, for the interpretation of his dreams. He casts three Hebrew leaders into a fiery furnace only to discover they are impervious to the flames. Finally, he loses his mind and eats grass with the oxen in the fields, until he regains his reason and puts his faith in the god of the Hebrews.

That is the kind of story from which grand operas are made. Yet the young Giuseppe Verdi resisted attempts to persuade him to compose Nabucco (shorthand for Nebuchadnezzar). Still in his twenties, Verdi had recently endured the deaths of his wife and two children, and the public¦s rejection of one of his early operatic works. Verdi wrote: "With mind tormented by domestic misfortunes, embittered by the failure of my work, I was convinced that I could find no consolation in my art and decided never to compose again."

Unwillingly, he brought the manuscript of the libretto home and threw it down. Then, Verdi writes: "The book had opened in falling on the table; without knowing how, I gazed at the page that lay before me, and read this line:

Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate (Fly, thought, on wings of gold).

"I ran through the verses that followed and was much moved, all the more because they were almost a paraphrase from the Bible."

Verdi spent the night poring over the text of the opera, and before long, he was composing the music. Members of the Carthage Choir have returned to campus early in order to help welcome you, in this convocation, to the College. In a few minutes, they will perform "Va, pensiero." It is the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, in chains, at forced labor on the banks of the Euphrates River. They remember their homeland as they sing:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold; go settle upon the slopes and the hills,
where, soft and mild, the sweet airs
of our native land smell fragrant!
Greet the banks of the Jordan
and Zion's toppled towers.
Oh, my country so lovely and lost!
Oh, remembrance so dear and so fraught with despair!
Golden harp of the prophetic seers, why dost thou hang mute upon the willow?
Rekindle our bosom's memories,
and speak of times gone by!
Mindful of the fate of Jerusalem, either give forth an air of sad lamentation,
or else let the Lord imbue us
with fortitude to bear our sufferings!

Freedom and oppression are central themes of the Star Wars saga. Those words and that music appropriately could find their way into critical moments of the films. Consider, for example, the situation at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Han Solo is frozen in carbonite. Luke has lost his hand in combat with Darth Vader. The home planet, Alderaan, has been obliterated long ago. Evil is everywhere triumphant.

The Italian public who first heard Nabucco in 1842 had similar feelings. Italy was not a unified country, but only a series of states, some of which were ruled by foreign powers. Censorship prevented open campaigns for Italian unification, but when Verdi wrote music for bygone Hebrew slaves on the banks of the Euphrates, his fellow Italians understood what he meant. Nabucco became a great anthem of the Italian risorgimento, or reawakening.

* * * * *

As an initiation into your college career, these remarks, I hope, do not seem too strange. The power of myth pervades our lives and helps us make sense of our experience. Myths provide reference points by which we can assess ourselves. Shared myths allow us to communicate with each other.

If you are to become a community among yourselves as the Carthage Class of 2003, you need a common vocabulary and storehouse of knowledge. Somewhere inside each of you lies your own unique story, far more worthy of respect than you might think. But you must first discover it yourself, and then find ways to communicate it to others.

For the purposes of this initial encounter, I have searched for something we have in common. I think I found it in Star Wars. Don Quixote, King Lear, and Nabucco probably are more foreign to most of you. Over the months and years ahead, however, they and many other stories will become much more familiar. As you learn, your capacity to reason and to communicate will grow exponentially. You will be moving toward intellectual maturity.

But, for now, let me conclude with just two simple suggestions: Never outgrow the values in Star Wars. Do understand those values in ever more profound ways.

Welcome to Carthage!