Office of the President

New Student Convocation — September 1, 2002

Sonnets and Sonatas

Members of the Class of 2006. Is it possible for us to have a serious conversation? What can we talk about together? What common vocabulary do we share?

There is much in your world about which I have no clue — popular music is just one example. If you tried to discuss a band or a performer with me, you quickly might give up in frustration. I simply do not have the requisite knowledge to be able to talk intelligently with you. On the other hand, my world stretches across many more years than yours, and you would be unable to compare memories with me.

This convocation is being held in your honor. You are entering an intellectual community, and we choose this academic tradition as a unique way of bidding you welcome. This speech provides me a brief but rare opportunity to share something of substance with you. But how do I start? Where is our common ground?

Two years ago, I found the answer in the film Gladiator; last year, in the recent exploits of climbers on Mt. Everest. Those were topics about which virtually everyone knew. This year more than ever before, and very sadly, we all share a recent experience we remember in excruciating detail. Just ten days away looms the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Throughout your lives, September 11 will mark a "day of infamy," just as surely as the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor did for your grandparents.

A good college education involves two primary tasks: asking questions and building vocabulary. The art of learning involves relating something new to something we already know. So, let us begin with the vocabulary we already share, and let me pose a few questions to you about September 11. Were this a classroom discussion, I would insist on hearing your answers and knowing what you yourself think — each one of you there — no one could avoid my probing.

First question. Virtually all the hijackers on those four airplanes were young men close in age to you. You may be able to get into their minds much better than I. What do you think they were thinking? What, in your opinion, accounts for their actions?

We do know certain facts about them. For example, realizing their deaths were imminent, some of those young men studied special devotional texts, especially written to steel their resolve in the days leading up to their sacrifice. Apparently, their leaders had some concerns, because those texts instructed the young men to shut out any natural feelings of human sympathy for those passengers whose frightened faces they would look upon, as they flew toward their targets. Did those young men, with decades of life before them, like you, have to overcome a desire to keep on living? Did they share normal human emotions, including pity for the unfortunate? If so, what compelled them to do what they did?

Were they committed to a holy war? If so, what was their vision for a more perfect world, and why was it so important to wrack destruction on us? What makes us so evil? They themselves did not grow up victims of poverty, and they personally were fully capable of prospering in a modern economy. Why did they seek to destroy a world in which they could have succeeded? Did they hate, did they love, did they do neither or both?

Perhaps, they were just all mixed up. Perhaps, their thoughts were just a random collection of someone else's teachings. Perhaps, they were too vulnerable to the influences upon them.

Well, if that rings true to you, let me ask you about your own thoughts. Have you, personally and independently, analyzed and determined your own principles and values? Do you make any ongoing effort to do so? Or, might it just be that you also are all mixed up? The bin Ladens of the world come in many shapes and sizes. In our country, few of them wear robes and beards, but many of them are super manipulators of other peoples' opinions. How vulnerable are you to your own bin Laden?

What do you think? What are your reasons? Do your thoughts make sense?

Second question. When television flashed the collapse of the twin towers around the world, thousands, perhaps millions, of people in the Middle East and elsewhere celebrated and rejoiced. Why did that sight give them so much pleasure? How much do they understand about America or the modern world? How do they think we have affected their lives? Do they have any justification for their apparent hatred of us?

There is a universal human inclination to blame others for our own frustrations, rather than to buckle down and take effective action to improve our own lot. You and I exhibit that tendency every day of our lives. Dubbing ourselves victims absolves us of responsibility to help ourselves. Is that their problem in the Middle East?

Or, should American policymakers follow the advice of an Arab expert at a foreign policy conference in New York City earlier this summer? Within two or three miles of the collapsed twin towers, he said: "Extend your concern for human rights from Americans to include people in the Middle East, as well." He was arguing for changes of regimes in the Arab states, suggesting that terrorism is a product of political frustration within Arab societies, and he wanted American help to establish new governments.

Well, if these times are out of joint, are we Americans born to set them right? Have not those societies always allowed the strong to do what they will, while the weak suffer what they must? Must we be our brothers? keepers all around the world? What are the limits of our power? How quickly would Afghans, Arabs, or Filipinos tire of our intervention? Are our principles of political and social organization best for everyone else, as well?

On the other hand, should we ignore distress in other parts of the world, until it affects us directly here at home? Should we then act only to quell the immediate threat to ourselves, or should we seek to correct basic, longer-term problems abroad? Which policies will protect best our own homeland security?

What do you think? What are your reasons? Do your thoughts make sense?

* * * * * *

These questions may seem a little heavy on a day like this. Many of you were busy with your unpacking, which you were forced to interrupt in order to be here. A picnic — by definition, a light-hearted and convivial affair — follows. Within a few hours, many of you will be saying "good-bye" to parents and other family members. You are just starting to adjust to new people in a new place. All kinds of emotional cross-currents are flowing through this day. Could not these questions of mine await a more convenient occasion?

Well, yes — but how would you know why you are here? How would you learn of the most important things Carthage can do for you? My questions are meant to provoke your self-examination. They are meant to encourage your thoughtful analysis of the world in which you live. Your personal definition of yourself as an individual human being, your personal definition of yourself as a citizen in society — what can be more important than that?

People who are thinking, learning, and growing never give final answers to those questions. Their quest for definition continues throughout their lives. But the sooner they take up that quest, the sooner they become sovereign, strong, independent human beings. True education requires you to become a thinker.

* * * * * *

A prerequisite for thinking is a vocabulary of words and ideas. I began this speech by asking what you and I can talk about together, and suggested that our common memories of 9-11 provide a starting point. We need to share much more than 9-11, however, if we are truly to communicate with each other.

