A Letter of Advice to New Graduates

Dear Phillipe and Bela:

Today as I sit in the Kirkland House, yard on graduation eve at Harvard I have your questions to ponder: Where is the achievement? What is the Point?

Achievement can make ambition go sour, unless you have a string of hopes you cannot exhaust. Necessarily such a long string of hopes involves other people. Do a good or great deed; sit down and shut up for a year or decade; then do another.

The sourness is ambition's aftertaste, always, and only achievements born of aspiration (for all) rather than ambition (of one person for himself) seem to bypass this strange cost. The achievements of aspiration, which I wish for you, have their own strange aftertaste, their own costs, for aspiration continues the chain of life that ambition constantly nibbles at.

Education is meant to do an impossible thing, to provide a mortal creature with a sense of the infinite. By so doing it would innoculate students against their limitations while fitting them to those limitations. This is one reason a Harvard education has taken me so long to get used to, and my Harvard education is why I am still not used to being human.

The Vietnam War curdled my life in a way that I have yet to fathom. For you, it was 30-odd pages in a textbook in prep school. For me, it was a comprehensive examination of where I stood on my humanity, a sixth final exam, if you will, that comprised all the others and was given in the form of surprise spot quizzes every day of my life.

No one who wasn't there can imagine waking up to that war every day in an environment already microscopically compressed.

My string of hopes started with the despair I felt of that war and ran the gamut of existence form women's issues, racial issues and the preservation of a habitable planet to the technical ontological and theological questions in which I believed I would find answers to everything else. To protect and extend the chain.

Generally speaking, the question of life was a question of striking a balance within the power of the many claims the world made on oneself and within the power of the many claims I would put to life, specifically my own life.

Where's my achievement?" "What's the point?" To carry a human organism as far as I have, as far as you will, is a huge undertaking. I tried to be not too expensive: inside, to be frugal by my efficiency, outside to be chaste in my demands.

I don't fear the consequences of a non-careerist life for the simple reason that it has given me securities that money, power, and fame cannot buy, attract, or command. Twenty-one years later, I am what I was not at graduation, mostly my own man. (No one is entirely his/her own person, for reasons of mortality.)

The struggle for life took on peculiar and acute form in my generation. One of the hopes on my string of hopes is that we did the job well enough that your task, and my nieces' and nephews', will be a little less peculiar, a little less acute. The chain was almost broken; by God, it held. It held because a few thousand people struck stunned and alive by instincts and expensive education's and rough upbringings and deadly cities were able somehow to achieve and maintain the chain outside itself on to your generation, and then clean it as we fixed another link to it.

How do you like that for an achievement? A purpose?

The horrible chemistry that is life--and you know test tubes better than I do--drowns us that we be more alive, corrodes and corrupts us that we be more alive, breaks and runs us bewildered and sore that we be more alive--and then requires that we be polite, sober, solicitous of others.

Life requires of excellence a balance of one's reading and one's dreams, between one's life exertions and one's life fantasies, between the world's vicious self-destructiveness and its breath-taking beauty.

My scorn of Harvard is tears, especially at this time of year, and those years are the price I pay for my life.

For a human being, as awareness evicts certainty, walking upright weeping is an achievement and a purpose.

A world that despises itself is little inclined to let you keep your head up, much less the dignity of tears.

But this brings us back to the individual. It is life, and not the world, that is bigger than the person ever is or was or could be or could have been. This is the source of the pressure to bow your head as you walk, and to stifle your life-power that sometimes comes in tears.

The world wants that life-power all to itself. Therefore it coins money, makes wars, divides itself into status groups etc. But comedy, tragedy, music, philosophy, history and politics are all expressions of the reality that power and mortal men alike are to serve life. So your education is meant to give you insights into this cardinal fact that every other institution you encounter must desperately hide because it cannot destroy. An individual can encompass the whole only in dream--or in the heartache of life, which is a version of dream, but a version of dream we are obligated to make as true as we are able.

The achievement, the point is that our cargo, our machinery to carry that cargo, be love.

We educate, train, break and spoil children in order that, as adults, they be able to protect and carry their cargoes in machineries they revere and enjoy educated adulthood is a childliness that is sure of itself; a child irreverent of himself is in Heaven.

To have written so much I obviously have little to tell you. Lately my selfrecriminations have ebbed in the discovery that 1) I m mortal, 2) I have flaws and weaknesses, 3) I am I, my own nature, which is my given nature. In the record of species achievement and purpose I have added my mite of awareness that, given to you or others, may help you be scornful or tearful or otherwise meaningful to yourselves to the end that your awareness be a mite added to species achievement and purpose.

If you know you are a patch of life cut to its own very nature, you cannot fail (or succeed), because awareness grows as you explore that patch of life given to you, as you grow out of the spoiled-child's eye view of existence.

My boyhood idols were E. Victor Seixas, Jr., a tennis player, and Allison Danzing, who wrote about tennis for The Times. Twice the national champion, Seixas sometimes smiled when he lost a point. Between the lines of Danzig's dispatches you could read the smiles. Thirty years later my idea of a perfect day would include watching Seixas play and reading Danzing describe the match.

The chain I have tended includes--it may have stared with--Seixas and Dancing. As I shuffle off the scene, out of the blacksmith's shop, if you will, Seixas and Danzig have outlasted in my memory thousands of idiotic distractions the world wished to impose, in the name of power, against my conception of life, against life itself as I live it. Real life is a competitiveness that smiles at losses and can write about it all.

I took my idol's bright, quick, amused congruencies of character and devotion as far as I could. This means: I took my aptitude for love as far as I could At the frontiers of my aptitudes I found my shortcomings. When I failed in an ultimate way, I knew it was time to retrench. Now I know I can forgive all that. (A moral thinker who has learned to forgive himself is obviously soon to retire.)

I won't burden you further. I simply have a point about nice guys, you know, those who are supposed to always finish last. For one thing, Leo Durocher, Who coined that nasty saying, is known for no other quote. Yogi Berra has more ideas in circulation than Durocher.

But the Statement actually is false. Nice guys don't' finish last--they lap the rest of the field and keep on running. The nice guys civilized enough to know that, though there is a race, in one sense it is a race with no finish. Now that you both are educated and have touched the infinite one way or another, you know what I mean.

Hal Eskesen '69 wrote this as a letter to two friends, Phillipe Selendy, a recent graduate of the university of Chicago.