"The Good Life"
President Dickey's Valedictory to the 1949 Graduates
MEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS: This ceremony is one of those occasions in life which are important. It is important for each of you individually for many different reasons. It is important for all of you because it marks with finality the end of your general education in classrooms which you began only fifteen or so years ago. From here on most of you will have no further formal education and the others will be in classes of professional and vo- cational studies.
I venture to remind you of this manifest fact because it points up the most important thing I can say to you as you push off from Hanover Plain. And that is this: the quality of your happiness and the worth of your life are now solely in your keeping. Up to this day these things have been in larger measure than you yet realize the concern of all those who have spent a part of their lives being your teachers. From here on, Gentlemen, to the end of the road, the choice of the good, the beautiful, and the true will be made for you only if made by you.
But let us also be clear about this business of choosing the good life. It is not made with one dramatic resolution. It is not a matter which will be settled simply by your state of mind on Sunday mornings. It is not something you do tomorrow but not today, let alone yesterday. It will either be in some measure your daily business or the good life of the liberally educated man will be beyond your knowing and you and Dartmouth will be the poorer for it.
On other days we have spoken together of the role of competence in the useful man, of humility in the wise man, of loyalty in the true man and of faith in the reverent man. If you choose it, the good life will put the muscle of experience onto those words. Here again, like all other muscle, the muscle of such experience and understanding comes only from your daily doing. The quality of that muscle will be determined by such familiar facts of life as the newspapers you choose for your daily fare, the easy labels you choose to avoid in thinking about men and affairs, and the number of little and even big things you choose to do well just because there is no thrill more satisfying to you than the awareness of bringing all that is you to bear on any aspect of life. Need I add that these words are not spoken from any pinnacle of perfection; all of us are always just part way up—and part way down.
Gentlemen, if you have been worthy of it, your Dartmouth education has given you perhaps the most precious possession of a human being—a larger opportunity of choice. May you use it.
And now the word is "So long" because in the Dartmouth Fellowship there is no parting.
PRESIDENT DICKEY DELIVERING HIS VALEDICTORY TO STANDING GRADUATES IN THE BEMA