Emblazoned on the new banners around campus, installed last week to welcome you today, is the phrase "Great Ideas." There are many stupid ideas in this world; there are a few great ones. As you become independent thinkers, you increasingly will discriminate between good and bad ideas. The process of assimilating the insights of some of humanity's great thinkers will augment your confidence in the power of your own mind.

The dedication in one of my favorite collections of short stories reads as follows:

The annals of former generations are lessons to the living: a man may look back upon the fortunes of his predecessors and be admonished; and contemplate the history of past ages and be purged of folly. Glory to Him who has made the heritage of antiquity a guide for our own time!
I can think of no more succinct argument for the serious study of ideas and human experience. Let me read you the rest of that introduction:

In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful.
Praise be to Allah Lord of the Creation, and blessing and peace eternal upon the Prince of Apostles, our master Mohammed.
. . . .
From this heritage are derived the Tales of the Thousand and One Nights, together with all that is in them of fable and adventure.
So begins this collection of popular stories spanning several hundred years of Islamic culture. Fanciful, sometimes bawdy, featuring characters like Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin with his enchanted lamp, the Thousand and One Nights opens doors for us if our own minds can respond. We can move into the minds of the people who told and listened to those stories, and still read them today, and we can discover human beings very much like ourselves.
Great ideas do not emanate from only one culture or age of history. By definition, they are the products of the deepest and most universal yearnings of human beings. For me, the greatest heroes are those who have expressed their humanity most profoundly and movingly. Let me allude to just two of my own heroes.

In the seventeenth century, John Milton harbored a dream of creating in English an epic poem comparable to Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, or Dante's Divine Comedy. He lived an active life, teaching, writing poetry and political tracts, getting involved in the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell's government. Gradually, Milton lost his eyesight, but he never lost his dream "to leave something so written to aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die." Only in his later years was he able to undertake the composition of Paradise Lost, his story of the fall of Lucifer. Milton worked at night, memorizing the lines of poetry as he composed them in his mind, and dictating them the next morning. The result was the greatest epic poem in the English language.

More approachable, more personal are his sonnets. In one sonnet, he wrote passionately about a dream he had of his dead wife. He had married her after he was already blind, and he never had seen her face.

. . . yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! As to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.
In his best-known sonnet, On His Blindness, Milton cried out: "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?" After calming himself with thoughts of God's omnipotence, however, he concluded the poem with his most famous line: "They also serve who only stand and wait." I often repeat those words to myself when I cannot compel, cannot control some situation.
My second hero mastered the universal language of music. For most of his adult life, Ludwig van Beethoven struggled with mounting deafness. It reached the point that he would put his ear to the piano to pick up the vibrations from the wood, as he worked on his compositions. Beethoven conducted the premier of his last, great Ninth Symphony when he no longer could hear the music the orchestra was playing. At the conclusion, he was unaware of the ovation that erupted, until one of the performers motioned for him to turn around and face the audience. To this day, in annual surveys, Americans still select the Ninth Symphony as their favorite piece of classical music.

A deaf Beethoven composing a monumental symphony, a blind Milton creating a powerful epic, such men are my heroes. The symphony and the epic are awe-inspiring, yet, as in Milton's sonnets, the more modest sonata most transparently reveals Beethoven as a person. In his day, the piano sonata was the primary form of chamber music, and Beethoven's interpretations at the piano could move an audience to tears. If you listen to his Moonlight Sonata or the Appassionata, Beethoven will emerge as alive today as when he composed them two hundred years ago.

* * * * * *

In 1945, a renowned German historian surveyed the rubble to which his country had been reduced. As an old man, he asked the questions plaguing all his countrymen: "Is it possible for us to recover? If so, how?" In response, Friedrich Meinecke developed no political agenda or economic strategy. He proposed, instead, the founding of "Goethe Societies" all across the country. Named for the greatest of German poets, those societies would consist of ordinary Germans meeting in churches on Sunday afternoons, reading great German poetry and listening to great German music. Meinecke understood that recovery from war, most fundamentally, is a spiritual journey.

I believe those young men who commandeered those airplanes last September would have acted differently, had they appreciated John Milton, Ludwig van Beethoven, or many others who have left us great ideas. Broader vision and deeper understanding mute the impulse to destroy, and encourage practical and positive attempts to solve the problems we face.

Likewise, your growing knowledge of your own cultural heritage, and your familiarity with such stories as the Thousand and One Nights, will change the way you see the world.

Within this speech have been allusions to the Bible, Thucydides, Shakespeare, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. To the degree you recognized those ideas, to that degree you had a fuller understanding of my remarks.

Your intellectual task here at Carthage is twofold. You are meant to hone a sharply reasoning, highly analytical mind. Your strength as an independent thinker will reinforce your individual freedom, and enhance both your competitiveness and your value in the world around you. Simultaneously, you are meant to build your vocabulary, to learn new and great ideas, and to develop an expertise in your own field of study. You will become wiser, as a result.

The deed has been done. In your minds, you always will carry that image of the fireball bursting forth from the twin tower, of people hurtling out of windows ninety stories to the pavement below, of the crumbling of massive buildings. You must have the strength to look straight at such scenes, and to deal coolly and analytically with the challenges they pose.

You also need the affirmation offered by the sonnets and the sonatas. Superimpose the poetry and the music, all the great ideas you learn, onto that fireball — and be inspired by the goodness, truth, and beauty humans can discover and express. Yours will be a healthy and useful life.

Welcome to Carthage!