Valedictory to 1958
GENTLEMEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:
The moment of going on has come for each of you. It is an irretrievable moment because, like being born, going on from college is something that a man need do, indeed, can do, only once.
It is a moment of leaving behind you: teachers, friends and all the others, seen and not seen, who in good weather and foul have manned Dartmouth's standards and her posts of duty to one end - that you might be a better educated person, a better man. Left behind also are courses, majors, campus principalities, the sense of mattering, perhaps even of power, that you inherited and held in your hands for a brief moment because you were a Dartmouth student.
These things and others you must leave behind but you also must take something with you - yourself. The traditional common garb worn at these exercises gives a deceptive appearance of uniformity, but beneath these gowns is a diversity of talents, interests, values and fates happily beyond the comprehension of any of us.
May I venture two comments only about what is ahead. The first is that a man is never simply what he has been, he is also always what he will be. You and we cannot change now by one jot what you have been; but never, never doubt that with all that is predetermined, the quality of your determination will make a difference.
The second comment relates to the way an educated man takes the world. A Charles Addams-like story makes the point. Two "hotrodders" went for a fast ride on a motorcycle. To protect himself from the wind, the driver put his leather jacket on backwards and his friend buttoned it up the back. At top speed they collided with an immovable object in the form of a big truck. When the state policeman arrived to investigate the accident he found both the motorcycle driver and his passenger dead. The policeman asked the truck driver whether they had both been killed outright. "No," replied the perplexed truck driver, "the rear fellow sure was killed outright but that other fellow, he was O.K. until I got his head turned around straight."
The moral, gentlemen, is that, although we must take the world as it comes, it sometimes is not what it seems at first glance. It is the way of an educated man to seek to know before he acts.
It has been good to be with you all the way.
And now, men of Dartmouth, the word is "so long," for in the Dartmouth fellowship there is no parting.
