Simpson College
Simpson College, Iowa
September 25, 2003
To the assembled freshman class, for whom her book was required reading.
Thank you.
I want to sincerely thank those of you who really took time to read
my story. I want to also thank those of you who, because of other
serious commitments, at least skimmed the book. And, most of all, I
want to thank those of you who quickly described the book to your
roommates who would have liked to have had time to skim the book.
I will not talk too much about the book, but I will say a few
things.
First, I would like to point out that the book has something of a
structure to it. It begins in the desert and it describes the
emotional desert I was living in after the death of my husband and
best friend.
Much of life, really, is about keeping going when you think your life
is out of gas. You take a deep breath. You walk fast enough to hear
the wind in your ears again. Life is about moving on, and sometimes
it is hard.
Here is a wonderful poem from a sister New Englander of mine, Edna
St. Vincent Millay, who was eighteen when I was born. She lived her
life in New England and died in upstate New York. Here she
crystallizes the emotional full stop of a great loss, and it is how I
felt, especially so because my Jim and my Elizabeth were such smart
and curious companions, as I hope you have and will have in your own
lives.
Dirge without Music
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the
hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.
Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, -- but the rest is lost.
The answer quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter,
the love,-
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant
and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do
not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all roses in
the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay describes my
desolation back then.
But in the book, you see, I walk it all out. I use the desert to talk
about those losses, but when I get to the wildflowers of Texas, I
begin to tell my stories of my youth--my girl scout trek and that
time on the frozen lake with my sister. When I get to Memphis and am
learning newly about political struggle from Martin Luther King's own
friends--I am back at school, as it were--and I share the stories of
my adolescence and my coming of age. I talk about working on
Nantucket Island and the beautiful young people next door, meeting my
future husband, my time at Emerson College, my hard days as a
domestic servant to the very rich.
And when I climb that snowy Appalachian mountain range on my 90th
birthday, I share the difficult stories of my midlife. Coming down
the other side, I tell the stories of my elder years. After I am
arrested as a protester, old Judge Hamilton in the D.C. Court is my
St. Peter.
And so this must now be heaven.
But of course--and you have now been at Simpson long enough to know
for yourself--it certainly is not.
No, we all have a long ways to go before we rest. We have great work
ahead of us.
Let me talk for a few moments--yes, settle comfortably into your
seats--about our positions as Americans.
We Americans are less than five percent of the world's population and
we consume over 25 percent of the world's resources and produce over
25% of the earth-warming carbon dioxide. You and I, as Americans,
simply consume too much and way more than we produce. That is one of
the reasons why the U.S. has a $45 Billion dollar annual trade
deficit, as we make up the difference by buying goods abroad. That is
not an economic model that can be spread across the world, unless we
are next to expropriate resources from some other planet to keep
things going. All the world cannot consume more than it produces, can
it?
No, there are two good ways we can go, in addition to an infinite
number of bad ways.
The first good way is that we can respect the idea that life is lived
differently in different parts of the earth. We can live as we do in
the U.S, although more sensibly: We can pare-back our own consumption
to make a better fit with our own resources, so that we are not in
the business of exploiting other lands and propping up bad
governments who will allow us to exploit those resources. I can
imagine us doing this. I can imagine leadership in America that helps
us become self-sufficient for our energy needs, for example--and I
can imagine leadership that shows us the way to do this without
trashing our wildlife preserves and without tearing down more of our
beautiful Appalachian mountains--blasting their tops off to get at
the coal.
I can imagine leadership that leads us to once again be able to make
our own chairs to sit in and our own televisions to watch while
sitting in our own chairs. After all, we will not be able to buy
dirt-cheap goods from other nations when their workers are finally
being paid fairly and their environments are being protected. So, if
unfettered international trade means to raise wages and standards, as
some claim, the incentives for such trade will fade away as wages
rise abroad. Without the incentive of cheap prices from these
nations, we will be back to making our own coffee tables and our
oscillating fans--and what would be wrong with that, as we indeed
need the jobs?
At that point, those foreign nations would have to rely on their own
citizens to buy their own goods, and that is the decent position they
were in before colonialism disrupted their natural economies.
A natural economy, indeed, is a good thing. It requires honest
government to work fairly, which is the trick. But when it is in
place, people provide for themselves, a middle class grows, and
democracy has the firm ground it needs to flower. Nations will still
trade commodities--one nation will have too much of this and will
need some of that--tin and oil and steel and kiwi fruit and coffee
and champagne--but for the most part, labor--which is to say our
lives--need not be a commodity. Labor can instead be expended to
produce the goods, foods and services needed by one's own family,
community and nation. It is, after all, hardly sensible to transport
a chair halfway around the world when it is so easy to make a chair
near home by people who need the jobs and who have the wood and the
cloth.
The second good way we can go is this: We can invent new ways of
living that are indeed exportable, because they do not expend more
resources per person than they produce. The world loves and
despises our lifestyle. They do not respect the wastefulness of it,
but they do like the freedom and beautiful glamour of it. They wear
our jeans while they protest against us, and that should instruct us.
Those jeans, and our music and much of our cultural content,
represents the freedom of the individual to express their unique
personality and potential. That, as an expression of our
constitutional freedom, is America's chief contribution to the
advance of civilization, and it is appreciated and embraced. The
symbols of it may be denim, superficial, and sometimes bad for your
teeth, but they are nevertheless important symbolic statements. The
blue jeans worn under the legally-mandated burka and veil in a
repressive culture are symbolic of individual resistance, individual
defiance, the promise of individual freedom and the development of
individual potential.
Is there a way for us to live that is in harmony with nature, with
our own resources, and that therefore is not exploitive--that does
not make us the clueless beneficiaries of a global plantation?
Can we invent new ways of living that do this and yet still
embody this idea of each individual life having the freedom to
explore its full potential? That is a good project for your
generation, I think. If the 21st Century is to be an American Century
as some would have it, let it be because we have the creative
imagination to joyfully lead the world in ways that actually work for
everyone, that sustain our world, that bring happiness and freedom.
We can no longer use our power to take from others to make easy lives
for ourselves. That time has ended. The world got smaller on
Septermber 11th in many ways. While the terrorists use religion as
their excuse for violence, the violence is really about poverty and
the class warfare that our international ways of doing business--and
their links to political corruption--have created in the world.
If we are capable of creatively leading the world, let us do so. If
we are not, let us profit by make our own chairs and let others
profit by making their own, as well.
Not long ago in America we celebrated the creative hand that made
what we needed. When that respect for labor, including creative and
artistic labor, resulted in the rise of the unions just after the
turn of the 20th Century, America grew a mighty middle class and a
generous standard of living. Labor did that, not capital and not
armies of occupation.
I will begin a new project next week and I shall begin in my own part
of the world, down the road from New Hampshire to Boston--to
Cambridge, more exactly. I will begin my adventure where a tree once
stood.
On Brattle Street, a couple of blocks from Harvard Square, there is a
little bakery with a small yard in front of it. There used to stand a
large chestnut tree in that yard. There also used to stand there a
blacksmith's shop and his family's home in that yard. Further up
Brattle Street lived an old poet named Longfellow, who would walk
past this yard and hear the clanging of the blacksmith, his old
friend. He wrote this now classic poem that you may have heard many
times, but I want you to listen to is as an expression of respect for
the labor of the local worker, unencumbered by the disease of debt
and not priced-out of his own community. Sing along if you know
it.
The Village Blacksmith
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night,
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,
When the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his haul, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,--rejoicing,--sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought.
I have included in my book some stories
about my father, about how he loved his work in a furniture factory,
how his muscles glistened as he hand pulled the ropes of the great
elevator, how he whistled home to us on his bicycle for lunch, how
his employers respected him with decent treatment and decent pay--for
he was a family man. Many good things have happened since then
to make the American workplace fairer for women and minorities, but
it has become less fair to all in that it exploits now rather than
respects. There is no assurance, as there once indeed was, that a
life spent in loyal labor would earn not only respect but security
for one's family. That is a great loss that we must repair, just as
we must repair our relationship with nature and with our neighbors
around the world.
Creative leadership at the political level is hard to come by today.
Creative leadership may come from other areas--business, art,
science--and that is fine. But it must come, and it must come from
you, from your generation.
So have confidence in your creativity. Don't let the demands of the
workplace or of academia dampen your zany spark for joyful living.
Insist on seeing the world through your own new eyes, and bringing
your surprise gift of the new to the crumbling institutions of those
who now hold power only by force. Power should be held by those who
earn it by creatively serving the needs of the people.
How shall we live? What kinds of dwellings and communities shall we
live in? How shall we get around? What shall we eat and where
and how will it be grown? These are among the old questions that need
new answers. I hope you will have confidence in yourselves to remake
the world while there is yet an opportunity to do so not in
desperation.
And in the shorter term, I ask you to be a patriot and defend the
Bill of Rights that make our nation a beacon of freedom in the world.
You have a right to representation if you are arrested, and so does
everybody else in America. You have a right to not be held without
evidence and you have a right to have that evidence reviewed by a
court, and so does everybody else in America. You have the right to
read any book and not have the government peeking at what you are
reading and thinking, and so does everybody else in America. That,
very simply, is what America is. Our highest public officials
swear when they take office to defend those rights against all
enemies, foreign and domestic. You are seeing in your own time the
gravest attack on those rights in the history of our nation. They are
your rights and your freedoms and you had better get out in the
streets if need be and defend them, for once they are gone they are
hard to gain back.
Work to protect the best part of America, our legally enshrined
freedoms. Once you have done that, dear ones, work to remake
America's way of life so that it is in balance with nature and with
the needs and dreams of the whole world.
And don't neglect your studies, either.
Now, let me part with the great old poem of another of my old
neighbors in New England. This is no doubt Robert Frost's most famous
poem. It is a good one for you to read or recite to yourself when you
are staying up all through a cold night of study. It is a good one
for me when I am walking into a new town on a cold morning, as shall
happen many times before election.
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives the harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
By the way, only a New England poet would stop to bother about whose
woods those were; a Western poet, I think, would just assume the land
was God's and would skip the property title search.
And a final few lines, if I may, from Edna St. Vincent Millay again.
From her most famous poem, "First Fig," which may be useful lines to
you on those late study nights:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light!
Thank you